Free Playing for the Other Team by Sage C. Holloway Page A

the sudden intimacy, his body against mine. I pressed my mouth and nose to his hair, inhaled his scent, a mixture of something fruity—apple, maybe—and the distinctive, earthy smell of art supplies, of crayons and watercolors and maybe even a hint of clay.
    I had no idea why we were embracing, but it felt amazing. I enjoyed it until he finally pulled away.
    “Fuck,” he whispered, running his fingers through his hair and making me want to do the same. “Sorry. I’m kind of, I don’t even know. Let’s just…um, my room?”
    He led me to a door, opened it, and motioned for me to enter ahead of him.
    I took one step into Jasper’s bedroom and said, “Holy shit!”
    He laughed out loud at my reaction, which was a welcome sound after his little freak-out. “You like it?”
    The four walls of his room had been painted in vivid colors, each depicting a different season. It was just nature itself, no houses or other signs of human presence anywhere in the mural.
    I looked first at summer, the south wall. Lush greenery, a glittering lake, and a deep blue sky made me want to walk right into the mural. Every leaf and twig had been rendered in jaw-dropping detail. On the right, near the corner, the scene began its slow transformation into fall.
    The west wall was alight with the rich, earthy hues of slowly dying leaves. At the bottom, just above the baseboard, they were collecting in heaps and piles. They too were stunningly realistic. They looked like they would make that beautiful crunching noise if anyone stepped on them, like any moment, a little girl in rain boots would come sloshing through the painting and send them all flying.
    Then winter, everything covered in snow, icicles hanging from tree branches, ice crystals glittering in the cool sunlight. Farther right, the snow seemed to be melting, and after the turn of the last corner, shy blossoms started to appear and transformed the bleakness into yet another scene of utter beauty.
    I wanted to cry. It was that stunning.
    “Wow,” I breathed and turned to Jasper, who had not said anything after his question. He seemed to sense that I needed a moment to take it all in. “That…how long did that take you?”
    “About a year, on and off.” He was smiling at me in a calm, serene way. “After the background was all done, I just moved my furniture around so I could work on whatever part I felt like working on.”
    “It’s absolutely amazing.”
    I closed in on winter and realized at once that there was far more detail than I’d been able to take in at first. Things like a small tree branch with dark red berries, glittering with frost, sets of deer tracks in the snow, a lone squirrel hiding in the trees.
    “Thank you,” Jasper said, sounding surprisingly shy. He wasn’t generally quite that modest about his art, and I turned toward him, taken aback. He caught my look and stepped closer.
    “It keeps me sane,” he said so quietly I could barely make out the words. “Painting it, and now just looking at it. It’s my own…” He glanced at me. “Space,” he finished hesitantly.
    World , I silently corrected, using the word I knew he’d choked back. And I understood, saw the room for what it was—a refuge, a place where the rest of the world wasn’t real, where everything bad could just go away for a while. I had used to imagine something like it occasionally, when pressure and stress and anxiety got the better of me. I was sure lots of people had a place like that. Jasper had painted his.
    “You spend a lot of time here.” It wasn’t a question. Jasper nodded anyway. And suddenly two separate realizations hit me at full force.
    One was the reason why he was acting so subdued. If this was his refuge, he wasn’t likely to bring a lot of people here, but I was here, standing in the middle of his safe haven, and it seemed like he was holding his breath, hoping I wouldn’t tear it down.
    Two was the much simpler thought that he had created this complex