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“Visiting, yeah, you said that.” She curls a golden strand behind her ear and finally looks up. “But why are youhere?”
I sigh. I want to tell her that I came to make things right, to take her back with me, to steal her, to do what I should have done over ten fucking years ago. I should have made her mine. I should have taken her with me when I left. I should have done a lot of things. Those words don’t leave my lips. Instead, I dig my hands into my pockets and fix her a stare. “You’re really not working on anything?” I ask.
After a moment’s pause Kate pushes from her chair and walks to a cluster of canvases close to a large window. She tugs off a drop cloth draped over one of the larger canvases and steps back, twisting her fingers. “It’s… not finished,” she says, almost awkwardly. “I have to—well the detail in the faces, obviously, isn’t done and—”
“It’s good,” I say quietly, taking it in. “Really good.”
The dark outline of a face hides the silhouette of a couple, their faces in the hallow of the eyes, their hands making up the nose, their arms hidden in the cut of the cheek, their feet nestled into the curve of the lips. The paint drips down from the edge of the face towards the bottom of the canvas like raindrops on a window. It’s all black and shades of grey. Cold and icy like a winter storm. All dark and so unlike the usual work Kate would dare to stroke onto a white surface, but because I know her, because I see her, I know this is her. The real her. The part of her she keeps hidden in her sketchbook.
I tilt my head at her work. “Self portrait?” I ask, and she wraps her arms around her middle, as if shielding herself, as if tucking herself away. But she should know by now that there’s not a part of her that she needs to hide from me. Not even the dark parts. Not even the parts she thinks are ugly.
“I didn’t mean for it to be,” she says quietly.
Leaning closer, I stare at the faces hidden in her work and smile. “Not sure if you got my nose right Katie, did you need me to model for you?”
She arches an eyebrow. “You think that’s us?”
“Isn’t it?”
All I get in response is a scowl, because of course it is. Last time I checked there wasn’t any other man in Kate’s life who’d brought her so much black, so much dark. All that pain splashed out onto the white of a canvas. No one makes her feel the things I make her feel, no one makes herhurtthe way I make her hurt. But what’s art without a little hurt?
I pick up her leather bound sketchbook from the table and she makes a grab for it, but I dodge her. “That’s private,” she snaps, but I only hold it out of her reach and quickly rifle through it.
And then I still, staring at drawing after drawing of… me. Of us.
“Katie,” I say smiling down at her. “Some of these are very… dirty.”
“Give it back.”
“God, I’d rather not. I might just have to steal this and hang every single one of these on my ceiling. You have a very”—I tilt my head at one of the pages—“vividmemory.”
She rips it from my hands, but before she can yell at me, I say, “Let me draw you.”
“What?”
I carefully pluck the sketchbook from her fingers and open it to a blank page. “Let me draw you,” I say again, and she scoffs.
“Christ, spare me, will you? Get out of here, James. I have to get home.”
“Tohim?”
“Ethan and I… we don’t live together. Yet,” she adds. “So no. But I shouldn’t be in here with you.”
A grin splits up my face. “Why? Afraid of what kind of trouble we might get into?”
She bites at her bottom lip and my fucking dick jumps. This fucking woman. I wonder if she did it on purpose because god I love it when she does that, and she knows it. She knows what it does to me, that the only picture I get in my head when that lip is between her teeth is what she looks like when I’m making her toes curl, when I’m making her grab the sheets and arch her back and when she’s coming on my fucking face.
I clear my throat and jerk my head to the sketchbook. “Come on Katie, why you being such a chicken shit? Let me draw you. What’s the harm?”
After a minute of pursed lips and clenched fists she lets out an exasperated huff. “Fine. How do you want me?”
I raise an eyebrow. “I want you in every way, Katie.” I don’t bother hiding my smirk when she glares at me. “On your back. Arms above your head. The desk will do.”
In one fluid movement, Kate is up on her desk in the position I asked, her face stern and angry, eyes full of fire. Fuck she's beautiful.
Dragging a chair across the floor, I settle in front of her and tilt my head. “Knees up,” I direct, “and arc your back a little.”
Again, she does as I ask, eyes on me, never breaking her glare. And I start. Been a while since I've sketched anything, since I’ve done any work really that hasn’t involved cannisters or copious amounts of paint, but I catch on quick, drawing out her shape, her legs, her long hair draping over the edge of her desk.
