Chapter 13 #3
Her hands trembled. She pressed them flat against her thighs and held them there until the fine motor tremors subsided, then lifted the right one and examined it.
Charcoal dust sat in the whorls of her fingerprints.
A faint warmth resided along the edge of her index finger where she’d held it a breath away from the line of his jaw.
She hadn’t touched him.
She’d wanted to.
The garden went on being a garden around her—alien roses exhaling their sweet-rot perfume, insects she couldn’t name threading between blooms that could kill them, the bruise-colored sky softening toward this planet’s version of blue.
A breeze lifted the locs at her temple, cooling the flush that still burned along her throat.
One inch. She’d held her hand one inch from his skin and felt the heat of him pour across the gap like something liquid.
His eyes had closed. Not the controlled stillness he wore like armor, not the predatory alertness that kept his body coiled and ready.
He’d closed his eyes and surrendered a sense.
Made himself vulnerable in the smallest way a man built entirely of vigilance could manage, and the vulnerability of it had hollowed her out.
She picked up the sketchbook. Her fingers found the charcoal where it had rolled into the crease of the bench, and she opened to a blank page and let her hand move.
The garden dissolved. Time thinned to the scratch of charcoal on paper and the loop of memory playing behind her eyes: his shadow falling across her page, the weight of him settling onto the bench beside her, the furnace-heat that crossed the gap between their bodies.
The way his gaze had tracked the flush climbing her throat.
The fraction of a lean. The breath on her cheekbone.
Those lashes. Dark as his skin, impossibly long, fanned against the obsidian plane of his cheek with a delicacy that had no right existing on a man who could become a monster between one heartbeat and the next.
Her hand stopped.
She looked down.
His jaw filled the page. The angle tilted slightly downward, caught in the moment before the lean became something more.
Below it, his mouth. She’d rendered the asymmetry of his lips with a specificity that spoke of sustained, hungry observation: the fuller lower lip, the fractional tension at the left corner, the blue-black depth of them against his skin.
Above, his eyes—closed, lashes down, every individual strand mapped with the obsessive fidelity of someone who had memorized the image and couldn’t stop replaying it.
She’d drawn the moment he made himself vulnerable to her.
She’d drawn a man she wanted to kiss.
The recognition detonated in her sternum—hot, unwanted, undeniable.
Not the friction of the cold voice. Not the combative electricity she could channel into anger.
This was the other thing she felt when his voice was true.
The thing that dissolved her lines and left her without borders, without the clear charcoal boundaries between captor and captive that kept her sane in this beautiful prison.
She closed the sketchbook. Pressed both palms flat against its cover as if she could push the image back into the paper, unmake it, unlearn the shape of his mouth.
Nothing good lived on the other side of wanting that.
That night, with the bedroom door closed and the lamp burning low, she pulled her private sketchbook from beneath the mattress.
She'd been resisting this. The other sketches were fragments — his hands, his jaw, the hollow of his throat where shadow collected. Pieces. She'd told herself they were anatomical studies, reference material, components for the commissioned portrait.
What she wanted to draw tonight was the whole.
She set the charcoal to the page.
She drew his face as she'd seen it for those thirty seconds in the sunlit studio — the ice thawed from his eyes, the hard angles of his jaw softened by a moment that wasn't vulnerability so much as arrival, a man landing in his own body after years of inhabitation by someone else.
His mouth, which in repose settled into a line as final as a locked door, here curved — not a smile, she hadn't seen him smile, but what came before one.
The muscles around his eyes released. His brow, perpetually drawn tight, smoothed into an openness that made him look younger. Present. Real.
She drew with tenderness.
The recognition crept up on her like dawn — gradual, then sudden, then everywhere.
The way she feathered the shadows beneath his eyes, building them in layers rather than slashing them in with the aggressive strokes she'd used on the commissioned portrait.
The care she brought to the transition between his obsidian skin and the lighter planes where bone pressed close to the surface — his temple, the bridge of his nose — giving each value shift the attention she reserved for the faces she loved.
Her mother's face. Her thesis portraits.
The self-portrait she'd painted during the worst of the divorce, the one that hung in no gallery because it was too honest to share.
She was drawing Skarreth the way she drew things that mattered.
When she finished, she held the sketchbook at arm's length and looked.
The face on the page gazed back at her with warm eyes and an open expression, unmistakably him — the same bone structure, the same scale, the same fangs visible beneath parted lips — but also unmistakably someone she'd never been introduced to.
Someone who existed in the spaces between his performances, in the margins of philosophy texts, in the lean of his body towards hers with his eyes shut, in the thirty seconds of truth before the walls came crashing down.
She closed the sketchbook. Slid it beneath the mattress with the others.
The stack was growing: his hands, his throat, his jaw, his eyes rendered three different ways, and now this — the whole man, drawn with a tenderness she couldn't lie about, not to herself, not at three in the morning with the alien dark pressing against her windows and her pulse still carrying the rhythm of his footsteps in the garden.
She was in trouble.
She lay in the dark and pressed her paint-stained fingers against her sternum where the ache lived, and she knew it with the same certainty she knew color theory and the tensile strength of canvas: deep, serious, no-way-out trouble.
The worst part — the part that kept her staring at the ceiling long after the lamp guttered and died — was that she didn't want a way out.