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She crossed her arms, staring at the panels on her desk. She’d decided to take control of the story, and she didn’t want to back down now.
Mina drew in black and white. She was known for black and white. All her reviews included something like, “Mina Clements’s stark black-and-white drawings capture the soul of the Russian people.”
Whether or not that was true was up for debate. However, it was a fact that she wasn’t a colorist. Not for public consumption, at least.
Times changed. Her life had never been for public consumption, either. So, instead of hiding from the challenge, she climbed down from her chair and got out her colored pencils. Coloring everything in meant she’d be up until dawn. And if she wrecked one of the panels, she risked ruining the immediacy the frenzy of drawing had brought on.
But her life needed color.
Before she could talk herself out of it, Mina slid a pencil out of her case and added color. She started with the easy decisions. The blues and pinks of the pajamas. The light greens of the Planned Parenthood. Then she moved on to harder things, like the stripes in Chase’s shirt. She didn’t color in everything. Her life was in color, but she was still a black-and-white artist. She had to be true to both selves.
Once everything was colored as well as she thought she could do it—not to her satisfaction, but close enough—she put her supplies away. Then she went to the kitchen to hunt down food.
And smiled when she saw the Post-it on the fridge saying, “Leftovers here.”
Levi. What would such a public statement do to Levi?
She shook that thought out of her head as she stuck the plate of leftovers into the microwave. Right now she was thinking about herself. Tomorrow she’d think of Levi.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE FIRST THING Levi did after he opened his eyes to see Mina’s round face and bloodshot eyes hovering over his head, the light streaming in from the hall giving her an otherworldly look, was glance at the clock.
“Is something wrong?” he asked. He’d slept in, but had she slept at all?
“I need to talk to you,” she said, her face so scrunched in worry that he sat up immediately.
“Let me get some pants on.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed, feeling for his jeans with his toes. Whatever it was she had to say looked serious enough that he didn’t want to be in only his briefs.
“You don’t need pants. I just want to show you something.” She was shifting her weight from left to right with her thumb between her teeth, an intoxicating combination of innocent and nervous. Much like she’d been when she’d stood on his porch months ago and charmed the hell out of him.
“I want pants.” Unpredictable and unexpected didn’t go well with underwear.
She didn’t wait for him. He was buttoning his fly as he followed her into her office. She didn’t bring him to her huge drawing desk to see whatever she’d been working on earlier but instead to the chair at her computer. At the top of the monitor was the banner for her website.
He noticed the color as soon as he sat. Then he realized the beds meant it was a dorm room and the man sitting on the comforter was a boy. The boy who’d given Mina HIV.
Give, like it had been a gift.
Though, he considered, as that thought came angrily to mind, it hadn’t been a curse. It just was. Like Kimmie’s depression, yet so very different from it.
“Is this what I think it is?” His eyes rolled from the panel with Mina—she’d captured her young self just like he’d imagined her to be—in yellow party clothes looking like she wasn’t sure being in this dorm room was a good idea, to the panel with the guy trying to convince her to trust him—and basically explaining in a textbook way why Mina shouldn’t have.
“It’s not live,” she said, defensively. “Not yet,” she amended.
“That’s good.” He scanned the next panel, the roommate standing in for every disappointed and judgmental reader of this strip. Only Mina had drawn love in Kaitlyn’s face, along with the disapproval.
“You think this is a bad idea?”
He could practically hear the nervous way she was biting her lip behind him. Mina and her open-book face.
