Chapter 23
Twenty-Three
Camden
Some hours later, I stir back to consciousness, only to realize I’m still in Logan’s room.
Still in his bed, though that’s not an odd occurrence in itself—I’ve spent the night in here a few times since getting back from break.
The strange part isn’t even the time—just after three in the morning—displayed on his alarm clock.
No, the part that confuses the shit out of me is when I turn, all bleary-eyed and hazy, to find Logan is still awake beside me.
His headphones are on and he’s drawing in his sketchpad, the page illuminated by the tiny book light clamped to the cover. He doesn’t notice I’m actually awake, too engrossed with what he’s doing, if the way his lip is caught between his teeth is any indication.
It’s only when I reach over, sliding my hand onto his thigh, that he finally realizes and pulls off his headphones.
“Hi. Did I wake you?”
“I don’t know,” I mutter honestly, wiping my eyes. “The real question is how you’re still awake to begin with.”
He glances over at the clock, noting the time, before his eyes find mine again. “Night owl, remember?”
I let out a little grumble before covering my eyes with my forearm. Of course, the move has him chuckling softly before he pokes me in the arm with the end of his pen.
“You can sleep in your own room. You know that, right?”
I bat his hand away and groan from the light infiltrating my senses again. “Impossible. Pretty sure you’ve got me handcuffed to your bed.”
A filthy smirk crosses his face, and even in my half-conscious state, I know exactly where his mind just went. And all I can do is groan again before closing my eyes.
“I’ll tie you up another night,” I mumble while burrowing my face against the pillow. “Too late. Too tired. You’d escape too easily.”
“And what if I wanted to be the one doing the cuffing? Could be a fun way to torment you even more while I ride you.”
The comment has my lids lifting, and I find him aiming another sinister smirk at me.
“Mmm, you paint a pretty picture almost as well as you draw them. Even at three in the morning.”
He laughs, shaking his head. “Smooth. Real smooth, Cam.”
“See? Knew you couldn’t resist me forever.”
All he does is roll his eyes and go back to what he was doing before I so rudely interrupted him. I should probably go back to sleep, knowing my wake-up call for practice in a couple hours will come far too soon, but the cuddle whore inside me isn’t content with the amount of space between us.
So, naturally, I rectify that.
Rolling to face him, I scoot my body closer until I’m pressed snuggly into his side.
I don’t stop there, though, because it’s still not close enough, and I nudge his arm up so my head can fit in the space made by the crook of his elbow.
His ribs vibrate with soft laughter where my cheek now rests against them, and his fingers sink into my hair, playing with the strands.
“Uh, hi. Can I help you?” he asks, his amusement evident in his tone.
“Wanna watch ‘til I fall asleep again.”
He’s quiet for a beat before whispering, “Baby, I can just go to bed if—”
“No, keep going. I like watching you work.”
Despite my request, he remains still for another moment or two. But he doesn’t pull away or flip the sketchpad closed either, which gives me the chance to get an up-close view of what he’s been working on while I was fast asleep.
It’s a page sectioned out in six various sized rectangles, some vertical, some horizontal, and there’s something different happening in each.
One could be a scene, while the next has a character taking up most of the panel.
And while the words in the speech bubbles are difficult to read—be it because of my dyslexia or my half-conscious state—I can understand what’s happening on the page without them.
The character’s facial expressions, the art, tells more than any dialogue could.
“Are these your own characters or someone else’s that you like to draw?”
“My own,” he whispers after a moment, his voice raspy. “It’s, uh, called a one-shot. Which is basically a short story.”
Without thinking, I reach up and turn the sketchpad to see the number of pages he’s already finished. It’s gotta be at least ten or fifteen, maybe more. Which seems like a lot from where I’m sitting.
“How short is short?”
“It ranges. This one will probably be around fifty pages.”
My first thought is damn, that’s a lot of drawing, and it’s no wonder he always seems to have it with him. Between school and everything else, I can’t imagine how long it’ll actually take him to finish it.
“What are you gonna do with it when it’s done?”
He’s quiet for a moment, simply continuing to scrape his fingers against my scalp, and for a second, I think I didn’t actually ask the question out loud. But then he lets out a little sigh, and quietly replies, “I don’t know. I hadn’t really thought about it.”
“Really?” I ask, unable to hide my surprise. “Wouldn’t the best option be to like…publish it or something?”
“Probably, but that’d require me to let people see it.” He pokes me in the cheek before adding, “Other than you, nosey.”
“Right, like I’m the only person you let see your art,” I say with a sleepy snort.
I shake my head at the thought, my cheek brushing against his shirt from the movement. But when Logan’s fingers go eerily still and he remains silent, not tossing back any sort of sarcasm or banter with me, I tense, suddenly wide awake.
Slowly, I shift to look up at him, finding his lips rolled inward as he stares down at me. And I see the answer in his eyes before I can even ask the question.
“I’m the only person you let see it?”
He nods, his tongue pressed against the inside of his cheek. “I mean, if I have an assignment for my art studio, then my professor and classmates see it, critique it, all that. But willingly? As in not for a grade? It’s just you.”
It’s like the bed, the floor, the entire world drops out from under me with those three simple words.
It’s just you.
Not Lexi, Bailey, Willow—his goddamn best friends—but me. It doesn’t compute in my head how no one else knows how talented he is. Or why he chose me to share it with. I literally can’t wrap my mind around it.
“How come?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s just really personal, I guess.”
For whatever reason, that simple response has my heart swelling in my chest. Painfully so. Because as honored as I am to be the one he’s let into this secret space inside his mind—the one he so easily brings to life on paper—his talent deserves so much more than that.
Settling back against him, I reach for the sketchbook again, wrapping my fingers firmly around the edge just below his own hand. My intention is obvious, despite being unspoken, but still affords him an out if he chooses to pull away.
Except he doesn’t.
Instead, he allows me to flip the page back to the previous one, revealing more scenes, more art, more pieces of himself.
And after I take that one in, he lets me do it again.
And again, until we silently flip through all the pages he’s completed together.
It’s only when we reach the cover that he flips it closed completely and sets it on his nightstand out of reach; a clear indication that show and tell is over.
Or, at least the “show” portion.
He slides down to lie beside me, shifting so my head is tucked in the crook of his arm now rather than on his ribcage.
I sling my arm over his stomach, holding him against me while his hand coasts up and down my arm in long, steady sweeps, and I work up the nerve to ask the question eating at me like a parasite.
“I promise, I’m not trying to like…poke at you, or anything. I’m genuinely asking this,” I hedge softly. “Why do you spend so much time on something that amazing if you don’t want people to see it?”
“Because it makes me happy.”
The sentence is so simple, it should be easy to accept it as the truth.
But I’ve come to know Logan pretty well over the past couple months, and I can tell when he’s still holding something back.
And right now, he is. I can feel it in the way his fingers press into my flesh a little more as they skate over my skin, using the connection to ground himself the way he has so many times before.
The surprising part is when he chooses to reveal more layers, completely unprompted.
“Remember how I told you I would draw or color or whatever, back when I was a kid, hanging out at the rink while Oakley was practicing? I guess that’s when my whole…affinity for drawing began.
“At first, I think it was a way for me to escape from what was happening around me. To forget that I wasn’t my brother.
Wasn’t the kid my dad wanted.” His hand moves up, sinking into my hair again, playing with the strands absently while he continues.
“Dad hated me drawing, though, even when I was little. I mean, you heard him at the banquet. And while I think he did that in hopes I’d give it up when I got older, I kept doing it.
Probably because I knew he hated it, if I’m being honest. But then somewhere along the way, I started to really enjoy it too—creating something from nothing with just my imagination and a pen. ”
I’d had a feeling a lot of this stemmed from his dad, but hearing the confirmation from his lips doesn’t make it any easier to digest. And though I’m not really a violent person, it kinda really makes me wanna deck Travis Reed in the face.
I turn my face toward him and press a kiss to the inside of his shoulder before whispering, “You probably grew to love it because, deep down, you know how talented you are. Even if you’re too humble or stubborn to admit it.”
“Yeah, well, you know talent doesn’t always compute to a career. Otherwise all your teammates would be going pro with you,” he mutters before tapping my head, playfully adding, “And, I mean, they don’t call us starving artists for nothing.”