Loch turns the book.
It’s me, lying out on the floor, blanket around my hips, head to the side so it’s mostly the line of my jaw and a scattered tangle of myhair on the pillow. He’s drawn the paint across my body in the style of his larger canvas art so it looks even more like those arehismarks on my skin.
The fire in my chest surges down to the base of my spine. I rest a fingertip where he’s drawn the side of my face. “It’s weird to see you do something more realistic.”
“I canna seem to break this way of sketching. A downside of going to school for it.”
“Downside?” I pick up one of the cups of coffee and the moment I take a sip, the rest of my mind kicks back on.
And even though I do want to have this conversation with him, the only thing I can think about is how he’s wearing pants and I hate it.
Loch sets the sketchpad to the side and finishes his apple, waving it as he talks. “The mechanics of it. They’re useful, but it gets me stuck in my own head a wee bit.”
“Ah. You mentioned something like that—knowledge versus education?”
“There’s knowing the steps, and then there’s beingboundto the steps. I do na regret taking these courses, but I wonder what my skill would be like if I did na have formulas clogging my brain. Structure is grand, but it does na often allow for the free flow of creativity and joy—and that’s what it’s all about for me. Just like our Holidays. Joy.”
I lower the cup from my lips. “I know exactly what you mean.”
Loch’s eyebrow cocks encouragingly.
Discomfort presses against me and I shift under the blanket, legs stretching out only to fold back again.
“When I was in the English track, I went into those classes so eager.The things I was writing may not have beengood,but they had a purity to them that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to recapture. And within the first week, I knew I’d made a mistake signing up for that track. The professors were so high on one specific way of writing, and they upheld it as gospel. We had to aspire to that style, or we were failures.”
“The classics, eh?”
It’s not surprising that he guesses. “Yeah. And I might havelikedthe books they upheld if they hadn’t been such jackasses about forcing them on us. The first assignment I turned in—” My chest aches at the memory, but there’s distance from that memory now, and I’m shocked that the ache twists into defensive anger, not resigned hurt. “The professor ripped it apart. In front of the class. It was a short story, barely a few thousand words long—and hedecimatedit, every word choice was wrong, every cadence of every sentence, the plot beats I’d chosen, it was too whimsical, it didn’t take itself seriously, and on and on. And I sat there, letting him eviscerate me in public, because he was the gatekeeper of this art form, right? If I couldn’t succeed here, I shouldn’t write at all.”
Loch’s hand is on my leg again. “That fucker. Christ. There’s no construction in public humiliation.”
“No. There isn’t.” I lock my hand in his and stare at that tangle. “So I switched to International Relations. And I hadn’t written anything formesince. Until—until, like, two days ago.”
“That’s what you were doing in the library,” Loch guesses.
I nod and look up at him.
“Colm said you asked him for a notebook. I’d—I’d hoped that was what you were up to.”
A blush creeps across my face. “Thank you. For the other notebooks. The pens, too.”
“Show me,” he whispers. “Your writing.”
“Oh, yeah, sure.” I snort. “You want to read my rambling, stream of consciousness nonsense after not having written inliteral years?”
“Yes.” His eyes sparkle and he gestures around the studio. “You’ve seen my soul, in all its unformed pieces. I wanna see yours, boyo.”
“My soul?” I laugh to cover the nervous hitch in my chest. “I don’t know. It’s rough shit. I’m not lying when I say it’s been years since I’ve done anythingrealand I don’t know if—”
“Kris.” He squeezes my hand. “You do na have to show me. What that professor did to your psyche was a right fucked-up thing to do. The only way to get that arsehole out of your head is to keep movingforward. There is no greater measure of value than that whichyougive to a piece of art. And if the stuff you’re working on is valuable to you, I wanna see it.”
There is no fantasy, no alternate dimension, no manufactured fictional world where I do not fall for this guy.
I mean, our version of post-sex talk is about the structure of art, for Christ’s sake.
“And you said I was a poet.” My voice is delicate and brittle and very far away. If I talk too loudly, it’ll break the hum of his words on the air, the net they’re weaving around me.
He smiles, a gentle upturn of his lips.
