The Dance

Chapter 107 Darkness and Light

Matt awoke to find Jill gone again. He called her name but received no response. He found his shirt and jeans neatly folded on the pillow next to him. His feet hit the floor to search for her but he didn't find her anywhere in the apartment. He did find breakfast on the counter with a note from her. "In the studio.-J." He felt relieved. What happened the previous night with her sitting in the cold with a faraway look troubled him.

Matt waxed off breakfast and took a quick shower. When he finally made it to her studio in the back of the shop, he found her with a welding torch in hand working together the pieces of their creative efforts.

She had almost completed their "tree" art and caught a glimpse of him from the corner of her eye. "Morning sunshine!" Jill pulled her goggles up to the top of her head and smiled at him. Matt walked closer to her wrapping his arm around her waist and planting a kiss on her cheek.

"So what has my little gypsy been up to this morning?" Matt ran his hand over their piece eyeing it from several angles. "Nice work. I'm impressed. I think you're better than Noah with that torch."

Jill was pleased by the compliment. She had only recently started to play with steel and torch welding. She had picked up the skill during her short stay in Washington state as she drifted throughout the northwestern states trying to forget her past. She always found herself drawn to small galleries and art studios. She had traded on her looks and talent often bedding an artist for a few weeks of shelter, food and art lessons and moved on just as quickly as she had come into a man's life.

It wasn't until a stop in Canada that she found some semblance of herself again thanks to a fellow artist who didn't trade on her sex appeal. Instead he asked to paint her portrait. She agreed as he gave her a warm place to sleep, alone, and food but more than that he helped her find part of her soul again. He spent countless weeks painting her but he never let her see his progress until he finished. What he revealed to her was simply called "Darkness and Light." It was her, a vulnerable tender version of her painted in two worlds of light and dark. When Jill saw the portrait, she felt as if he had exposed all the pain she was attempting to run from and all the joy she once knew. That night at dinner, he handed her a mirror and asked her what she saw. She answered nothing. He asked her to look again. He explained to her that what she saw reflected in the mirror was the beauty and tragedy of life and all the things that make it up...the tears, the joys, the laughter, the sorrows. For without those elements, he told her, there would be no art. It was the most important art lesson, life lesson, she would ever learn.

The next morning Jill left with her portrait, the mirror and a new perspective of herself. She gathered her courage and called Cassie in Savannah and had her wire all her money to the Royal Bank of Canada before finally settling on a new destination in a fairly little town called Hoonah, Alaska.

It would be in this tiny little town that she would start to rebuild her life and resume her art in a place so small and remote that she would go unnoticed  until Matthew Brown walked into her life.