One of Those Faces (2)

An elderly man sat across the café, sporting an enormous handlebar mustache and dressed in a bolo tie.

Perfect.

I set down my cup and pulled my sketchbook from my bag. I briskly scribbled the shape of his rough and square face and dotted the page where his features were. I wanted to make sure I got that mustache down before he left.

My pencil drew over the paper in a familiar movement, filling in the man’s mustache with quick strokes. I looked up regularly to catch him in between bites of a muffin, after which his mustache wriggled like a wild woolly caterpillar. Someone crossed into my line of sight and took a seat in front of Mustache, but my view was still mostly unobstructed. A couple of times I looked up and accidentally locked eyes with the man sitting in front of my subject. I didn’t focus too much on his face in those quick moments, but his eyes were alert and bright, his jawline carved and rigid.

But I had already begun a project. I couldn’t shift focus to a new subject now. The next time I looked up, the man with the granite jawline was gone.

I added some shading under Mustache’s eyes, right around the swollen, dark rings underlining them.

“I couldn’t help but notice you staring.”

The depth of the voice made me jump. I flipped over my sketch pad, which was already barricaded from view by my bag, before looking up at the man standing on the other side of my table. It was the jawline who had been partially blocking my view of Mustache. The edges of his lips were slightly curved into a curious smile.

“What?”

A flash of nervousness flickered across his face for the briefest moment before that crooked smile reappeared. “I was just saying, I noticed you staring from across the café.”

“Oh, um, I was just sketching someone else,” I said in a lowered voice, worried that Mustache might overhear. “You were sitting right in front of him.”

Jawline’s smile remained, but his cheeks became tinged with red. He laughed. “Really?”

My hands began to shake a little as I turned the sketch faceup. “Yeah, he has a really killer mustache,” I said. I gestured with my head toward Mustache at the other end of the shop.

Jawline shifted slightly to look over my shoulder at the drawing and looked up toward Mustache. “You really captured his essence.” He scratched behind his ear and took a step backward. “Sorry, I assum—”

“Thanks, it’s not easy to spot facial hair like that in the wild,” I remarked. It wasn’t unusual to have strangers walk up to me while I was drawing. Sketching in public tended to raise questions.

Jawline pulled out the chair across from me and sat. “Do you do this a lot?” He gestured toward the drawing.

“Yes, occupational hazard.”

His eyes got a little bigger. “So you’re an artist, not just a random voyeur?”

I grinned. “They’re one and the same, right?”

“You may have a point.”

To fill the pause that came next, I asked, “What do you do?” and took a sip of my coffee. My tongue burned from the hot steam, but I needed to keep my hands and mouth busy.

“I study and kind of teach psychology.” He leaned back in his chair slightly.

Of course. I flinched. “You look a little young to be a professor.”

His lips curled. “I never claimed to be a professor. I’m getting my master’s in psychology, and I have to teach a couple of classes in the meantime.”

So maybe he wasn’t too far gone yet. I shuffled my sketchbook and pencils around nervously.

He met my gaze. “I have to get back to campus now, but I’d love to buy you a cup of coffee sometime. Maybe see some of your work?”

I didn’t make a habit of giving my number or name out to just anyone, no matter how good they looked. “I come here a lot, so maybe I’ll see you around.”

His eyes drifted to my name written in the barista’s hasty and slanted cursive on my coffee cup, the r’s in Harper looking more similar to the swirl of an s. Well, so much for privacy. “Maybe next time I’ll have a mustache worth drawing.”

I laughed at that. “We’ll see, I guess.”

I watched as he took his coffee cup and left, grinning at me over his shoulder as he pushed through the door onto Milwaukee Avenue.

“Shit!” I glanced at the time on my phone. Yep, I already had two texts from Erin asking me where I was. Technically I wasn’t even late yet, but Erin’s overbearing tendencies as a friend poured over into her role as boss.

I hiked the strap of my messenger bag over one shoulder and took the steps out the door to the street two at a time. I was willing to bet even if I made it to the studio right at six o’clock, Erin would still say I was late.

I turned the corner at the end of the block, nearly bumping into a man with a goatee and beanie in my hurry to the studio door.

“You’re late. I knew it,” Erin called over her shoulder as she placed wine bottles on the table in the center of the room.

By one minute. I walked past her on the way to the back, then tossed my bag in the corner of the room and pulled my painting apron from a hook.

“Is everything okay? You don’t look so good.” Erin shook a mason jar of paintbrushes at me. “And your apron’s inside out, by the way.”

I instinctively raised a hand to the dark circles under my eyes. “Oh.” I tugged my apron over my head and flipped it so the Tipsy Paintbrush logo—a cutesy image of a paintbrush dipped into a glass of red wine—was facing out. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just tired.” I set empty wineglasses along the counter at the front of the shop. Soon they would be full and in the hands of novice artists who were almost always more interested in the wine than the actual painting class.