Except she keeps looking at me.
I notice it the same way I noticed the rhythm changing earlier. Short glances, then back to the page. Then another. Each one holds a beat longer than the last. I can feel them landing on me, brief and focused, and each time one arrives my awareness of my own hands on the keyboard sharpens until I am conscious of every tendon, every point where skin meets plastic.
I keep my eyes on my screen and redo another calculation I've already done.
The pauses get longer. The pencil goes quiet and stays quiet and I know she is looking at me.
I take my glasses off again.
"What are you drawing?"
She looks up. "A surprise."
"I hope I'm not the reference model for one of the animals in your book." I set my glasses down. "Specifically, if it's the frog, don't tell me."
She smiles.
Not the careful version. This one gets away from her completely. It opens her face, and for a half-second I see the person underneath, the one she's been holding back since she walked into this house.
"It's not the frog," she says.
I stand up. "Show me."
She watches me come. Her body stays where it is, shoulders loose, hands relaxed on the edges of the sketchbook. I stop at the corner of the desk. She turns the sketchbook and pushes it toward me, and I lean over, and the space between us zaps.
I go still.
It's my face.
A full portrait, done in pencil with the kind of patience that requires sitting with a subject until you understand what you're looking at. The line of my jaw, the way it sets when I'm concentrating. The particular way I hold my shoulders, slightly forward, the posture of someone who learned young to take up less space..
She has been watching me. The way I watch things when I'm trying to understand them, fully and without announcement. She's been doing that to me. And I didn't see it, which means either she is better at concealment than I am at observation or I was so busy watching her that I missed her watching me back.
"Not a frog," she says.
I look at the drawing. Then at her.
"The artist was generous." My voice is level. "A frog is probably closer."
"I draw what I see."
I'm still at the corner of her desk. There's a pencil mark on her right hand near the base of her thumb, a smudge of graphite across the knuckle. Her eyes come up to mine and stay there, and I become aware of the distance between us as a physical quantity. Small. Measurable. The kind of distance that only holds if both people agree to maintain it.
"I think you're closer to a prince." She says it quietly.
I look at her mouth.
She looks at mine.
The sketchbook is open between us. The lamp on my desk puts warm light across the left side of her face, and her eyes are grey-green with flecks of gold near the center that catch the light like sediment at the bottom of a clear stream.
My hand is already aching for the smooth skin of her cheeks, and I think about the way my fingers would fit against the soft skin below her ear, the way her chin would tilt. My mouth would find hers and it would take a breath, the smallest possible collapse of the agreement we have both been silently maintaining.
I straighten, and the distance returns to what it was. I pick up the sketchbook and look at the portrait for a moment longer, giving myself somewhere to land that is not her face, not her mouth.
She has given me kinder eyes than I think I have.
"It's good work," I say. My voice is level. "It's very good."
