It always has been, but I feel it now more than before when it had a purpose. To win her attention. Now she’s giving me another chance, it’s just voyeurism.
I delete the app, clearing out the memory where I stored the transcripts from her counselling session.
There’s still the emergency alert on her phone but fixing that would require accessing her phone again and I can’t imagine explaining why if she caught me.
With the access gone, my spirit feels lighter. Instead of spying on her like a creep, I close my eyes and relive every memorised image from earlier today, planning what I’d like to do next, what I think she’d like, how far I could take her.
And for the first time since the party, there’s no residual horror tainting my thoughts as I fall asleep. Just the low buzz of anticipation.
On Saturday,Avon comes to the studio again. Her in-progress works are at school, but she seems happy to start a new painting, getting acclimated to the space, learning where everything is kept.
Right now, she is so cute, leaning forward, tongue caught between her front teeth. Her face scrunches as she tracks the curve of her brush, dotting along the leading edge to intensify the sweep of a line. She gets so close to the work, I wince, thinking she’s about to turn her bright pink hair into an accidental paintbrush, then she sits back, blinking rapidly like she’s trying to shake away the aftereffects.
Her intensity is adorable and envy-inducing. The quick sketch this week lit up a part of my brain that’s been in slumber for too long and now it’s awake, prowling the edges of its cave, stretching its jaws wide.
The itch gets under my skin, needling me until I set up a canvas next to hers… then I’m stuck. Not knowing what to capture, what to express.
I pick up a piece of charcoal, scanning the room for inspiration. But I’ve done the same a dozen times already and nothing catches my eye but the girl next to me.
Earlier, I loaded a palette with acrylic colours, thinking that might help kickstart me into an idea but I put it aside without a single stroke hitting the canvas. I stare at it, then glare at it, then jerk my eyes away when Avon laughs.
“Careful. If you keep looking at the paint like that, it’ll get a complex.”
She stands, lifting her arms above her head and stretching out her body from its hours of hunching over the easel.
“You want to see what I’m working on?” I ask her, my work tilted at an angle to hide the blankness.
“Sure.”
The moment she’s within touching distance, I pull her into an embrace, trapping her against the stool with one leg while my arms crisscross over her midriff, chin resting on her shoulder. Her body moves like liquid, flowing where I want to put her.
“That’s really something,” she teases, glancing at the blank white space. “You’ve totally captured the essence of empty space.”
I rest my forehead on the curve of her neck, my breath gently huffing across her back. The studio was freezing when we first entered this morning. The large ceiling hung radiators took an age to get going, groaning about their years of disuse.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come over again, today.”
“After you scared the shit out of me with your speech about testing limits? I can’t imagine why I wouldn’t.”
My laugh is muffled by her shoulder blades, and I kiss the angled line of one, pulling the fabric of her t-shirt taut against her skin.
“Do you have too many ideas or none at all?”
“I have so many ideas of what to do with you there isn’t enough room in my brain to think of them all.”
She laughs softly, wriggling her back muscles as my breath hits a ticklish spot. “Not for me. For your work.”
“There definitely isn’t enough room left to think about painting.”
I lift my head, watching her frown at the empty canvas, a thousand thoughts swirling behind her expressive eyes. Without knowing where it’s heading, I pick up the palette in my left hand, putting a brush in her right hand before enveloping it in my own, dabbing into the blue and making the first mark.
“This is not an efficient way for us to work.”
“Do you hate it?”
And I already know before she shakes her head that she doesn’t. The supple way her body curves against mine told me before I asked.
With her as my proxy, the idea comes easier. I have her complete the first lines of the image, sweeping strokes that capture the shape of the tree branch hanging over the water. As a small kid, in here reading or playing games while my mother worked, I used to stare at the bend in the tree. I watched it grow over the years, spreading wider, blossoming with early spring leaves, dropping red leaves in autumn.
