Beneath The Skin(30)

I can’t move. I can’t trust him. I can’t even appreciate his sweetness for what it is, because my brain knows that no matter how sweet the fruit, it’s in their nature to rot.

“So you wanna go out with me or not, Nell?” he asks gently, stirring me from my thoughts. “If you’re feelin’ nothing here and I’m just … barkin’ up some tree I got no business barkin’ up …”

“I have work to do,” I blurt.

His face freezes, startled by my blunt response. “Afterwards, then?”

“My work will take me all night,” I lie, running the back of a wrist over my forehead before making a move to reclaim my stool.

“Wait,” he says, stopping me.

I stare into his eyes.

To my surprise, he gently presses a thumb to my forehead, then wipes. He brings the now-darkened thumb to his lips. “Smudge,” he explains, the word barely a whisper.

I hold my breath, then let out a word: “Charcoal.”

He glances at my drawing, then lifts a questioning eyebrow. “Does it have a name yet?”

“No,” I lie.

He smirks at it. Then he asks, “You really don’t want to go out with me tonight?”

I press my lips together, refusing to answer him again. Or maybe I don’t trust the answer I’d give him.

“Alright,” he says softly, taking my silence for his answer, and then quietly leaves.

I stare at my cat for a long while. Then I clench my eyes and purge all thought of Brant and his messy hair and his perfect body and whatever tiny, nearly undetectable trace of humanity or sensitivity or soul that might—with some very, near-to-breaking-point stretch of the imagination—exist. I take a deep breath, face my work, and patiently decide where to place my next stroke.

“You know …”

I jump at the sound of his voice again, turning to find him still standing at the door.

“If I were to name it,” he muses, leaning against the doorframe, “I might call it something like … Dinner.” He smiles, his dimples showing. “Doesn’t tell the viewer what to think. Doesn’t explain anything. Just … sort of … unsettles you. Makes you think. Makes you … hungry. Which I’m hoping is the point, because I’m starving.”

“Brant …”

He screws up his forehead. “Yeah?”

“Nine o’clock,” I make myself say. “Tonight.”





NELL



There are two very passionate young women inside of me. One of them wears black and summons the rain with her dark, furious eyes. The other wears a bright green dress and dances in the puddles. I’m always at war with them.

Brant has the girl in the green dress to thank for my saying yes.

I don’t know what kind of woman he was expecting to pick up, but I don’t imagine it’s the one he gets. When he pulls up to the rear of the art school that grazes the main road by a line of carefully placed shrubs, there’s a look of awe in his eyes when I open his car door and slip inside. I had run home and changed into a pair of black jeans that don’t have paint stains on them, complemented by a red crop top. I even bothered to tease a few curls into my hair. Why? I don’t know. I never have a reason to do much of anything with it lately.

And Brant? He’s apparently gone home and traded his look from earlier with a totally new one. He wears a clean, seemingly starched blue-and-orange plaid shirt buttoned with the top one undone, tucked into a pair of rough, distressed jeans and a belt that thankfully doesn’t have a dinner plate for a buckle. His hair has been tamed, parted to the side with just a few rebel tufts here and there going in their own stubborn directions. His eyes are somehow softer than usual too. It’s both inviting and disarming, what those eyes do to me.

“Well, hey there, pretty.”

“Nell,” I correct him reservedly, securing the seatbelt.

He smiles at me, pulling onto the main road. “Nell,” he amends. “Not fond of terms of endearment?”

I check my phone for the time, then pocket it. “Not particularly.”

“Alright. I’ll remember that, babe.”

I shoot him a look, then question whether he even knows what he said as he innocently pays attention to the road, one hand hanging on the top of the wheel and the other gripping the stick shift.

Of course he knew what he said.

“So how long have you been an artist?”

I keep my eyes ahead as I think of how to answer that question. I hate that question. There’s never just one moment that someone like me wakes up and thinks: Ah, yes—I want to torture everyone around me for the rest of my life, including myself.