I dug my toes in the wet sand, feeling it squish into the cracks in my feet. The soft light of sunset made you look like some god of art, with that pencil dangling out of your mouth and that sketchpad so delicately balanced on your knee. Like a pro. Like I should be drawing you.
“Hold still,” you said around bits of graphite and wood, scribbling madly with the five other pencils that were in your hand. Of course, this was when I had to wriggle and squirm and make all sorts of unattractive faces.
You huffed, threw your equipment down, and marched up to me. You got all in my face, so I could see the permanent crinkles around your ocean-green eyes that made it look like you were always smiling because, let’s face it, you pretty much always were.
“I said hold still,” you said, and proceeded to tickle me until I made sounds that resembled a dying fish. I was pretty sure that I looked like a dying fish too, what with my sunburn and salty-ness.
You went back to your pencils and your sketchpad, and I held still to prevent another attack, which secretly I kind of wanted, but of course I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction. You finished and showed me, and I said, naturally, “That really doesn’t look anything like me.”
“Are you kidding me? Of course it does. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“No, really, come on. She’s beautiful.” The girl you drew was all soft curves and smooth hair and big sparkly eyes. I was a creature of sharp angles, frizz, and squinting.
You grabbed my face in your painter hands and pressed your lips against mine, hard and soft and wet and dry and wonderful and infuriating all at the same time, and I hated you for being able to reduce me to a pile of quivering gelatin.
“You are beautiful,” you said, once you were done assaulting me with kissing skills that no human being should have the right to possess.
“Nuh-uh!” I pouted and crossed my arms and huffed and puffed, and if there was a house, I would have blown it down.
“Yuh-huh!” And you huffed and puffed right back, and I’d be damned if you didn’t blow me away every second from the first moment you popped into my mediocre little life.
Once you were done huffing and puffing and trying to somehow ingest my face, which by the way felt wonderful, you must tell me your secret, you receded right back to your painterly pose, pad on knee, pencils arranged haphazardly in your hair, your mouth (oh, you lucky pencil, you), and your hands. You were like the tide behind you: I could be drowning in you one second, and the next you’d be miles away.
I stood up and grabbed your sketchpad, flipping through the pages of the hers that were stupid enough to let you go. But more surprising than that were the pages labeled “Bethany’s Hands” or “Bethany’s Eyes”, “Bethany’s This and That and the Kitchen Sink, Too.”
I looked up at you. “When did you draw these?” I’d only ever posed for you this once.
“Oh, here and there. Mostly from before we were together.”
“You creep. What, did you like show up at my house while I was sleeping and draw me?”
You smiled that smile that made me want to peel it right off your face and frame it. “No. Most of those are from memory. Some are from pictures.”
I flipped through the pages, watched myself become a jigsaw puzzle of body parts (I was very pleased to discover that there was no such page labeled “Bethany’s Rather Unimpressive Assets”).
Finally I gave you the pad back and sat down all close and snuggly with you. I took your hand, traced the lines in it, a painting in itself. If I were an artist, I would want to dissect you into little bits and draw you too, so maybe “Bethany’s Left Ear” wasn’t so creepy after all.
“What are you thinking?” you asked, leaning in so our noses touched and your breath that smelled like cake climbed into my nostrils and did wickedly lovely things up there.
“You’re my beautiful, beautiful Renaissance man,” I said and pressed my lips against yours.
