Fiction Outtake: The First Two Drawings (Trevor’s Song era)

Most guys, Mitchell figured, would freak out the first time they woke up in their new girl’s place. It wasn’t familiar, the bed felt a bit weird, nothing was where it should be.

Enter the touring musician, he thought as he stretched his arms over his head, kind of digging the lack of a head board. He’d woken up in so many strange places — including, once, curled up around one of those outdoor chiminea things with a hangover that made his mouth feel like the inside of the filthy, ash-filled thing — that he only freaked out the first few days he got to spend in his own bed.

Now, though, it was all about the fact that there was supposed to be a woman beside him in her bed. His woman. He was finally ready to say that.

He lifted his head and tried to squint through the Chinese panel things that separated her futon-thing from the rest of the loft. It was a heavy panel thing, the kind that girls slipped behind while they changed their clothes. He couldn’t see Kerri, but a little bit of light slithered around the edges of the screen. Her loft had been fully dark when they’d finally gotten too tired to do something as simple as kiss, hard as that still was to imagine. Fuck, he wanted her.

Emerging from behind the screens, he saw her, seated in front of a small pool of light that was focused on the paper on her drafting desk. She was busy drawing, her head bowed. She’d thrown clothes on, too: a paint-spattered button-down shirt and grey sweatpants that had become a piece of art on their own. She couldn’t have looked hotter if she was still naked.

Quietly, so he didn’t startle her and make her mess up the picture, he wrapped his arms around her and pressed against her back.

She rested her head against him; he felt her spine elongate as she straightened. “Hi,” she said, pursing her lips to give him one of those sideways kisses that was more intention than contact.

“I thought I was the one who liked to work all night.”

“Mmmm,” she said. “I love to work like this. Here, tell me what you think.”

He thought he hated that she sat forward. His belly and chest immediately felt cold.

Just as fast, he was distracted by the picture she held up. The first was of him, probably meant to be from the awards show the other night. It was just him; there was no background. Him and his guitar — and his middle finger raised as he chorded. So she’d noticed that he did that. He could usually get it by the TV censors. Clearly, she was savvier than they were.

“Did I get the guitar right? I’m new at them,” she said.

“Damn close,” he said, afraid to touch it and wrinkle the paper or something. She was amazing; that was all there was to it. Before the awards, they’d been on, what? Two dates — if you could call them that. Maybe he’d grabbed his guitar and played when they’d gotten smashed on that second … uhh, whatever, but for the most part, all she knew of him and his guitars was what she’d seen two nights ago now, at the awards.

She slid her hands down his legs, then turned to look at him. “You’re not wearing anything.”

“Yeah. So?”

She pointed to the windows. “Neighbors can see in.”

“Neighbors can sell tickets once it lightens up outside. They’ll make a fucking million or two. You might, too, if you keep drawing like that.”

“You may not say that when you see this one…” she said, sliding it out from underneath a clean sheet of paper. “I’ve never done anything like it. I mean nothing. So if you hate it, I’m trashing it. I can’t even believe I’m showing it to you; I barely know you!”

This one, he did take from her, but only because he couldn’t stop himself. There was no doubt it was a drawing of them, even though all you could see was two naked torsos. It was one of those perspective things, where you felt like you were falling into the crevice their bodies made, their shoulders apart and their bodies slowly coming closer together until they joined.

“Holy fuck,” he breathed and took a step backwards. He needed that distance.

She reached for it. “It sucks.”

He held it out of her reach. “If that’s your idea of suck… This… This…” He shook his head, as if that would help clear the image from his brain. He was ready to swear it was seared there, forever. “It’s amazing.”

“You think?”

He looked over at her; if she wasn’t ready to bolt and run, no one on the face of the Earth ever had been. “Yeah,” he said, wondering if she’d make good on that look if he talked about how he wanted to hang it on a wall in their bedroom, in the house they would buy. For fuck’s sake, they’d been together how long now? It was still in the range of hours. And here he was, like a lunatic, thinking about forever.

Trevor, he knew, would laugh in his face and call him a loser.

But that picture. If Trev saw it, he’d shut the fuck up. And then be jealous as hell.