Chapter 2 #2
She's with a client when I get there — a sleeve in progress, a woman with silver hair and a leather vest who's clearly a regular — and Freya glances up, sees me, and tips her chin at the window.
My spot. I take it. I get out the sketchbook.
And I draw her working, which I've started doing without permission, filling pages with her hands and her concentration and the small frown between her eyebrows that she doesn't know she makes.
I never show her these pages. They're the only secret I'm allowed to keep that doesn't hurt anyone.
When the client leaves, Freya comes over and holds out her hand. "Let me see."
"It's the bottle," I lie. "I was redoing the bottle."
"You were not redoing the bottle. You've been staring at me for forty minutes with that look you get." She wiggles her fingers. "Sketchbook. Now. I'm your teacher, I get to critique your figure work."
"It's not finished."
"Nothing's ever finished. Give."
And because I'm an idiot, and because some part of me has wanted her to see them since the moment I started drawing them, I hand her the sketchbook open to the wrong page.
The right page. The page where it's her, three-quarter, head bent over an arm that isn't in the frame, the whole drawing built around the negative space she taught me to leave, the bare paper where her concentration lives.
She goes quiet.
She turns one page. It's her again. Another. Her hands. Another. Her, laughing at something a client said, a fast loose study I did in maybe ninety seconds and never touched after because touching it would have killed it.
The silence stretches until I can hear the boardwalk through the window — the gulls, a kid on a skateboard, the distant carousel music from the pier.
I want to take it back. That's my first instinct, the old one, the one that says you never let anyone see the soft thing because the soft thing is just a handle for them to grab you by.
I've spent the whole forty minutes drawing her without permission and now she's holding the evidence and the silence is going on too long and every survival instinct I own is screaming at me to make a joke, downplay it, reach for the book, call it nothing — it's nothing, the reflex I've said about myself my entire life. I get as far as opening my mouth.
And then I make myself stop. Because Griffin hasn't told me the thing about out-honesting yet — that's later, that's the dock in the rain — but I already half-know it, sitting in her window with my heart in her hands.
The lie is right there, easy, automatic: it's nothing.
And the lie would protect me, and it would also be the most cowardly thing I could do, because the drawings aren't nothing, they're the truest thing I've ever made, and they're all her, and pretending otherwise would be exactly the move that's kept me small and safe and alone for twenty-four years.
So I don't reach for the book. I don't make the joke.
I sit there and let her look at the soft thing, and I let it cost me whatever it's going to cost.
"These are good," she says. Her voice has changed. The teacher's gone out of it. "Kieran, these are — you left the right things out. You finally left the right things out."
"I had a good teacher."
"Don't." She closes the book. She doesn't hand it back right away.
She's holding it against her chest, both arms, like it's something she's not ready to give up, and when she finally looks at me the assessing thing is gone and underneath it is something raw and unguarded that I've never seen on her, and I realize with a lurch that I'm not the only one who's been pretending this is professional.
"This is a bad idea," she says.
I don't pretend I don't know what this is. "I know."
"You're a prospect. You're my brother's prospect. You're —" She stops. Recalibrates. "You're six years younger than me."
"I know all the numbers." I take the sketchbook from her hands, careful, and this time I let my fingers brush hers, and neither of us moves. "I run them every night. They don't change anything. I've been trying to make them change something for two months and they won't."
"Kieran —"
"I'm not asking you for anything." And I'm not.
That's the truth of it, the truth I've been carrying around like a stone.
"I'm not stupid enough to ask you for anything.
I know what it costs you and I know what it costs me and I'd never put that on you.
I just — I needed you to know I see it too.
That I'm not pretending. The drawings are the truest thing I've got and they're all you.
I figured you'd rather know that than not. "
She looks at me for a long, long time.
Then she steps back, and the cold comes down over her face like a shutter, deliberate, and she says, "Same time Thursday. We'll work on hands. Yours are stiff."
And I understand that I've been dismissed, and that I've also been told something, and that both things are true at once, and that this is exactly the impossible territory I knew I was walking into the day I bought a roll of paper towels I didn't need.