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I set the binoculars down. “Well. I think we found your weapon, AJ.”
“Secondary,” she whispered, correcting me as she patted the blades on her belt. “It’s okay, babies, I would never replace you.”
I snorted as she lined up for another shot.
“Keep practicing,” I encouraged her, getting off my belly to sit against the short wall behind us where the barn attached to the shed. I checked my phone again, waiting for word from the guys. It would be getting dark soon and they still weren’t back.
Sighing, I lifted a knee, snatching up my sketchpad to try to get some other work done while I could.
She fired, and I watched her readjusting again. The long weapon at home butted against her shoulder. Fuck, she was more than I ever dreamed a woman could be. She was how I imagined Diesel’s wife to have been before she was taken from him.
Before I knew it, I was drawing AJ instead of sketching new merch designs. It happened more often than not.
When she was finally ready for a break more than thirty minutes later, having put a good dent in Diesel’s good quality lead, I was finished.
She fell against the wall next to me, rubbing out a kink in her neck, but she froze when she saw what was lying in my lap, her lips parting.
“Is that me?”
She leaned over me to get a better look.
It wasn’t anything special. Just a series of dark and light lines, but they were unmistakably her lines. The cruel curve of her mouth. The angle of her face. Her delicate ears. Long fingers curled around the trigger of the sniper rifle.
“It’s amazing.”
I tore it off the pad and handed it to her. “Keep it.”
She took it, staring at her likeness like she couldn’t believe it was her.
“Wait, is that me, too?” she asked, tapping the pad in my lap with a black fingernail.
I barked a laugh, seeing what ripping the page off had revealed.
Another drawing of her. This one of her ass.
Specifically, her bare ass, peachy and lifted as she bent over a bank of sinks in the girls washroom at Briar Hall. The mirror over the mountainous peaks of her ass and dripping cunt broken to reflect back a busted up image of me.
She snatched the pad from my hands before I could stop her, flipping quickly through the pages.
There was no point in stopping her.
Besides, maybe she should know. How irrevocably she was burnt into my thoughts.
She flipped past images of herself. Her side profile. Her hands. Her breasts dripping with water in the shower. The arch of her back, artfully covered in a wave of dark hair.
She flipped to the last page and icy dread threaded through my veins at the image on the page. An old drawing. Of another woman.
Older. With short waxen hair and a small face. Her eyes scratched out with heavy black strokes. I could never get my mother’s eyes right. Couldn’t remember what they looked like. Probably because she never looked at me. Not even when I was right in front of her.
My stomach soured.
I took the sketchpad back from AJ and flipped all the leaves back over until it was closed.
“Who is she?” AJ asked.
“My mom.”
She squinted at me. “How long since she…” she trailed off. “I mean, how old were you when…”
