Page 6 of Framed By the Mountain Man Firefighter

I should leave. I know I should leave. She closed, and I’m still on the bench by the window, and neither of us is moving toward the door.

She pulls the sketchbook back out and opens it. Then she grabs a piece of charcoal from the cup by the register and looks at me.

“Don’t move,” she says.

“What?”

“The light on you right now.” She’s already drawing, her eyes flicking between the page and my face with a focus so sharp it feels physical. “Just…stay where you are.”

I sit still. I’m good at still. People expect restlessness from someone my size, the same way they expect aggression, but I’ve always been the one who can hold a position longer than anyone else on the crew. Patience is the thing nobody reads off my body correctly.

Her charcoal moves in quick, confident strokes—nothing like the hesitation in her voice when she talks about her own work. Her hands know something her mouth won’t admit.

“You do this a lot,” I say. “Draw people who don’t know you’re watching.”

“You know I’m watching.”

“Yeah.” My voice comes out lower than I mean it to. “I do.”

Her hand slows. She looks at me over the top of the sketchbook, and the gallery is so quiet I can hear her breathing change. The gold light from the courtyard is hitting the left side of her face and leaving the right in shadow, and I think about how I would carve that. The angle of her jaw. The line where light becomes dark. The hollow at the base of her throat where her pulse is beating faster than it was a minute ago.

“I’m only getting your face,” she says. “The flannel is hiding everything.”

The words sit in the air between us. She hears herself say them and goes still, and her cheeks flush, and she starts to backtrack.

“I mean the anatomy. For a portrait to work, I need to see the structure underneath. The muscle and the bone. The way the shoulder connects to the…”

She trails off. Her fingers are tight on the charcoal.

I unbutton the flannel and shrug it off my shoulders.

Her breath catches. I hear it clearly in the quiet of the closed gallery. She’s staring at me, charcoal suspended above the page, and whatever she was about to say is gone. I’m sitting on the bench in the last of the daylight, bare from the waist up, and she’s looking at me the way she looked at my carving. Reading the surface. Seeing what’s underneath.

“All of it?” I ask.

Her eyes come back to mine. I watch her process the question. I watch her understand that I’m not flexing or posturing or giving her the version of my body that other people have always demanded. I’m asking if she wants to see what’s actually there.

“All of it,” she says.

4

IRIS

He moves to the back of the gallery without me asking. Away from the window, away from Prospect Street, into the space where the track lighting is off and the only light is what filters through from the courtyard. He stands there, and I follow with the sketchbook. He undresses the rest of the way with the same deliberate calm he carries through everything, and I draw.

The charcoal moves, and my hand knows what to do even when the rest of me has forgotten how to breathe. I’ve drawn hundreds of people in this sketchbook. Tourists, locals, the women I love. I’ve always worked fast, catching them in moments they didn’t know I was watching, and the safety of that distance is what makes the portraits honest.

There’s no distance here. He’s watching me watch him. He’s standing three feet away—bare, still as wood—and every line I put on the page is a confession he can see me making in real time. I draw the slope of his shoulders, and the width of them is staggering on the page, but what stops my hand is the way he holds them. Soft. Careful. A body built for force, carried with restraint.

I draw his hands at his sides, the fingers loose, and I think about those fingers holding a chisel. Carving cobblestones no bigger than a fingernail. Making something delicate and precise when every inch of him suggests the opposite.

My charcoal slows on his stomach, tracing the line where muscle cuts toward his hips, and I feel the shift happen. The focus that’s been holding me together—the artist’s eye that keeps me clinical and steady—it thins. My hand is still moving, but my breathing has changed, and he can hear it. I know he can hear it because his breathing changes too.

I set the charcoal and sketchbook on the floor beside me, my pulse hammering in my throat.

“I can’t get it right from here,” I say. “The proportions. I need to feel where the muscle sits.”

It’s half true. Maybe less than half. But he doesn’t call me on it.