Chapter 14
Professor Muldoon had a habit of dropping bombs at nine in the morning while the rest of us were still nursing our coffees.
“Everything we’ve done this semester has been a warm-up,” she said, pacing in front of the wall of student work—charcoal nudes, gesture drawings, anatomical studies pinned in neat rows.
Her heels clicked against the concrete floor, and the sound bounced off the studio’s high ceilings.
“Every figure you’ve drawn has been a stranger.
Someone you paid and asked to take their clothes off and hold still.
” She stopped pacing and turned to face us, her dark eyes sweeping the semicircle of easels.
Fourteen students, most of them still half-asleep, clutching paper cups and pencils. “That ends now.”
I set my coffee down, understanding that what was coming next was going to be the most important moment of my college career.
“Your final piece.” She held up one finger.
“One drawing. One subject. Someone you know. I don’t want a posed nude of someone sitting on a stool under good lighting with their shoulders back and their face arranged.
I want vulnerability. I want exposure—physical, emotional, or both. I want the moment the mask cracks.”
The studio went quiet. A girl two easels over raised her hand. “Does it have to be nude?”
“It doesn’t have to be anything.” Muldoon crossed her arms. “Nudity isn’t vulnerability by default.
We’ve proven that all semester. Our models stripped down and gave us nothing but anatomy.
Muscle, bone, proportion. Technically perfect and emotionally dead.
” She pointed at the wall behind her. “Every one of those drawings could be in a medical textbook. That’s not what I’m after.
” She walked to the center of the room, her voice dropping lower, pulling us in.
“I want to look at your drawing and feel like I’m intruding.
I want to know this person’s secrets by the way you’ve drawn the line of their mouth.
That you’ve captured the human being behind the subject.
I want the thing you see that no one else does. ”
My pencil had stopped moving. I hadn’t even realized I’d been sketching—a loose, unconscious line on the corner of my pad that was already curving into the shape of a shoulder. A broad shoulder. A specific shoulder.
“The medium is your choice,” Muldoon continued. “Charcoal, graphite, ink, mixed media. Size is your choice too. But the emotional weight must be there. If I feel nothing, you’ve failed the assignment and the class. Questions?”
A guy in the back, who’d spent the semester drawing his girlfriend in a series of increasingly suggestive poses, leaned forward. “Isn’t that kind of invasion of privacy? How do you draw an ‘unguarded’ moment without being a creep about it?”
“That’s between you and your subject.” Muldoon picked up her coffee from the desk and took a sip, the conversation now casual, as if she hadn’t just detonated the room.
“Some of you will work from memory. Some will work from photographs. Some will sit your subject down and ask them to be brave with you. The approach is part of the art.”
I stared at the line on my pad. The shoulder had become a neck. The neck was becoming a jaw—square, strong, slightly clenched the way it got right before he let go.
I knew who my subject was. Hell, the charcoal dust on my fingers knew. The image was already there, waiting to be pulled onto the page.
It was Evan, face down on a hotel bed, his spine a long, perfect curve.
Evan, with his fist jammed between his teeth, his whole body shaking as every wall he’d ever built came down.
It was the thirty seconds after, when his eyes went soft, and his mouth did that private, unguarded thing that nobody else in the world got to see.
I didn’t need a model. I had fourteen pages of his ass and the taste of him memorized. I had a catalog of his sounds filed away, organized by intensity. I could draw him from memory with my eyes closed.
No one on the team can know about this. I mean it, Tommy.
Drawing Evan in a moment of defenselessness and turning it in for a grade skipped right over risky and landed squarely in the land of betrayal.
I’d have to present it to a room full of my peers while explaining that I do, in fact, know what this man looks like when he’s falling apart.
Here’s the proof rendered in charcoal on twenty-four-by-thirty-six-inch paper.
Muldoon dismissed us ten minutes early. Students filed out in clusters, already buzzing about their subjects—a sister, a best friend, a dying grandmother. People who’d say yes without hesitation, who’d sit still and let themselves be seen because they had nothing to lose.
I stayed at my easel, my eyes tracing the charcoal line of the jaw on my pad until it became the start of a very bad idea.
The obvious solution was to pick someone else.
Hunter would strip naked and pose on a beanbag if I asked nicely.
My father would be a different kind of challenge—capturing the immense pressure behind that locked jaw, the whole story in his rigid posture.
But getting him to sit still for longer than a debrief would require sedation.
There was only one person that I wanted to do this with.
I pulled out my phone and opened my texts with Evan. The one and only message was from three days ago—a single word sent at 11:47 p.m., after two days of silence.
Evan: Pretty.
My thumb hovered over the word, and my heart did the same stupid little tap dance it did when the message first lit up my screen.
I typed four different messages and deleted all of them.
Hey, can we talk about something? Too vague. He’d assume the worst.
I need to draw you for a school project. Too clinical. Stripped of everything that made it matter.
Would you let me draw you? Too loaded. He’d hear the subtext and bolt.
I have this art project about vulnerability, and the only person I can think of is you. I know this is insane, but—
Delete. Delete. Delete.
My thumb jabbed the lock button, making the screen go dark.
Rutgers was this weekend. Three nights in a hotel room, one chance to ask for the impossible, and a thousand ways for it to go wrong.
But then I thought about the pinky. The word pretty, whispered in the dark. The way he watched my face when he jerked me off, the focus in his eyes so absolute it wasn’t about the mechanics of getting off, but a hunger to see me unravel. To watch the moment I broke apart.
I opened our texts again, my thumb hovering over the call button this time.