Free Kate Sherwood - Dark Horse 02 - Out of the Darkness by Kate Sherwood Page B

Blaine’s benefit, but he can’t see the guy anywhere. Maybe this is just… Jeff. Dan relaxes a little, lets his shoulder fall against Jeff’s, and he feels Jeff give his arm a little squeeze in appreciation.
    The gallery isn’t packed, but there are quite a few people there. Some are looking at the paintings, others just standing in little groups, visiting. It’s pretty laid back, really. Jason and Liam are moving away now, smiling at Dan, although he notices that Liam looks a little puzzled, presumably by Jeff’s arm placement. Then another couple appears in the doorway, and Jeff turns to greet them, his arm still around Dan. This is getting a bit odd, now. Surely these people are wondering where Evan is; Dan is starting to wonder that himself. He gently disengages himself from Jeff’s arm and smiles when Jeff turns to him. “I’m gonna look at the paintings?”
“Oh, yeah. Okay.” Jeff seems a bit bashful, and Dan is reminded that this is the man’s first show. It must be a little nerve wracking. “Is there a good place to start, or just…?”
    “They’re clustered a bit, but I don’t think it really matters which cluster you start with.” Jeff glances over at the new arrivals, then back at Dan. “I could come with you, but my agent wants me at the door.”
“No, that’s fine. I’m fine.” Dan decides to start by the door and work his way around the room.
    The first painting is of a vegetable garden. Dan isn’t sure of the style—the brush strokes are really obvious, giving it a textured feeling. Dan figures that must be on purpose, and then remembers what Jeff had said about just letting his mind go, trying to feel the painting rather than understand it. He gives it a try, but he doesn’t really get much. It’s vegetables. In a garden. The colors are nice, maybe…. A woman Dan doesn’t know moves beside him and gives him a polite smile before turning her attention to the painting, and Dan moves on.
    The next one is a bit harder to figure out. He wants to call it abstract, but he’s not really sure what that means. He can see parts of what it’s meant to be. There are trees, he’s pretty sure, and a lake… or maybe that’s the sky. And there’s some dark stuff. He tries to just let his brain go, but it doesn’t really know which direction to go in. PuppetChris suggests that they should have actually taken some acid before coming, and maybe that would have helped. Dan has to admit that it probably wouldn’t have hurt. He’s beginning to get a bit desperate; he’s going to have to say something to Jeff about all this, and he really has no idea what. He looks around the room, but there’s still no sign of Evan. Great. He’s really going to….
    And the next painting erases all those thoughts from his mind. It’s got the same obvious brush strokes as the vegetable bed, and some of the same weirdly unclear stuff around the edges that the landscape had, but at its center, there’s a horse. And Dan isn’t a preteen girl, he doesn’t moon around over pictures of ponies, but… this horse. It’s jumping, although Jeff hasn’t painted the jump, and it looks like it’s coming out of the picture at an angle, as if Dan is standing just off to the side of the jump and the horse will brush by him in one more stride. The horse is reaching, really pushing itself, and Dan can feel the power and strain in the muscles, the surging joy of the jump, the savage beauty of a creature doing what it was created to do. He has no idea about the technical merits of the piece, but he can absolutely understand what Jeff was talking about when he said that the art was about feelings. There’s an intensity and passion about it that he finds almost mesmerizing.
    “Guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you like this one,” Evan’s voice says from over his shoulder. Evan’s standing close behind him, and Dan leans back a bit, not enough to be obvious, just enough for a little brush of contact. He doesn’t