since it was only a hurried text from ava—come have a pint. hans is pouring at the corner bar.—and beatrice is noticeably absent, michael has a few guesses. still, ava usually handles her alcohol well, and the ava he’s watched for the last 20 minutes resembles the ava he met when she was a tourist several years ago, not the ava he’s grown used to, who just gets tired and leans into beatrice after more than three glasses of wine at an extended dinner.

ava leans her head in her hand and turns to michael with a little smile. she looks tired.

“you alright, ava?”

“fuckin’ brilliant,” she replies, poorly imitating his accent. “hans!”

“ava—”

“i decided i’d go out tonight, so i’m out, mikey.”

“but maybe—”

“shhhh…”

hans pours another, giving michael an apologetic look.

ava tosses back the mezcal shot. “another!”

“christ, ava. no.” michael moves her glass from her outstretched hand.

“hey!” she tries to reach past, pushing at him like a child would an older sibling.

“what is wrong with you?” michael says, exasperated as he swats her hands away. “ava what’s gotten into you?—hans, do not pour another!”

hans puts his hands up and slowly backs away.

ava mumbles something.

“what?”

“i kissed beatrice,” ava groans.

“you have. i’ve seen it.”

“no, mikey—it was the two of us. no one else was around.”

“ah.” michael leans toward appearing empathetic to bury the lack of surprise despite the predictability of this. to him, as well as to lilith’s chagrin, ava and beatrice have increasingly become inevitable.

ava drops her head into her hands as she leans heavily against the bar, elbows digging into the worn wood surface like scaffolding keeping her upright. michael hear’s a muffled fuck.

“so what’s going on now?” michael asks, moving closer and lowering his voice.

“she’s in the states for work right now, y’know, reaping the benefits of our loving marriage.”

“but what happened after you kissed her?”

“i froze. she froze. i walked out—prectically ran out. we just… we haven’t talked about it. i also have avoided being in the same room as her for longer than a minute,” ava confesses, cringing as she thinks about it, occupying her hands now by shredding the paper coaster in front of her. “she texted me she was leaving for work. i texted ‘safe trip!’ annnnnd that was it…”

“well, when she gets back, you can get it sorted, yeah?”

“how?” ava asks, raising her gaze to meet michael’s, drunk and teary-eyed.

“talk it out.”

this was not the thing to say as ava huffs, fully turning to michael and raising her voice, “how do i talk it out,” she grabs michael by his shirt, shaking him dramatically, “when i’m pretty sure i’m IN LOVE with my FUCKING WIFE?!” her voice is loud enough that hans hears and laughs as he approaches.

hans, sliding a glass of water across the bar toward her, says, “well, i’d hope so.”

ava releases michael, defeatedly taking the glass, and mumbles, “that wasn’t part of the deal.”

“ava,” michael mutters, “you need to limit how many ppl you tell this.” from hans’ confused expression, michael can tell he didn’t catch all of what he said.

“that i’m in love with my wife??”

hans chimes in, trying to be helpful, “you don’t have to tell people that. we can see it. she’ll be back soon.”

michael pinches the bridge of his nose. where was camila when they needed her.

“people can tell??” ava’s bottom lip trembles before she pushes her face into michael’s chest. michael waves off hans, alluding to an explanation later. “mikey, i think i’m fucked.”

“i think you’re drunk, ava. you and beatrice will figure it out soon.” michael can feel her tears soaking into his shirt as he pats her back and reaches to the bar for his pint. he takes a heavy swig of his beer.

Once puberty hits, everyone talks about seeing in color. You never hide the fact that you have been able to see colors since you were five, but you don’t like talking about it much. It’s often something you keep to yourself and your paints. Most kids in your small town know it’s unlikely and often hope they don’t meet their soulmate here, but that doesn’t prevent their hormones from kicking into full gear.

When a new student arrives in the spring of seventh grade, you’re not surprised when you hear Octavia (amongst several others) has a crush. You’re also not shocked to hear that Bellamy confronts him after baseball try-outs that same day, telling the new kid, Lincoln, to stay away from his sister. You decide you like Lincoln when you hear he dodged Bellamy’s first swing and in turn gave the Blake boy a bloody nose. Neither of them get into trouble since it happened far enough from school grounds, but Octavia does get in trouble for giving her brother a fat lip as soon as he gets home for starting a fight with Lincoln. 

After punching Bellamy, Octavia calls you.

“I can see colors like you now,” Octavia says excitedly. “Just... wow, Clarke. You never told me how beautiful it is.”

She ends up rushing off the phone when her mom gets home and sees a beat up Bellamy holding bags of frozen corn to his nose and mouth.

Although Octavia is grounded for the first month of their relationship, there isn’t anything or anyone who can stop Lincoln and Octavia from falling in love because both puberty-stricken thirteen and twelve-year-olds knew as soon as they saw each other in fourth period English. It really is beautiful, seeing the world in color, but you don’t have the heart to tell Octavia that the colors you see haven’t been as bright since you were just a kid in a park.

Your mom never asks, but you know she’s thinking it when you tell her your top choices for college—Columbia, New School, NYU, Fordham, CUNY. You don’t talk to your mother often, not since your dad died two years ago, so you think she might not want to scare you away from opening up by asking questions.

“I like the idea of being somewhere I don’t have to drive to get to the best art in the city... or the world for that matter,” you say one night over dinner.

She nods in understanding. It is true that the city has that benefit, but you’re not sure if you’re rationalizing it more to yourself or your mother.

You drove enough to get your license, but you hate it. You’ve grown more comfortable riding in passenger seats because Octavia luckily loves to drive, and she talks and plays music loud enough to stop you from thinking too much. But it’s still too easy to get in your head when you drive on your own. You still tremble in your seat at large intersections, and your hands sweat as they hold the wheel because you don’t think you’ll ever forget the sound of metal being crushed and the silence that comes after.

“So wait,” your roommate slurs with a chuckle, “you’re telling me... you decided to come here... because you think your soulmate might still be here?”

“Way to make me sound like a total sucker, but yeah, pretty much,” you confess before downing another shot.

You just had the entire art department rip into your sophomore year portfolio, so you decided to put some distance between you and the art world and get drunk with Raven—a computer engineering student who transferred from UMass back to her home, New York City born and bred.

“You’re not like a sucker. Pretty sure you just are one, but I’m a bitter asshole,” Raven says with a smirk.

You smile and clink your beer bottle with hers before taking a sip.

Raven has good reason and you’re sure you would be much angrier with the world if in her shoes. She met her soulmate when she was fourteen, and they fixed cars and built things with their hands together. Then they were sixteen, riding on a motorcycle they had fixed up together, a car didn’t see them, and Raven just remembers waking up in the hospital with a shattered leg. “I can still see colors,” she said that night the whole story spilled out of her, “but it’s all... faded, I guess. Colors are pretty dull in my eyes.”

“Do you think it’s stupid?” you ask Raven. “That I thought I could find her again?”

Raven shrugs. “Don’t put your life on hold for someone who isn’t here right now,” she says. “If you really are soulmates, things will work themselves out. Until then, have fun, make art like you weird liberal arts kids do. Do whatever. Doesn’t mean you have to fall in love.”

“Makes sense,” you agree as Raven pours you both a shot and opens a couple more beers.

“Of course. I know what I’m talking about; I’m in the sciences.”

You kiss a boy who also sees color, but nothing about him feels special or makes your heart race. You both know you’re welcome distractions for each other, but he knows his soulmate is never coming back and you might always be looking for yours.

You kiss a lot of people and sleep with a few others too. Some can see color, some can’t, and some you don’t bother asking. It’s fun and nothing close to love, so it fills the gaps between those times you think about a little girl who brought green into your life and then everything else. You wonder what she looks like now, if she’s cut her hair, or if she’s somewhere thinking about you.

You fall for a girl with long, light brown hair. She has the opposite curse—born colorblind like everyone else but informed by doctors that she will never see colors. She has to learn to love the hard way—heart first. When you’re lying next to her in bed, and she hums as you trace her jawline, you wish you could love her the way she deserves.

You think she’s always known and that’s why she never said “I love you” because the response would be a lie or an apology.

She’s standing in front of you now, smiling that sad, knowing smile. “You showed me color in a different way,” she says before kissing you softly for the last time. She leaves you in your studio with your hands covered in verdigris.

You don’t know if it’s the lack of sleep or your eyes playing tricks on you again, but you swear you see a flash of green eyes and dark hair on your morning commute. You don’t know if it’s because you’ve been busy and single for the past couple of months, but you feel your heart swell, your blood flowing through your veins to your fingertips. You just know that when you get to your studio, your paintings look a little brighter and your hands find the paint on their own, blending the perfect shades for your last piece of your senior presentation.

Your advisor introduces you to more of her curator friends and they praise your work as you stand in the gallery beside one of your paintings of an eclipse, half the canvas is a haunting cerulean, the other half painted bright shades of yellow.

“I assume you gave Ms. Griffin the A she deserves?” jokes one of her colleagues.

Dr. Miles grins and hugs your shoulders. “I wouldn’t dream of giving her anything lower than that,” she says with pride.

Dr. Miles had been so impressed by your senior project, she invited some friends from MoMA to your show at the campus art center. You were already elated to have your work being viewed by such important people, but when Dr. Miles called you during senior week to ask if you’d like to feature your work at a gallery in affiliation with PS1, you almost burst. You could hardly process what you were hearing and when you did, after hanging up your phone, you screamed and jumped around your apartment, much to Raven’s hungover chagrin.

Since it was rather last minute, Dr. Miles managed to sort out most of the details while you prepared for graduation. Still in your apartment until the end of May, you were able to help move your work to the small gallery space in the Lower East Side on Rivington with some help from Raven. It didn’t feel real until you saw your name in the brochure for New York City Museums’ Summer Tour.

You excuse yourself to greet your mother and her boyfriend, Marcus Kane. They’re beaming as they look at all your work on display, but mostly they look happy together. You smile because your mother’s found a kind of happiness you haven’t seen since your father passed away. Of all people, you’re glad the first person to put paint in your hands is now the person adding color to your mother’s life again.

You give them both a hug and kiss on the cheek, asking how they like the city since they stuck around after your graduation. Someone offers them wine, and Marcus happily takes a glass and mouths to you, “Fancy,” and wiggles his eyebrows, making you laugh.

“Wow, your work is selling quick,” Marcus notes, sipping from his wine.

You’re surprised when you take in how many red dots are stickered next to several of your paintings.

“You’re taking us out to dinner when you visit,” your mom teases.

“I like lobster,” Marcus adds before wandering off to look at more of your work.

You find him a bit later in front of your favorite piece. It’s mixed media, with various New York debris scattered around the edges with the blur of a subway train speeding through the center, featuring green eyes that stand out from the grey. You didn’t put a price on it; you want to hold onto this one.

You’re taking inventory of all the sold pieces and confirming contact information with buyers as Raven continues texting you from across the street as she waits for you to wrap up. She keeps sending you ridiculous ideas of how to spend your newfound relative wealth.

You’re in the back office when you hear the door open.

“Raven, I gave you the passcode to help me move my stuff here, not so you can treat it like an extension of our apartment,” you say as you round the corner, flipping through the contact paperwork. “I’ll just be ten more min—”

You forget how to speak as you blindly set down the stack of paper on the desk, unable to look away from the figure in front of the door.

“Sorry. Your friend told me the passcode... I’d have come earlier, but I had to take the train in from Connecticut.”

You remember everything: the laughing leaves, the charcoal skirt, her brown hair, and those eyes.

“My sister only told me a couple of hours ago there was this art gallery I had to see,” she says, offering a small smile as she takes a couple tentative steps toward you. She picks up one of the small pamphlets about yourself and the exhibit. “Blue + Yellow,” she reads, “Still your favorite color?”

You nod, still struggling to find the right words to say. Maybe it’s because you never let yourself plan this part out; all your energy went solely into making her appear again. Now she’s here, right in front of you.

“Clarke Griffin,” Lexa says like she’s trying it out, putting the pamphlet in her pocket. “Clarke, with an e, Griffin...” She lets out a small laugh. “That would have made things easier.”

You let out a laugh of your own. “And you’re Lexa...”

“Woods. Well, now anyway, once my parents adopted me,” she explains.

"Woods,” you repeat. “Suits you. Woods, forests... like pines.”

Lexa’s smile broadens at that and you wonder if she’s played your last conversation as children over and over in her head like you have, as if sifting through memories for clues to find each other again.

“Is it stupid of me to have dreamed of meeting you again here?” you ask.

Lexa shakes her head. “Only if it’s stupid of me to have read every art section of every New York magazine for the past five years,” she admits, blushing lightly and looking away from Clarke. She notices your unsold mixed media piece and stands in front of it. “It must have been you,” she says, almost to herself as she deciphers the subway and her own eyes gazing out, “but I also thought I saw you walk by me or waiting on the opposite subway platform for years.”

“If it’s any consolation,” you say, standing beside her, looking at it as if from her perspective, “I thought that too. I painted this after I thought I saw you in March. Everything was grey in the rain, but then I saw you... Or thought I did.”

You watch her take in the painting, a look of awe. “Yeah, it must have been you then,” she says, lifting her hand to her chest as if she felt you too. Her eyes trace the grey-blue edges filled with bits of New York—a MetroCard, a crushed coffee cup, a newspaper, and a faded piece of paper with a simple cartoon boat with half the sky colored blue. “It’s always been you,” she says, reaching out as if to touch it but stopping herself.

She turns toward you. “Sorry, this is... a lot.”

You nod dumbly. Lexa smiles and takes your hands in hers. Your artwork breathes with you, seemingly radiating colors off the canvases. They’re singing as they all come back to you in full.

“I spent all my time hoping to find you again... I didn’t put much thought into what I’d say,” Lexa admits with an embarrassed half-smile.

“We have time,” you give her hand a squeeze. “You being here is... We don’t need to talk at all.”

Lexa closes the small distance between you and presses her lips to yours. Every stroke of your paintbrush for seventeen years has been a wish for this moment, and if magic exists, you’re sure it’s in art because Lexa is wrapping her arms around you, holding you, and you’re kissing her back. Like neon buzzing butterflies in your stomach, all the light and color makes its home in you and you’re in love exactly as it was supposed to be.

When you part, you’re looking into those green eyes and you don’t want to look away or wake up if this is all a dream. Lexa blushes under your gaze and you let out a laugh like a breath you’ve been holding in. “Hi,” you sigh.

“Hi,” she says quietly in return, her eyes shimmering like those leaves in the wind. “Would you like to get dinner with me?”

“Now?”

“Yes. Right now.”

“I’d like that. I just, uh,” you keep Lexa’s hand in yours, pulling her with you to grab your phone and keys from the back office, unwilling to let her go now that she’s here. You laugh when you see Raven texted you about a dozen messages, concluding with, you’re welcome. have fun. i’m going to meet with octavia and lincoln to help those poor souls around the city. you owe me several rounds. xox.

You walk out of the building hand-in-hand, and the city’s fast pace and noise welcomes you back to reality. It doesn’t feel jarring with Lexa still beside you, and you sigh contentedly. The city doesn’t feel lonely, seeing it the way you do now.

“I painted a sunset for you... well, several, actually,” you tell her as you walk down the street toward one of the restaurants Lexa likes nearby.

“Any paintings of your hair and eyes?” she asks, smiling at you and almost walking herself into the streetlight pole because she can’t take her eyes off you.

You laugh and kiss her cheek as you wait for the crosswalk sign. “I’m not a fan of self-portraits,” you say, “but you don’t need a painting of me now; you have me right here.”

“You’re right,” Lexa says, and that same look of awe washes over her again because she touches your hair, tucks it behind your ear, and leans down to kiss the corner of your lips. “I’ve missed you... That’s what it feels like.”

Like coming home, you think.

“I’ve missed you too.”

So you ignore the walk sign and kiss her again, under the golden glow of the streetlight to start making up for all that that time spent apart.

“Yesterday at school?”

“Before school, when I woke up? ... I think.” You remember your head hurt at school the day before, and you were tired as soon as you got home from Kids’ Club after school. You don’t remember seeing any colors though, not until the next morning. “Like... some of my cereal was green... and the limes in the fruit bowl!”

″That’s good, Clarke,” your dad says with a bright smile, picking you up into a tight hug. You both growl into your “bear hug” like always.

“So does that mean I’ll meet someone like you or Mommy? Or I’ll fall in love like you and Mommy?” you ask as your dad adjusts his arms to carry you like when you were smaller. You try to remember what your parents told you about seeing colors some day, so you close your eyes to think because what was once mindless, dreary gray is now a loud, growing spectrum of color. 

“It means you’ve already met them.”

“I don’t feel like I’m in love.”

“It just might take time, hon.”

You’re quiet for a moment as you think about this new information. After a few moments of silence, you open your eyes and look at your dad with eyes like yours. “Ewwww, I hope it’s not that boy, Bellamy. I like his sister, Octavia. She’s in my class. But he plays too rough at recess.”

You’ll always remember the sound of your father’s laughter at that, three perfect laugh lines at the corners of his blue eyes. You laugh too, and you feel his deep chuckle rumble in his chest against yours. You wrap your arms around him tighter as you pass under a row of trees on the path, and the green leaves rustling in the wind seem to laugh with you both—everything easy and gentle.

A week passes, and now you can see the colors of the rainbow and everything in-between R.O.Y.G.B.I.V. Your art teacher, Mr. Kane, lets you stay in the art room during Kids’ Club after school. He cleans and prepares lessons while you mix the few paints he has in search of your new favorite color. Because of your immediate gravitation toward art, you parents invest in a paint set. You know they’re expensive and for grown-ups because most paint sets aren’t made for kids; painting is a skill mostly adults learn.

Your parents never seem concerned about their five-year-old having met her soulmate, but you do overhear parts of one hushed argument. Your dad insists on asking other parents at the school, and your mom says something about it making sense “in due time.” They both conclude they’re “old-fashioned,” and you’re not sure what that means, but you hear them kiss and decide to go back to bed.

You know it isn’t common for children to see colors so early and you know you’re the youngest in your small town to have found their soulmate... kind of. Out of curiosity, you start asking your classmates if they see in color too, but they all say no. Some even tease you because grown-ups see colors, and they kiss and have coodies.

You learn to be more subtle about it after.

It’s a Friday, so your mom picks you up to go to the park instead of Kids’ Club. She’ll work late, overnight into Saturday evening, sometimes well past Sunday afternoon, so she spends the time she can with you.

It’s been almost a month since you started school and began seeing the world in color. It makes you tired, trying to explain it and understand it. You're pretty sure you’ve learned all you need to know as a five-year-old and no one in school sees what you do, so you dramatically asked your dad, “What’s the point?” and threw yourself back onto your bed when he tried to get you up for school this past Monday. He had to explain that school lasts basically forever, but some day you can go to a grown-up school and just study art if you want, “if you work at it.” So you fill your nights and weekends with coloring and drawing and painting, which is much more exciting than learning math and the alphabet.

You played tag for a bit with Wells and Octavia, but they had to go home and right now you’re happy sitting at a picnic table with your crayons and activity book. Your mom talks with another mother nearby, waving and coming over to see what you’re coloring every so often. Crayons aren’t very fun; they don’t blend well and they’re made cheap and in weird hues that starkly contrast each other for kids who only see in greys, but they’re all you have since your mom won’t let you bring your paint set or special paper and brushes anywhere but art class or home.

“What are you doing?” a voice asks.

"Coloring,” you say, finishing the last petal of a sunflower. “Do you wanna color with me?” You look up and you remember her from a few weeks ago. You remember her pretty face and dark hair and the same skirt she had on for school. Now you can see her skirt is charcoal—boring and almost exactly the same as before—but her hair is brown, almost auburn in the early evening sunlight. Most of all, you notice her eyes—green like those laughing leaves.

“I’m not very good,” the girl says timidly.

You’re used to this; most kids like tracing or doodling because coloring is like schoolwork—you have to memorize everything, like, “the sky is blue, the sun is yellow, the grass is green.” You decide the grass nearby is a much uglier green than you see in this other girl’s eyes.

“That’s okay,” you say, scooting over to make room on the bench. “I can help.”

She takes off her backpack to sit at the picnic table. “Your name is Clarke, right?” she asks as she settles beside you.

You nod.

“I’m Lexa,” she says to remind you.

You appreciate it because you didn’t remember it. You feel your cheeks get warm and repeat Lexa in your head over and over so you’ll remember for next time. You notice she kept on her school skirt but changed out of the white polo private school kids wear, opting for a soft-yellow t-shirt with a sun in sunglasses on it. “You go to St. Mary’s, don’t you?” 

“Mhm.” Lexa picks up a crayon and fiddles with it nervously as she looks at it for a moment.

“You use that one for the sky,” you say, ripping out a page from your activity book for her to color—a sailboat on the water with the sun in the sky.

″I know,” she replies quietly, beginning to color the sky, careful not to get blue in the lines of the sun or sailboat.

“Sorry,” you say, unsure if you should ask if she knows her colors from school or sees them like you. Instead you decide to say, “I know you from that coffee place.“

“Mhm.”

“Our moms were sleepy and getting coffee before school.”

“She’s not my mom,” Lexa says. She doesn’t sound upset, but she keeps her attention focused on coloring the sky.

“Oh, well she was a nice lady,” you say with a shrug, “and you were in your uniform. Is it weird wearing a uniform?”

“No, but I can get ready for school real fast.”

“Hm... It just seems kind of boring to me.”

Lexa laughs and you smile at the sound and sight of her grin. “It is,” she agrees.

You chew your lip nervously before asking, “What’s your favorite color?”

Lexa looks at the half-colored paper before turning toward you to sit criss-cross applesauce. She tilts her head and hums as she thinks for a moment. “Blue... or yellow. I haven’t decided. What’s yours?”

“Blue plus yellow.”

“Equals green. Like pine trees.”

“What are pine trees?”

“Christmas trees but without the lights and stuff hanging on them.”

“Oh, yeah! I like that green. I like all kinds of green!”

“Lexa,” a voice calls, interrupting your smiles and conversation, “we have to go back to the house to pack.” A girl appears beside the table and picks up Lexa’s backpack. She looks much older and cooler than you, and also like she could scare Bellamy. Before you can say a word, the girl huffs and starts walking off.

“Sorry. That’s my sister. I’ve gotta go,” Lexa says, setting down her crayon. “Thanks for letting me color with you.”

You pout and you think your heart knows what’s happening more than you have words for. “Will you be here tomorrow?”

“Let’s go, Lexa,” the other girl demands; despite the frustration in her voice, she mostly seems sad.

Lexa shakes her head. “Today was my last day at St. Mary’s. We’re moving to New York City tomorrow with my new family.”

“Oh...” the sound seems to fall out of your chest. “I’ll see you again some day though,” you manage with a smile. “My dad and Mr. Kane say if I work hard enough and paint, one day I could make art in a city or go to school there.”

Lexa smiles back. “OK.”

“You want your coloring?” you ask, offering her the unfinished page.

“You keep it. Paint something yellow or blue for me when you come to New York. Like a sunset or your hair... or your eyes. I like your eyes,” she pauses before adding, “Yeah, I think blue is my favorite. but yellow is my second favorite.”

“OK, I promise.”

“See you later, Clarke.”

You wave goodbye and some minutes later, when you’re by yourself and can’t seem to color because the sunset looks too golden, your mom comes over to check on you. “Did you make a friend, Clarke?”

“Yeah. I think so.”