First Kiss, Last Kiss, Every Kiss
Copyright© 2026 by SpankLord40k
Chapter 21: The Opening
The gallery was full. Emily could hear the murmur of voices from the corridor where she was standing, adjusting the collar of her dress for the third time. She had bought this dress for tonight. Navy. Understated. She wanted the paintings to be the thing people noticed.
She walked through the door and into the exhibition space.
The Whitfield looked the way she had imagined it would look. Warm lighting. Hardwood floors. People in dark clothing holding wine glasses, moving between canvases in the slow orbit of an opening night. She could see her section from here, five paintings along the east wall, the progression Catherine had designed.
She moved toward them.
A couple was standing in front of the centerpiece. Emily’s chest lifted. She got closer and the couple turned and she saw their faces and they were looking past her paintings at the sculpture installation on the adjacent wall. They hadn’t stopped at all. They were already moving on.
A woman in a gray coat was near the second piece. Emily watched her. The woman glanced at the canvas, tilted her head, and then her eyes moved to her phone. She typed something with her thumb. She walked away without looking up again.
Emily stood at the edge of her section.
People moved through the gallery in a slow current. They gathered in front of other artists’ work. A small crowd formed near the entrance where a large photograph hung, people nodding, discussing, gesturing at details. Someone was laughing in the far corner. A camera flash went off.
Nobody stopped at Emily’s paintings.
She watched for a while. She lost track of how long. The current of bodies flowed past her section the way it flowed past a blank stretch of wall, and she stood there and felt her hands go cold and pressed them together in front of her stomach.
She found Catherine near the back of the gallery. Catherine was talking to a tall man Emily didn’t recognize. She was laughing at something he had said, her head tilted slightly back.
Emily stepped closer. “Catherine?”
Catherine did not turn. She took a sip of wine and said something to the man, too quiet for Emily to hear.
“Catherine, I wanted to ask you something.”
The man glanced at Emily, then back to Catherine, as if nothing had happened. Catherine laughed again.
Emily was standing right next to them. Close enough to smell Catherine’s perfume. Close enough that every gesture, every word should have registered.
Catherine looked through her.
Emily raised a hand, half in the air, as if to touch Catherine’s arm. She let it fall again.
She stepped back. Nobody noticed.
She turned away from them and the gallery had grown. The ceiling was higher. The walls had moved further apart. Her section was the same size but the rest of the space had expanded around it, and her paintings looked small on the wall, small and separate, five bright rectangles surrounded by white.
She walked toward the wine table and it was further than it should have been and the people she passed looked at her and looked through her and someone said something and someone else laughed and she could not locate the sound. The laughter was coming from everywhere and nowhere. She walked faster.
She reached her section. The centerpiece was gone. The wall where it had hung was blank. A clean rectangle of slightly lighter paint where the canvas had been, and below it a small white card that said REMOVED.
Not sold. Removed.
She stood in front of the blank wall and felt the room pressing in from all sides, the conversations and the glasses clinking and the laughter, always the laughter, and she tried to breathe and her chest would not.
She woke up.
Ceiling. The crack that ran from the light fixture to the corner. Morning light, gray and pale, coming through the curtains.
Emily lay still. Her heart was hammering. The sheets were damp under her back. She could still see the blank wall. The white card. REMOVED. She could still feel the gallery expanding around her, the floor stretching under her feet while her paintings shrank on the wall.
Sophie was asleep beside her. One hand tucked under her cheek, dark hair spread across the pillow. Her breathing slow and even.
Emily stared at the ceiling and waited for her pulse to slow. It didn’t. Her body hadn’t caught up to the fact that she was in bed, in their apartment, and the opening was today, tonight, in fourteen hours.
She got up. She went to the kitchen and filled a glass of water and drank it standing at the counter. The apartment was quiet. The easel in the corner with the half-finished canvas. Sophie’s headphones on the couch arm.
She thought about Catherine looking through her. The hand she had raised and let fall.
She finished the water and stood at the window and watched the street. A delivery truck idling at the corner. A woman walking a large dog that was more interested in a fire hydrant than in moving forward. The ordinary morning of a city that did not know today was anything special.
Three months ago she had been standing in this same kitchen eating yogurt out of the container when her phone buzzed. A number she did not recognize. She almost let it go.
She answered on the fourth ring.
“Emily Morrison?”
“Yes.”
“This is Catherine Park. I’m a curator at the Whitfield.”
Emily set the yogurt down on the counter.
The Whitfield. She had been in that building maybe ten times over the years, always as a visitor, walking slowly through the rooms, standing in front of other people’s paintings and thinking about what it would be like to have her own hanging on one of those walls. She had thought about it the way you think about things that happen to other people.
Catherine was saying something about a group show. About identity and transformation. About how they had been following Emily’s work.
A sound came out of Emily’s mouth.
She did not decide to make it. It came from somewhere below her ribs, a high thin sound, half-scream and half-squeal, the kind of sound a body makes when the brain cannot keep up. It came out directly into the phone.
She heard it after it happened. She heard herself hear it.
There was a small pause on the other end of the line. A kind of stopped breath.
Then Catherine laughed. A short, warm laugh, the laugh of someone who had heard this before.
“Well,” Catherine said. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
Emily’s face went hot. She felt it rising from her throat, up over her cheeks, into her hairline. She pressed her free hand against the counter and stared at the yogurt and tried to make words come out of her mouth.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Quieter now. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do that.”
“Don’t apologize. It’s the best reaction I’ve had all week.”
Emily closed her eyes. Her face went hotter.
Catherine went on. June. Six artists. Identity and transformation. Four to six pieces depending on wall space. She spoke the way someone speaks when they are used to doing this, calm and efficient, giving Emily time to write things down. Emily wrote names on the back of an envelope. Her handwriting came out wrong, the letters too big and slanting.
When the call ended Emily stood at the counter and did not move.
The yogurt was still open. The spoon was still in her hand. The kitchen was the same kitchen it had been five minutes ago. Nothing in the room had changed.
She pressed both hands against her face.
She started laughing. Then she started crying. She stood there in her kitchen and she was not sure for a minute which one was which.
That had been three months ago. Now she was standing in the same kitchen with a dream clinging to her like something wet, and in fourteen hours the doors would open and people would either look at her paintings or they would not.
Sophie’s arms wrapped around her from behind. “Morning,” she murmured against Emily’s shoulder.
“Morning.”
“How are you feeling?”
Emily turned in her arms. “I had a nightmare about the opening. Nobody looked at my work. Catherine wouldn’t even see me.”
Sophie pulled back enough to look at her face. “Your brain is trying to protect you by showing you the worst version.”
“I know.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to believe it.”
Emily leaned her forehead against Sophie’s and breathed. Sophie smelled like sleep and the particular warmth of their bed and Emily closed her eyes and let that be enough for a moment.
They got ready. Emily put on the navy dress. Sophie wore black trousers and a white silk shirt with the sleeves rolled, her dark hair loose.
“You look incredible,” Emily told her.
“You look like someone about to have a long evening,” Sophie said.
They took the subway. Emily gripped the pole and Sophie’s hand rested on the small of her back and Emily leaned into the contact. The train rocked. Stations passed. Emily’s stomach was a knot.
At the gallery, Catherine was already there, moving through the space with a clipboard, talking to one of the assistants about lighting. She saw Emily and waved her over.
“Good, you’re here. I want to move the smallest piece.”
Emily looked at the wall. Catherine was pointing to the third painting in the sequence, the one that had always been the bridge between the darker work on the left and the gold pieces on the right.
“Move it where?”
“Closer to the centerpiece. I think the progression reads better if it’s tighter.”
Emily looked at the arrangement. She had worked on this sequence with Catherine for weeks. The spacing mattered. The small piece needed room on both sides. Without that room, the gold in the centerpiece would swallow it.
“I think it reads better where it is.”
Catherine glanced at her. Not unkindly. But she had already made up her mind. “Trust me on this. I’ve been doing this for twenty years.”
Emily stood there for a second. She thought about pushing back. She thought about saying no, actually, leave it, it works where it is. The words were in her mouth.
“Okay,” she said.
Catherine nodded and went to find one of the handlers. Emily watched the small piece come off the wall and move two feet to the right.
It looked fine. It looked okay. It did not look the way she had wanted it to look.
Catherine came back with a clipboard and went through the price sheet with her one more time. The numbers on the other four pieces. A blank line next to the centerpiece, where the price would be.
“Last chance to change your mind about the centerpiece.”
“It’s not for sale.”
“Okay.” Catherine wrote NFS next to the title. Not for sale. “I’ll tell anyone who asks.”
Sophie came up behind her. “You good?”
“Yeah,” Emily said.
The doors opened at seven.
The first half hour, nobody stopped.
Emily had positioned herself at the edge of her section, close enough to be available if someone wanted to talk, far enough that she was not hovering. She had a glass of water in her hand that she was not drinking. The water was warm by now. She was still holding it.
People moved through. They paused at the sculpture installation. They gathered around the large photographs in the front. One man stood in front of Emily’s centerpiece for a moment, tilted his head, and then made a face. Not cruel. More like he was trying to understand something and had decided he was not going to. He moved on.
A woman and her friend walked past the smallest piece and the woman said something to her friend and they both laughed. Emily did not hear what was said. Her brain filled it in with words that were almost certainly not the ones that were spoken.
She felt the room start to expand.
Not the way it had in the dream. Not literally. But something in the proportions was shifting. Her section felt small. The rest of the space felt huge. She pressed her free hand flat against the wall behind her and felt the cool plaster and tried to remember that this was the same gallery, the same floor, the same night.
Something made her turn.
Sarah was standing at the entrance.
Emily did not think. The sound came out of her before she could stop it, the same high thin sound from the kitchen three months ago, but louder now, in a room full of strangers. She was already moving. She crossed the gallery in a half-run and threw her arms around Sarah and held on.
The room shifted around them.
A woman in a long coat turned with her eyebrows up. A man in a dark suit glanced over and shook his head slightly and went back to the painting he was looking at. Two people near the wine table were smiling. Somebody else was laughing, not unkindly.
Emily felt it. She felt her own body in the middle of the room with her sister in her arms and everybody watching. She felt the heat rise up her neck and over her face.
She pulled back. “I’m so sorry,” she said to the nearest couple, who were looking at her with something between amusement and patience. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to.”
Sarah pulled her back into the hug. Her mouth was close to Emily’s ear.
“Don’t apologize. Not tonight.”
Emily closed her eyes.
“You said you couldn’t come,” she said into Sarah’s shoulder.
“I lied.”
Emily pulled back and hit her lightly on the arm.
“I hate you.”
Sarah grinned. “No, you don’t.”
Emily leaned her head back against Sarah’s shoulder and wrapped her arms around her.
“Shut up,” she mumbled.
They stood there for a moment. Emily could feel her face still burning but she did not let go right away. Sarah smelled like the perfume she always wore, the one their mother had given her for her eighteenth birthday, and Emily pressed her face against her sister’s coat and let the gallery do whatever it was going to do.
When she pulled back Sarah looked at her face for a moment. She did not say anything encouraging. She did not say anything about the paintings. She just squeezed Emily’s arm once and said, “Breathe. This isn’t a race.”
“An hour in, people barely know what they’re looking at. They need time. You don’t have to win this in the first thirty minutes.”
“It feels like the room is getting bigger.”
“I know.” Sarah squeezed her arm again. “It’s not, though.”
She stayed for another minute. Then she drifted off toward the wine table. Emily watched her go and took a sip of the warm water and something in her chest eased by half an inch.
Around eight, an older couple stopped in front of the centerpiece. They stayed.
Emily watched them out of the corner of her eye. The man was pointing at the brushwork in the lower left, and the woman was nodding, and they were talking to each other in low voices, and they did not move on.
Catherine appeared beside her. “The Hendersons. They want to meet you.”
Emily’s hand tightened around the glass. “Now?”
“Now is good.”
She walked over. The Hendersons turned and smiled and introduced themselves. He was tall and lean, a retired architect. She was smaller, with silver hair cut very short. They were both warm in a practiced way, the warmth of people who had done this a hundred times.
They asked about the series. Emily talked about change and about color and about the way the figure in the centerpiece was caught between two states. She had said these things before. She knew what worked.
Then Mr. Henderson said, “Who did you look at when you were working on the palette? It reminds me of some of the early Diebenkorn, but the transitions are warmer.”
Emily opened her mouth. Closed it.
She had not looked at anyone. She did not know who Diebenkorn was, not beyond the name. She had not worked from references. The palette had come from the nights in her studio, from the light in her apartment at three in the morning, from a color she had mixed by accident and then kept mixing because it was the closest thing to what she had been feeling.
She could have given a name. She could have said something true-adjacent. Catherine would have accepted it. The Hendersons would have accepted it.
“I didn’t work from references,” Emily said. “I don’t really know who I was looking at. I was just trying to get the gold right.”
The silence after was very short. Maybe a second. It felt longer.
Mrs. Henderson smiled. It was a different smile than the one she had been wearing before.
“That’s the right answer,” she said.
Emily did not know what to say to that.
They talked a little more. Mr. Henderson asked about her process. Mrs. Henderson asked how long the centerpiece had taken. Emily answered. Her voice felt far away from her mouth. After a few minutes Mrs. Henderson touched her arm and said it was lovely to meet her and they would be talking to Catherine.
Emily watched them walk over to Catherine. She saw Mr. Henderson speak. She saw Catherine’s expression shift slightly. Catherine glanced at Emily once, briefly, then back at the Hendersons. They talked for a minute. Then the Hendersons moved toward the wine table.
Catherine came over.
“I told them it isn’t for sale. They want to make an offer anyway. I said I would ask.”
Emily felt her chest tighten. “What did they offer?”
“Fifteen thousand. It’s your call. I’ll tell them no if you want me to.”
Fifteen thousand.
Emily heard the number and it did something to her body before her brain caught up. Her hands went hot. Her heart started beating hard enough that she could feel it in her throat. She pressed her free hand flat against the wall behind her.
Fifteen thousand was more than she had made from her art in the last two years combined. After Catherine’s cut, it was still more than six months of rent. It was the difference between freelancing until midnight and being able to work on her own paintings in the afternoon. It was something she could give back to Sophie, who had been carrying the two of them for so long that Emily had stopped being able to count it.
It was also the centerpiece.