There’s a notepad next to her phone charger. One of those yellow legal pads with the spiral binding, a pen clipped to the top. Myfingers find it without permission, and I’m turning to a blank page before I’ve decided to do anything.
Lines first. Just the scratch of ballpoint on the page. My hand moves like it knows something I don’t, the pen tracing shapes that aren’t random. A curve. An angle. The suggestion of something taking form.
I glance up. Natalia is stirring the eggs now, head tilted slightly, a crease between her eyebrows that makes her look lost in thought. Another piece of hair slips free from her knot and falls along the side of her neck, and my hand moves faster.
The slope of her nose comes first. Then the line of her jaw. Her lips, slightly parted, the top one just as full as the bottom in a way I keep staring at.
I’m not thinking about it. That’s what makes it strange. My fingers know the weight of a pen, know how to layer shadow and shape, how to suggest depth with crosshatching.
Muscle memory. Same as on the beach this morning, my body moving before my brain gets a vote. Whatever I was before all this, I spent serious time with a pencil in my hand.
Her eyes are the hardest part. She has these wide, expressive eyes that hold about fifteen things at once, and I keep looking up to get the proportions right, the way they tilt slightly at the outer corners, the kind of blue that shifts depending on the light.
She doesn’t notice. Too busy plating the food, sliding bacon onto paper towels, moving through the kitchen with that quiet efficiency she has.
A little more shading under the cheekbone, a suggestion of the light source, and...
“Oh my god. Did you just draw that?”
Her voice pulls me out of it. I blink, look down at the notepad.
Shit. That’s actually good. I can say that with the weird objectivity of a man who has no ego about his past to protect.
“Yeah.” I turn the notepad so she can see it better. “I guess I draw.”
She sets the plates down. Comes around the island, slow, like she’s not sure she wants to see it up close. But she does. She stops next to my stool and looks down at the page and doesn’t say anything for long enough that I start to wonder if I’ve crossed a line.
Her lips part. She picks it up, carefully, fingertips at the edges like it’s something fragile, and I watch her eyes move across the lines.
“It’s me.” Barely above a whisper. “Is that... is that really how you see me?”
The kitchen goes quiet. Just the tick of the cooling burner, the distant crash of surf through the window, the hum of the ancient refrigerator that runs too loud.
I don’t have a good answer for that. Or I have too good an answer and no safe way to deliver it.
“I barely know what I look like.” I turn the pen over in my fingers, not looking at her. “Half the time I can’t hold a thought for more than ten seconds. But when I look at you...” I glance up. She’s gone completely still. “Everything sharpens. I don’t know why. But I think I could draw your face in the dark.”
She’s near enough that I can smell the coconut of her shampoo. Near enough that the warmth of her body reaches mine.
My fingers itch to touch her. I tuck a strand of hair behind her ear before I can talk myself out of it. She doesn’t pull away. Doesn’t lean in. Just goes very still, and her breath catches.
“I think you knocked your head pretty good.” She tries to smile, but it comes out wobbly. “There’s no way I actually look like that.”
She means it. Something behind my ribs folds in half.
I hook a finger under her chin, tipping her face back up. “Of course you do.”
Color floods her cheeks. A deep, fierce red that spreads from her neck to her ears, and it’s so real, so beautiful, that I want to make her do that again every day for the rest of my life, which is a crazy thought to have about a woman whose last name I don’t know.
“You can’t just say stuff like that.” But she sways toward me as she says it. Catches herself. Sways again, like her body keeps vetoing her mouth.
I might have someone waiting for me somewhere. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what these hands did before they picked up a pen and drew her face. Every good reason in the world to stop, and I don’t give a damn about a single one of them right now.
My other hand comes up. I’m cupping her face, both palms against her cheeks. She’s looking up at me with those eyes, and from this close I can see the grey flecks in all that blue and the way her lashes are darker at the roots and the tiny scar on her eyebrow I haven’t asked about yet.
“Tell me to stop.” I bring her closer. My mouth is an inch from hers. “And I will.”
“I... I...”
