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"Wow, this piece is amazing!"
"Which piece?" Renjun asked offhandedly, leaning back and examining the painting propped up on the easel before him. Something about it seemed off. Maybe it was the nose, or the eyes, he couldn't tell, but it was bothering him badly.
"This one, behind the other ones. You really popped off with the shading, man."
"I'm going to need a bit more description than that, Dongha," Renjun sighed. He dabbed a bit more white onto the eyes to contrast the yellow a bit more, but it didn't fix anything. In fact, it almost seemed to make it worse. He frowned, resisting the urge to toss his palette onto the floor and storm out of the studio.
"This beach one, the one with the girl. Damn, I'd kill to see the ocean again."
The description caught Renjun's attention and he swiveled around on his stool to see Dongha, one of his classmates, precariously holding his other paintings out of the way to look at the one Renjun had intentionally hidden in the back. Getting up and setting his palette on the stool, Renjun gingerly took the paintings away from Dongha and set them against a patch of empty wall a distance away, thankful the man had managed to not dirty the dried varnish on the finished products. "Kill whatever you want, but please do not kill my paintings with your clay covered fingers. Why were you moving my paintings anyway?"
Dongha shrugged, crouching down to more closely admire the ocean painting. "I was bored."
Walking over to him, Renjun gave him a slap on the back of the head. "I should've known you were going to say that. Why can't you keep your hands off of my work?"
"Old habits die hard, I guess," Dongha chuckled with a pained smile, rubbing the spot where he'd been hit. "Someone's cranky and mean, though. Can't believe someone as cruel as you could paint something so pretty."
Renjun raised his hand as if to hit him again, smiling satisfactorily when Dongha put his hands up in a protective gesture. He didn't actually hit him, but he did reach down and pull Dongha up by the ear, eliciting yelps of pain. "Call me cruel again and I won't hesitate to actually hit you."
"Alright, alright, I got it, geez," Dongha huffed, pulling Renjun's hand off of his ear. He pointed back at the painting, specifically at the smiling figure in the center of the canvas. "You really did great work with the waves, they almost look photographed. Who's the girl, though? Didn't take you for much of a romantic."
"She's no one," Renjun quickly denied, retrieving the other paintings and hiding the ocean piece again. "I just...dreamed her up, that's all."
"I swear she looks familiar," Dongha spoke as if he hadn't heard Renjun, tipping the finished paintings at an angle to once again inspect the ocean one. He squinted his eyes at it as if it would make the figure's face any clearer. "Does she go here, to this university? I feel like I've seen her around somewhere, but I can't quite put my finger on it."
