"Cora." He called, eyes caressing my face in a way that I so badly wanted for his fingers to instead. "Tell me to stop."
I gulped, the words frozen on the tip of my tongue.
"Cora, tell me now." He repeated, growing more agitated as his gaze moved do...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Lucy squealed from where she was standing. "Cora, this is perfect! We can do coupley things together now."
I nodded, but continued to watch her closely. I had a feeling that she was already planning something.
I was proven right when she turned to me a second later, eyes glittering. "We're going to have a double date. Tonight."
"Luce—" I began to protest.
"It'll be fun, I promise. We'll do it right here, so we don't have to go to a restaurant." She gestured around my living room.
"We'll just play drunk games." She winked. "They're always more fun when you can't remember what you said the next day. It'll help us get to know each other more."
It was impossible to say no to her when she threw me the look that she did, eyes wide and lips pouting.
I gave in with a deep breath. "Let's do it."
In the instant that the words left my mouth, my phone vibrated from my back pocket with a notification.
I took it out and glanced down at it to see that I had two unread messages, both from the same group chat.
Gabe's name was written next to a text which read "Sounds good," and Danny's name was featured alongside the words "On it already."
There was a small smile pulling at my lips when I looked back up at Lucy. "You messaged them before I even said yes, didn't you?"
She threw me a guilty smile. "Whoops?"
I shook my head fondly as I made my way out of the living room, walking the short journey to the art studio a few rooms away and shutting the door behind me.
Once I had prepped a canvas and gathered some brushes, I did nothing but stare for a while.
The white fabric swam in my vision as I thought things over.
I had already created two of the pieces that I needed for the gallery, but I was completely stumped for the third and last one.
Everytime an idea sprang to mind, I would get bogged down in the execution and end up scrapping it altogether.
It was five minutes later that I had an epiphany.
My brush travelled across the canvas in strokes, perhaps with slightly more caution than I was used to. After all, it had been a while since I'd painted anything.
I began to nimbly switch between dabbing the brush onto the sheet and dabbing the brush onto the palette next to me, mixing colours together until they matched the vision that I had in my head.
