“You have?” I said.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “To answer your question, though, I usually come here to draw.” He ducked his head, suddenly shy. “And. Um. Actually, I was hoping to ask you a favor.”
Here it goes, I thought. Let me guess, the favor is going to involve me holding something for you. And surprise! That something is your dick—
“I was wondering if I could draw you.”
My heart stammered in my chest. It was a strange request but flattering all the same. And I could tell that he was serious; I could see now that he’d left a small book and a pencil pouch on the bench.
“Oh,” I said.
Cute Boy seemed to have used up all his bravado on his initial approach, because now he could barely meet my eyes.
“Sorry,” he said, “I know it’s kind of a weird thing to ask—”
“No,” I said quickly. When his smile faltered, I added, “I mean, no, it’s not weird. Okay, who am I kidding, it is, but I don’t mind. You can draw me.”
He smiled so widely you would’ve thought I’d offered to pay his rent. And he had dimples. Christ.
“Oh. Okay! Great!” he said, noticeably more animated. “My name’s Ricky, by the way. And you are . . . ?”
“Angela,” I said. “Angie.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” he said, then, all business, headed back to the bench.
At Ricky’s direction, I sat, cross-legged, in a patch of sunlight on the ground across from him. The foliage around me left dappled shadows across my legs but spared my face. He instructed me to put my hands on my knees, then changed his mind and had me fold them in my lap. When he was satisfied, he pulled his sketchbook onto his lap and began to draw.
The early summer breeze shifted through the trees, still carrying with it the sting of spring chill. Without my music, I could hear the loud stillness of the city, cars zooming down the street only tens of feet away, birds chirping, Ricky’s pencils scratching against paper. The places where the sun touched my skin felt warm and light, and I took in a deep, cleansing breath. I felt loose and liquid and languid. It was the most at peace I had felt in months.
“You can move, you know,” Ricky said after a while. I opened my eyes to find him looking at me with amusement.
“Doesn’t my pose matter?” I asked. He smiled, switching out his graphite pencil for a colored one.
“Not anymore, not really,” he said. “I just wanted to get your face right.” Then he stuck his tongue out, teasing. “This isn’t the Royal Academy; I don’t need you to stay put for six hours for your portrait.”
“Nice of you to wait”—I checked my phone for the time—“fifteen minutes to tell me that.” I bent forward in a stretch, making a show of shaking out my kinks. “Are you almost done?”
“Yup,” he said. “Just hang on a second.” He pulled a corner of his top lip into his mouth, his eyebrows furrowed with concentration. I watched him as he switched between colored pencils automatically, using only red, yellow, and blue. After a few more minutes, he grinned up at me. “Okay. Here.”
I sat next to Ricky on the bench, accepting the sketchbook when he handed it to me. In the millisecond before it could exchange hands, it occurred to me that he could like to draw but be terrible at it and I would have to praise this stranger for highlighting my worst features—
I needn’t have worried.
“What the hell, Ricky,” I said, dumbstruck. By cross-hatching the primary colors together, Ricky had managed to bring a new, shimmering dimension to the garden, merging and blurring the flowers and leaves into a mere suggestion of themselves. And the image of me—it emanated peace and contentment and none of the turmoil I was feeling in reality. He’d made me so beautiful, and so effortlessly. My throat tightened, and I felt my eyes well with tears again.
“Do you like it?” Ricky asked.
“O-of course. It’s stunning,” I stammered. The tears I tried to hold back trailed down my face, and I sighed and wiped them away before they could fall onto his small masterpiece. “Oh no,” I said, exasperated. “Sorry. I can’t seem to stop doing this today.”
“Hey, it’s okay,” Ricky said in a low voice. Then he added, “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No offense, Ricky,” I said with a snort. “But why do you care?”
Ricky’s expression didn’t change. Instead, there was a flicker of strain behind his eyes, like a light being turned off and then back on again, gone and back so quickly that I might have missed it if I hadn’t been specifically searching it out. But then his smile disappeared altogether, and he leaned back on the bench, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.