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The best thing about not having a job but having a boyfriend is afternoon naps at around four that last hours, which will ultimately cause me to stay up later at night, but it's okay because it just means that my nightmares will be delayed, or completely passed tonight.
I sit up next to Joe, who rolled away from me sometime in the past two hours. The sheet rests right at his hips, showing his bare back as it moves with every breath he takes.
Stretching out my limbs, I kick my phone somewhere at the bottom of the bed. I find it about to fall and kick it upward. I have texts from Regina and Caspar, but I just poke my phone under the pillow and sink down in bed, hoping to fall back asleep.
I lay there for what feels like hours, but it's actually only five minutes. Realizing that I'm never going to be able to go back to sleep, I reach over and grab my sketchbook from the beside table.
The sketchbook is filling up quickly. I have pages and pages of doodles of Joe. I still haven't told him about it, and as far as I know, he hasn't found it. I try not to leave it open, hoping that he won't see them. It's completely different to draw Alfie or Conor from a picture on the internet than drawing Joe in reality. It's so strange. I don't know how I feel about it. It is a whole lot easier to draw from a picture than a moving person because he definitely moves a lot.
I pass the pastel of Zoe, stopping for a short moment to critique myself on it. I tried to make it too realistic, and I almost hate it. Her eyes don't look right, and neither does her hair color. I turn the page over, being careful to not smudge it until I can get an overcoat on it.
As I turn to the next page, I grab the small case of pencils off the table. For my birthday, Zoe had bought me just hard and soft pastels, but after telling her how much I loved them, she bought me a set of pastel pencils. Everyone needs a Zoe in their life. She's the sweetest person I've met over here, and even though our relationship was kind of iffy for awhile, it evened out. We're not nearly as close as Regina and I, but I would definitely be up to spending the day with her now.
I started my current work about two days ago. It's been a very slow process, but I try to get as much as I can done whenever. Most of it has been drawn from memory because I spend a lot of my time - probably more than I should - studying every inch of my boyfriend. The drawing in the book is a pastel of Joe how I see him the only time I can actually draw him; right now. So far I've got the back of his head and the top of his back, like where his shoulder blades are.
Almost twenty minutes into it, Joe begins moving around. When he turns over on to his back, I sigh, trying to find the tissue paper that I keep between my pastels and the page before them, to reduce smudging. Unable to find it, I lay the sketchbook down on the bed and put my pastels away. I make my way out of the his - our - room.
Once I'm upstairs, I pull aside all the jackets on the dining table, trying to find the bag of tissue paper I got just for this purpose. I finally find it buried under Joe's Sugg Life hoodie. Making the quick decision that it's cold enough in the apartment to wear a hoodie, I slip it over my head. I look down and see that it just barely leaves Joe's boxer shorts visible. It's an unbreakable habit for me to steal his clothes. I only steal his boxers because he leaves them in the most unconventional places. I found the ones I'm wearing now at the bottom of the stairs. If I find them, I keep them. Pretty soon, he's going to run out of boxers.
When I reach the base of his stairs, I catch my mistake of thinking that Joe was not going to wake up in the two minutes I was upstairs. What were the actual odds of that happening? Obviously, they were very high because as I reenter the room, I see him sitting up on the bed, looking over the sketchbook. He hears my bare feet on the floor and looks up at me.
"Babe, I'm sorry for snooping, but damn. That's amazing." He says, smiling up at me. I can't stop myself from grinning at his compliment. I sit on the bed as he stands up. I place the tissue paper where it needs to be before laying the book on my table. When I turn back to Joe, he has slipped on a pair of sweats. He reaches toward the laundry pile in our room, and I think he is grabbing a shirt, but instead, he picks up the acoustic guitar leaning up beside the pile.
"What are you doing, hun?" I ask him, crossing my legs under me as he joins me back on the bed, sitting at the top next to me, leaning his back against the headboard. His legs lay outstretched beneath the guitar, and even though he doesn't look particularly comfortable, he makes no effort to move.
"I made a deal with you, didn't I? You draw me, I sing for you." He answers, leaning over his guitar to kiss me quickly. He clears his throat for a small second before beginning to strum on the guitar.
"One look at you, my whole life falls in line. I prayed for you before I called you mine. Oh, I can't believe it's true sometimes. Oh, I can't believe it's true. I get to love you. It's the best thing that I'll ever do." His voice is just full of the lightest sounds that make all my insides mushy. I can't decide where to look as he sings. There's his baby blue eyes that gaze lovingly at me. His mouth trying not to smile as he sings. Then his hands that pluck the strings gently.
I've never heard the song, but it makes me so happy to know that the first time I hear it, it's in Joe's voice. I have to cover my mouth, scared that if I don't, I'll laugh causing him to. I'm also blushing furiously, which is not the worst thing, but I hate how easily he can make me flustered.
After singing the very end of the song, he lays his head on the guitar in his lap. "You also look pretty fucking hot in my clothes." He says, smirking slightly.
"I must look hot all the time because I never take them off." I say, sarcastically arrogant.
"No joke." Joe laughs. He sets the guitar off the bed before grabbing me and pulling me on top of him. He holds me with a hand on each hip as I caress his cheek for a small second.
I lean over and grab the sketchbook off my table to show to Joe. I show him all the pages I filled up with the rough sketches. "You must be hot yourself if I've drawn you this many times." I say, sitting back right below his knees for the sketchbook to rest on his lap.
I watch the way his fingers carefully graze the page as if he is expecting to feel his own skin across the drawings. His eyes look over the pages with so much wonder and amazement. It's so weird to have someone react this way. Regina did the first few times I drew her, but she hasn't done in at least two years. By now, I just get the really appreciated 'thank you's as she posts the next one up on her wall. Now, that I do more digital work, she keeps them saved on her computer, and if Caspar told me right, she looks at them when she misses me.
"How long have you been doing this?" The brunette asks, breaking the silence.
I watch him turn the page before I answer. "I don't know. Zoe saw the first one when I stayed there for a little while. I draw you at least once a day." I say, shrugging as if it's nothing new, which to me, it really isn't. The first time I talked to Aaron was because he saw me drawing him from across the therapist's waiting room. There's only one drawing of Aaron that remains in my possession.
Joe flips back through the book, looking for something, but I don't ask what. He stops on the page with Aaron. "What are we to do about him?" He asks, holding the sketchbook out to me.
I've wanted to get rid of that drawing for so long, but something would always keep me from doing it. Now that Joe is holding out my sketchbook to me, I know that there is nothing that's going to stop me. I rip the page cleanly from the book and hold it for a small second. "Can you get the lighter from upstairs?" I ask, not looking up from the drawing. Without an answer, I hear Joe's feet on the stairs.
When I hear him come back, I pull Joe into the bathroom with me. Standing right outside the shower, I reach both my arms inside. I hold a corner of the drawing in one hand and spark the lighter with the other. I set the bottom corner on fire and watch the page go up in flames. I hold on to it until the very last seconds before letting go.
Joe grabs me from around the waist, poking his hands into his hoodie pocket. He holds me as close as he can. He places his head on my shoulder, and I nudge it gently with my own. "Thank you." I breathe, staring down at the burnt remains of the drawing on the shower floor.
"I didn't do it. You did." He murmurs back as I place my hands inside the pocket to hold his. "I just told you that you could."
"Look, I know that you don't -" I'm cut off by my name being screamed upstairs by Caspar. I groan with exaggeration before pulling away from Joe. I jog up stairs to where Caspar is standing by the door, gesturing to huge brown box sitting in the middle of the room.
"Bloody hell. What's that?" Joe says, stepping up behind. I shrug walking over to the giant box.
"Is it heavy?" I ask Caspar, kicking it gently with my foot.
"Not really. It says it's from Regina, though." The blonde answers, only confusing me further. I rip open the top of the box and immediately recognize what it is. There's a note stuck on to the inside of the bottom flap of the box. I pluck it off and read Regina's scribbled cursive.
Hey, babe. I found these out in our storage unit when I went to get the car out because I actually have a reason to drive it. I thought you might want them for the flat or something. I hope to see you soon, love. Miss and love you lots. Regina.xx
P.S. I kept the one of me, hope you didn't want it.
I pull out the tallest canvas and admire the fading paint for a short second. The painting is of a vase of sunflowers that I did when I was about seventeen years old. It was first hung up in Aaron and I's place, until Regina stole me and everything away. It then went up in Regina and I's house but the more I painted, the more we had to cycle out paintings. Some got sold to the small shop down by the beach. Most just went down to the storage unit just a bit away from the house. Before I moved, I pulled my car inside because I didn't think that Regina would be getting her license anytime soon.
"Do you want to put them up?" Caspar offers, reaching in and pulling out another one.
"I don't know. I mean, they're all pretty old." I respond, leaning over to look at the painting in his large hands. "Shit. That one is like, ancient." I laugh.
"I remember this." Caspar says, pointing to the younger version of himself next to a younger Regina. You wouldn't be able to tell who it was if you didn't know Caspar and Regina. I had painted it behind them when they were sitting on the edge of a cliff. Well, it was the back of Caspar's head and Regina's profile because she was turned, sticking her tongue out at her cousin.
When Caspar would come to America for whatever reason, the three of us would always steal away to the beach or woods somewhere. It was always some little adventures that we would have to remember until the next summer when we would go somewhere else.
"You didn't always do people?" Joe questions, pulling a canvas out to hold himself. This painting is the first canvas that Regina put up in her room. It's a pink balloon with a dead smiley face on it; eyes x'ed out but still grinning. The background is white with swear words crowding around it.
"Nope. The one Caspar is holding was the first painting I did of a person. I've been drawing them for a bit longer. I went through a huge flower phase, though, which is probably what the majority of the rest in the box and storage are." I answer, sitting down the sunflower painting to gaze back into the box.
"We're hanging them up." Caspar says suddenly, still staring at the painting of him and Regina. I can see something in his eyes that I recognize from my own. He misses his cousin so much; just like I do.
"No, it's okay. I can find some place to shove them." I respond.
"Nope. They're going up on the wall." Joe says. I give him a small glare out of the corner of my eye. "Two out-rules one, love." He says, before kissing my forehead.
Honestly, I couldn't even get mad at them for not listening to me. Having Joe and Caspar support me and my art just makes me feel a hundred times better about my art. My mom used to call it too contemporary, something that would "never sell". Well, it might not sell, but it's now hanging up in two different countries, and I'll take that as an achievement.