Spring Semester

I walked in to Brie’s painting studio one afternoon. It was really her classroom, but she always stayed late. She was more driven than the other students. She stood there in a splattered smock in the center of the room, moving her brush back and forth. She wore her khaki shorts. When she bent forward to get a closer look at what she’d just painted, her shorts moved upward on her thighs. Even then, after I’d already had her for months, her thighs looked too good to be true. Brie didn’t hear me. I wrapped my arms around her from behind and she gasped and the paintbrush jerked off the canvas.
“Oh God, Dennis,” she said, laughing. “You scared me.”
I kissed her on the cheek. I looked at the painting. It was a lot of swirled shapes in vibrant colors; chiefly red, blue and green. Primary colors.
“What’s your painting about?” I asked.
A spiral of expressionistic shapes culminating in a buxom cartoon character woman delivering a blow to a muscular, bare chested cartoon character man. A Roy Lichtenstein POW! above her fist and his face. A blurry background of indeterminate shapes that looked like stars.
She looked at me as if it was obvious.
“Feminism,” she said.