4. Gracie
— ? —
Gracie
The barn smells like turpentine and hay and the last warm breath of October.
“You moved again.”
“I didn’t.”
“You did.” Mal’s voice floats from behind the easel, exasperated, the way he gets when a painting isn’t cooperating. “Your left shoulder dropped. I had the line and now it’s-” A frustrated exhale. “Just. Stay.”
I’m perched on a wooden stool he dragged in from the milking station, wrapped in a paint-spattered drop cloth because he said the light was being spectacular and he needed to capture it right now, this second, and I wasn’t allowed to change clothes first. The fabric smells like linseed oil and him.
“I’ve been sitting here for forty minutes,” I say. “My back hurts.”
“Art requires sacrifice.”
“Your art requires me to get a chiropractor.”
He huffs out a noise between a laugh and a growl.
Through the gap between the canvas and the easel’s edge, I can see a sliver of him, paint-smeared fingers, the furrow between his brows, that lock of dark hair that always falls forward when he’s concentrating.
We’ve been married a year and I still catch my breath sometimes, watching him work.
The way he disappears into it and the whole world narrows to pigment and light and whatever he’s trying to pull out of nothing.
Golden afternoon pours through the barn’s high windows, thick and slow as honey. Dust motes drift. Somewhere outside, the orchard rustles.
“The cloth keeps slipping,” I say.
“Then hold it.”
“I’m trying.”
“Try harder.”
I watch that sliver of him, the intensity, the complete absorption. He hasn’t really looked at me in twenty minutes, not at me, just at the shape of me, the planes and shadows. I’m a problem to solve. A composition.
The cloth has gathered at my collarbone, draped over both shoulders like a shawl. I reach up slowly, adjusting, just adjusting, and let it slide down my right arm.
The brush stops.
“Gracie.”
“What?” I keep my voice innocent. “It slipped.”
“It didn’t slip. You-” He leans around the easel, and now he’s looking. At me. The real me. His eyes track the bare curve of my shoulder, the strap of my bra just visible. “You’re sitting still wrong.”
“I don’t think that’s a real complaint.”
“It’s now.” He retreats behind the canvas. The brush moves again, but slower. Distracted. “Just. Let me finish the shoulder and then you can-”
I let the cloth drop another inch.
“Gracie.”
“Hmm?”
“You’re making it very hard to focus.”
“The barn’s warm,” I say, shrugging the fabric down further. It pools at my elbows now, the paint cloth, bunched around my waist. My skin prickles in the golden air. “I’m just getting comfortable.”
The brush has stopped again. I can hear him breathing.
“You’re doing this on purpose.”
“I’m just sitting here.”
He doesn’t answer. I reach back, unhook my bra, and let it fall away.
The sound he makes isn’t quite a word.
I sit there in the honey-thick light, bare from the waist up, watching the canvas like I can’t see him at all. My nipples tighten in the cool air. My pulse kicks hard at the base of my throat.
“You could keep painting,” I offer. “If you want.”
“I can’t-” His voice cracks. “I can’t possibly-”
“Finish the sentence, Mal.”
He comes out from behind the easel like a man pulled on a rope.
Mal crosses the barn in four strides, all that coiled intensity aimed at me now, only me, and my breath catches as he stops inches away. Close enough that I can see the flecks of gray in his pale blue eyes, the paint smear on his jaw, the way his chest rises and falls too fast.
“You,” he says, “are a menace.”
“You married me.”
“I did.” He reaches out, and his fingers, those clever paint-stained fingers, trace the curve of my bare shoulder. Barely touching. “God help me, I did.”
Then he leans down and presses his mouth to the spot his fingers just mapped.
The kiss is soft. Reverent. He moves an inch lower, to the hollow above my collarbone, and kisses that too. Then lower, to the swell of my breast, his lips warm against my skin.
“You’re supposed to be painting,” I whisper.
“I am.” Another kiss, this one to my sternum. “I’m memorizing.” Another, to the curve beneath my breast. “I’ll paint it from memory.”
“That sounds inefficient.”
“Shut up, Gracie.”
He lifts me off the stool like I weigh nothing, and the drop cloth falls away entirely as he lays me down on the old wool blanket we keep here for picnics, for afternoons exactly like this one.
Straw dust catches the light. The blanket scratches against my back.
Above me, Mal looks wrecked, flushed and hungry and utterly focused.
“I think in color,” he says, almost to himself. He traces a line from my throat to my navel, watching his own hand like it’s a miracle. “And you’re every single one of them.”
“That’s-” My voice hitches as his fingers reach the waistband of my jeans. “That’s a line.”
“It’s not a line. It’s true.” He undoes the button slowly, drags the zipper down.
“You’re cadmium yellow here-” His mouth finds my throat.
“And alizarin crimson here-” Lower, to the peak of my breast, and I arch into the heat of it.
“And this-” His hand slides into my jeans, fingers finding me through cotton, and I gasp.
“This is burnt sienna. Warm. God, you’re so warm. ”
“Mal-”
“I know.” He strips off my jeans, my underwear, with the same efficient intensity he brings to everything. Then he sits back on his heels and just looks at me, spread out in the golden light, and the hunger in his eyes makes my stomach clench. “I know. I’ve got you.”
He bends down and puts his mouth on me.
I stop thinking.
His tongue is clever and patient, mapping me the same way he mapped the shoulder, finding every spot that makes me gasp.
My hands fist in his hair. He groans against me, the vibration spreading through my whole body, and he’s still fully clothed while I’m naked and desperate on the barn floor, and somehow that makes it hotter.
“Please,” I manage. “Mal, please-”
He pulls back just enough to look at me, lips wet, eyes dark. “Tell me what you need.”
“I need-”
“Tell me.” His thumb traces a lazy circle, keeping me on the edge. “I want to hear you say it.”
“I need you inside me.” The words come out ragged, shameless. “Now. Please.”
He’s out of his clothes in seconds, paint-spattered shirt, worn jeans, everything, and then he’s braced above me, the blunt press of him right there, and I wrap my legs around his waist and pull.
He sinks into me in one long stroke.
We both stop breathing.
“Fuck,” he whispers against my hair. “Gracie. Fuck.”
“Move,” I tell him. “Please move.”
He does. Slow at first, deep rolling thrusts that make me feel every inch, his weight braced on his forearms so he can watch my face. The afternoon light catches the sweat on his shoulders. His eyes don’t leave mine.
“You feel-” He breaks off, jaw tight, fighting for control. “I can’t - you’re-”
“I know.” I pull his mouth down to mine. “I know.”
The rhythm builds. His hand slides between us, thumb finding that spot he knows so well, and I cry out against his shoulder. He’s murmuring things I can barely hear, beautiful, perfect, mine, please, and I’m saying things back that don’t make sense, just sounds, just his name over and over.
“Come for me,” he breathes. “Let me feel it. Please, Gracie, I need-”
Everything crests and breaks. I come apart around him, shaking, gasping his name into the straw, and he follows a heartbeat later with a broken groan against my throat.
After, we lie tangled in the ruined drop cloth, his heartbeat slowing under my ear. The golden light has softened to amber. Dust drifts through the shafts of it.
“You completely derailed my painting,” he says eventually. His voice is hoarse and satisfied.
“You’ll survive.”
“I had the shoulder perfect.”
“Start over.” I trace patterns on his chest, through the sparse dark hair. “I’ll model again.”
“Absolutely not. You’re banned from modeling, you menace.”
“That’s fair.”
He laughs, soft and warm, and presses a kiss to the top of my head. Beyond him, I can see the abandoned easel, the canvas facing away from us. Whatever he’d started, whatever golden-light portrait of me in a paint cloth, it sits unfinished, waiting.
“What are you going to call it?” I ask.
“Hmm?”
“The painting. It needs a name.”
He’s quiet for a moment. His fingers card through my hair, gentle, absent. “You tell me,” he murmurs. “You always name them.”
“The Warm Season,” I say, and I feel him go still, then press a kiss to my hair.
I smile against his skin. The barn smells like us now, like sweat and turpentine and hay, and outside the orchard rustles in the October wind, and I think: remember this. Remember exactly this. The weight of him, the warmth, the way he looked at you like you were every color. Remember it forever.
He sold that one too.