Painting Sky (36 page)

Strangely, even with my brain shouting at me to refuse and be outraged, some deep part of me wanted to do it. The sane part resurfaced, then. I had nothing special for him to draw. There were models in our class who were much more beautiful than me. He wouldn’t have any special connection like I did with him, and that would crush me.

“I see the wheels turning in your brain. Stop thinking,” he said, placing the bowl on the table and grabbing my hand in his. I tried to pull back, but, like last night, I was weak against him in every sense. “If you want my help with your work, you need to trust me. You need to have confidence in yourself, even with your body.”

“I—I don’t know.” He smiled, knowing full well that I was done for. He just needed to push a little more and I would agree. “My brother, he’ll…” Keith shook his head.

“He texted me, saying he wouldn’t be home until late tonight. They have some kind of dinner to attend.”

Keith stood up and pulled me with him. “It won’t be that painful, I promise.”

He sounded like he was promising something entirely different, and the butterflies in my stomach didn’t calm down. “Let me take a shower,” I said, thinking that, if I was going to do this, I was, at least, going to shave and wash every part like crazy, even if he wasn’t going to touch. Oh my God, what was I getting myself into? There would be no going back—ever. Keith would always be the first guy to see me naked.

I was scared and thrilled at the same time. It wasn’t like when I’d thought I was going to sleep with Cody. It felt so different. Even if there would be nothing sexual about this, it felt so intimate at the same time—more intimate than sex, even. Painting was looking at the model and really seeing them. He would be trying to piece me together and see past my body, like I did with him.

The shower was warm while I shaved and washed, but, at the end, I turned it to cold. I needed some clarity as to what I was about to do.

“Don’t dry your hair.” I almost knocked my head on the counter at Keith’s voice and instinctively tightened the towel around me—as if he wasn’t going to see everything in a few minutes. I didn’t know what I was supposed to wear, but leaving the bathroom with just a towel was ridiculous. I fished an old shirt that reached my thighs out of the laundry basket. It was baggy enough to conceal my body and was still clean.

I had no idea why Keith didn’t want me to blow dry my hair, but I supposed he didn’t want me wearing any make-up, either, so I went in search of him, feeling ridiculous in just a shirt. I found him in his room, looking around for something. I stayed at the door as an idea formed in my head.

I coughed to get his attention and paused, waiting for him to turn to me. His eyes darted from my face to my legs and back up. A deep frown formed on his face and, before I could make my demands, he blurted out, “Is that shirt Cody’s?”

I mimicked his frown and shook my head. His face softened and I gathered up my courage.

“If you want me to do this,” I paused for emphasis and rubbed one foot against the other. Keith’s eyes shot down to the shirt’s hem and I saw my opportunity. “We’ll do it in the attic.” His eyes met mine and his face scrunched up again. “What’s the problem? I’ve been there. Nothing weird shot out of the shadows to bite me.” Keith opened and closed his mouth twice. His hands shot to his hair and he looked around, searching for something. I tried to explain further. “I don’t feel comfortable here in your room, or in mine, so… please.”

He finally turned to me, still angry. “Rule number one: you do what I ask. Rule number two: no snooping around.”

It felt like such a victory to be going upstairs, and in the middle of the day, nonetheless. It was a place so sacred that not even Ryan had been there. I nodded enthusiastically and turned to go upstairs.

“Not so fast.” Keith grabbed me by the back of the shirt and pulled me behind him. “Give me five minutes, and then you can come upstairs, okay? It’ll be a test. If you obey the five minutes, we’ll do the drawing upstairs. If not…” He left the sentence hanging.

I sat at the last step and watched the minutes on my watch go by. After five and a half minutes, for good measure, I went upstairs and knocked softy on the door, wanting to start this whole thing on his good side.

I opened the door and the room was much more different than what I’d seen at night. There were windows all around, casting sunlight into the room. The mattress was in the same place, with crumpled sheets on it. On the other side of the room, dozens, if not hundreds, of canvases lined the wall. Most were covered with white cloth, while others were turned around.

As the bed was still messed up and the work table was filled with dirty brushes and rags, I guessed he’d spent the five minutes covering the paintings. I had no idea what kind of work he did that he couldn’t show me. It would be good for my own drawings.

“You can sit on the mattress, if you want. The sheets are clean—I just slept there last night.” I stopped with my examination before he categorized it as snooping around and crawled to the middle of the bed. I was about to pat the sheets into place when he asked me to sit on them as they were. I slumped and waited for further explanation. I had sat on the messy bed with my leg bent under me and hadn’t taken the shirt off, because I wanted to do it at the last minute.

Keith started to close the curtains on the windows, confusing me. Someone who had this kind of light shouldn’t be covering it up, after all. When almost the entire room was dark, he turned a lamp on. The light was strong enough to light up half of the room, but it had a yellowish color that created a more romantic environment than the sunlight. The butterflies were back in my stomach. I was nervous, already, and I hadn’t even taken off the only piece of clothing covering me.

Keith turned some music on: rock, not too hard, and not too soft. It kind of suited the mood. “Are you ready?” Keith asked, sitting on the floor with a sketch pad on his lap. I guessed he wouldn’t be painting on a canvas, but would create a detailed drawing on paper. This was much more intimate.

“You need to promise me you won’t show this to anyone,” I pleaded, with my hands at the edge of the shirt.

Keith gave me a lopsided smile. He could lie, but I knew him too well by now to know he would never do that to me. “Only if you’re the one who gives me permission.”

I nodded and slowly took the shirt off. I heard Keith’s inhale, as if he hadn’t seen dozens of girls naked before—as if I was something special. I wanted to believe it, but I wasn’t that stupid. I wouldn’t make the same mistakes the girls at my high school had. I couldn’t feel special around him: that was his way of luring us in. I didn’t think he could control himself.

Without lifting my head, I threw the shirt away from the bed and turned to Keith, not meeting his eyes. “Now what?” My voice was weak, but, at the same time, I sounded mad. It wasn’t my intention.

Keith coughed and scratched his head before answering. Maybe he was nervous, too. I was, after all, his friend’s sister and his brother’s ex. “Relax. Turn just slightly to the light and rest your arms in your lap.”

The light was placed so expertly that I envied his imagination. My right side was almost completely dark, while the left was lit by the warm light. It would be a difficult, but entertaining piece of work for him. Maybe I would be able to draw him like this. He would owe me big time.

Time was going by slowly and it seemed like an eternity before I heard the pencil hit the paper. He was studying me, which was normal for a drawing. This didn’t suppress my anxiety, though. Keith was seeing all of me, inside and out. I lifted my eyes to him. The light had been placed close to him, so it hurt my eyes and prevented me from see him very well. His hands were moving, though, and the sound of pencil skirting across paper told me he was immersed in his work, so I relaxed. I knew he wasn’t really seeing me, now—he was in his own head.

Every time his head snapped up, I turned my face to the side. “You need to stop moving. You can keep looking at me.” He smirked and continued working. I shifted and then settled on a position. Every now and then, he messed his hair with his free hand. The strands were pointing everywhere. It was so sexy watching Keith draw that the first feeling that crept up on me was jealousy for the models he surely hired.

“Do you do this often?” I asked, my voice rough from being quiet and nervous.

He kept working and I almost believed he hadn’t heard me. Then he asked, “Do what? Paint?” He looked up, confused, and met my eyes, focusing on me and not on the drawing. I didn’t want that: I wanted Keith focused on his work. I just couldn’t back off, now, though.

“Hire people to pose for you?” He kept his confused expression, until he shook his head.

“No, I draw from memory, mostly. I haven’t drawn anyone live since my drawing classes.”

It wasn’t the answer I was expecting, but it calmed my jealousy. I needed to keep it bottled up—for both my sake and for that of our kind-of-friendship.

My back was starting to hurt, even though I was finally relaxed and less self-conscious, when Keith muttered that he was finished.

My first instinct was jump up to get the shirt, but it would look ridiculous. He had spent an hour looking at my body, so I took my time reaching for it, only to have Keith snatch it from under my hand.

“I’ve seen everything there is to see, Sky. Relax.” He was looking into my eyes, not my body, but I covered my breasts, anyway.

“I mentioned that yesterday, and you covered yourself, anyway.” He surprised the hell out of me when he took his own shirt off and extended it to me. He threw mine to a pile of laundry in the corner.

I sat straighter, gaping, until he placed the shirt over my head, himself. It smelled so good that I had to fight the impulse to sniff it. It felt so intimate to wear his clothes while I had nothing else on underneath. I guessed that was exactly his intention.

Keith was about to close the sketching pad when I jumped from the bed. “What? No, no. You’re going to show it to me.” I placed my hands on my hips, telling him that I was going nowhere, until he showed me the drawing.

Keith looked embarrassed, and I was sure his work would be perfect, so I couldn’t understand why. He placed the sketch pad in my hands. I sat down to look at it better in the light.

It was perfect. It was like looking in the mirror, but there was something else to it. It was my eyes—the way they were looking at him. I was so surprised that I looked up to Keith, but he had turned around and was messing with his art supplies. I wasn’t sure I’d been covering my feelings very well, by what my eyes were showing. I took my time appreciating his work and tried to calm myself. His smell around me, on his shirt, and on his sheets wasn’t helping.

“It’s… perfect. I just don’t know if it’s really me. She looks much prettier.” It wasn’t a complete lie. She looked like someone else—someone sexier and more confident. Keith sat on the bed and placed the pad on the mattress, behind us. He took my hand. It was his turn to have part of his face shadowed, which made him look more mysterious and more dangerous, which I knew he was—at least, for my heart.

He turned my hand palm up and traced the line that went up to my wrist. “You don’t see yourself,” he whispered, turning my skin into goose bumps. His dark gray eyes met mine and I finally understood the gut-wrenching knowledge that was a goner. I had fallen in love with him, against all of my protests—against everything everyone kept warning me about.

I was in love with Keith Hale.

I
ended up rushing downstairs and shutting myself in my room. I slid down to the floor with my back against the door, trying to keep my heart from leaping from my chest.

I needed to backpedal and return to when I wasn’t stupid enough to fall for a guy like Keith. I had to think about Cody and Ryan. I wasn’t very good at keeping my feelings hidden—blame it on my freakish eyes, or the blush that appeared on my face, but I was as clear as water.

When my legs and butt were as cold as I felt, I got up from the floor and threw some clothes on. I had to start dinner and form a plan to distract my heart. I needed a rebound, like my sister said, and it couldn’t be Keith, period. Even if he was up for it, I would never recover from him—not with any rebound in the world.

Keith was already in the kitchen, with wet hair and fresh clothes, as if he had taken a second shower. He was chopping garlic and I leaned against the door, silent, and watched him cook, while he hummed a rock song.

He turned to pick up a frying pan from the island counter and met my eyes. “You could’ve said something.”

I pushed forward, met him at the other side of the counter, and sat. “What can I do to help?”

Keith looked around, chose an onion, and placed it in front of me. “Here: chop this.”

We ended up sitting on the couch, watching documentaries on TV, as we waited for dinner to be ready. We didn’t talk and never bothered to get up to turn the lights on, so the night fell and enveloped us. The house was warm, but it still gave me chills after the sun set and no longer warmed the house.

The timer buzzed, announcing that our dinner was ready. Keith picked up two plates, but I took them from him. “No—your dish deserves the dining room. Take the table cloth from the top drawer.”