Under Summer Sky • Zarry

14. Muse

"This is...impressive," I remarked, green eyes scanning around, unable to decide where I should look first.

Which was how I felt the first time I ever saw Zayn's bedroom.

"Natalia had all of this done while I was away at boarding school," said Zayn as he lead me around the walls, stopping at each of his pieces to view them. "She's always raving about my art to people and she gets disappointed with me that I don't show my work more."

I viewed a large painting in front of me then that he had done in oil pastels. It looked to me like falling rain but consisted of every color in the rainbow just streaming down in these thick, heavy lines. And off to the side there stood what appeared to be a woman and child huddled under an umbrella, holding hands. It was entitled: When the rain comes.

I thought it was beautiful.

"Why don't you like to show your work?"

"I don't know," Zayn shrugged. "I just like to make art for myself, not for others...and I don't really care much about being praised for it either, m'not much of a narcissist."

My hand grazed against Zayn's as we moved on to the next painting, an abstract piece which looked like a splatter painting but created with such precision that it took the shape of a horse and it was simply called: Cool.

"Well you may not care about getting recognition for your talents, but I think that people just want to be proud of you," I asserted as we meandered over to the next wall of paintings.

"I do get recognition," Zayn clarified with a shrug. "I get quite a bit of it, it's just that art is subjective, you know? I believe anyone can be an artist."

I snorted under my breath. "Not me. I can't create shit."

"That's not true."

"Isn't it? I'd just paint one single fine line on a canvas. Nobody's going to come look at that and say holy fuck, that's some great art."

Zayn laughed at me.

"So then it's abstract. You can interpret that one line any which way. What can a line represent? It connects two points, it's moving space, or it could mean the separation of two things. It could symbolize walking a fine line between two extremes. Or perhaps it could represent a tightrope, afraid of letting go...afraid of falling."

"You got all that from a line?"

"Like I said, art is subjective."

This was a prime example of what I meant when I said that Zayn was different from other people. He didn't think about anything in a basic way. There was a lot of depth to the way his brain operated and the more time I spent listening to him explain things, the more inspired I became to reconsider the way I perceived everything.

I then gazed up at a long row of six different paintings and two drawings on the far wall where I stood and each piece of art depicted nude figures in various positions. And each of them were created differently; some were more realistic, down to the very finest of details and others were more abstract in appearance.

But the thing that they had in common was that they all appeared to be male.

"What's with all the nudity?"

Zayn chewed on his lip. "I sat through a lot of figure drawing classes."

"Yeah? So, did all these guys pose for you?" I questioned, raising an eyebrow at Zayn.

"Mhm," he answered coolly.

"Where? At boarding school?"

He shook his head no. "I took some private classes in Paris. We didn't have classes that did nude figures in boarding school."