Put Me Back Together(10)

So much for putting Lucas out of my mind.

The sunlight streaming through the window was falling directly onto his shoulders, lighting him up like a beacon. There might as well have been a huge arrow above his head, pointing him out to me. And, of course, my easel was just beside his.

Great.

As I approached his side, I couldn’t help but take in his tousled dark hair and the worn plaid shirt he wore open over a gray t-shirt that fit him snugly across the chest. He was frowning, his honey-coloured eyes searching the canvas as though they might find some precious secret hidden there. Even frowning he was drop-dead gorgeous. I silently cursed myself for thinking this. His concentration was so complete that he didn’t notice me at all, even when I was almost directly behind him. Looking over his shoulder, I saw that his canvas was completely blank.

I understood the intimidation of the blank canvas—I think every artist does. A part of me wanted to give him some tips to get through it, but another part of me warned vehemently against it. This was exactly what I’d vowed not to do less than an hour ago. In the end, my clumsiness made the decision for me when I knocked over a jar full of brushes, sending them scattering across the floor, including right under Lucas’s easel.

“Oh, sorry!” I mumbled as I fell to my knees and began frantically collecting the brushes. I heard Lucas chuckle and then he crouched down beside me to give me a hand.

“I was just thinking about you,” Lucas said as he handed me a bunch of brushes smiling broadly. His fingers grazed mine as I took the brushes from him, causing me to yank my hand away and nearly drop them all over again.

“I hope that’s not true, considering how hard you were frowning at your canvas,” I said shakily.

We both stood up and I busied myself with shoving all the brushes back into the jar as he looked over at his canvas again.

Calm down, I told myself. He was probably just thinking about what a crazy spaz you are.

“I was just thinking how easy the assignments must be for you, with all your talent.”

I gave him a puzzled—and maybe a little resentful—look, feeling my hackles rising. I really wasn’t good with compliments.

“I’ve been in the class since the beginning of the semester, Katie,” he said gently. “You’re an amazing artist. I’ve always thought so.”


“Did you realize we were in the same class when we met last week?” I demanded, crossing my arms. I might have been overreacting, mainly because I felt bad. He’d noticed me before last week, but I hadn’t noticed him at all.

“It took me a few minutes to place you,” he said. “But I figured it out. Your paint-spattered fingers reminded me.”

I glanced down at my hands, rubbing at the red paint on my index finger. Emily was always chiding me about it. When I looked up at Lucas, his eyes were also focused on my hands. He took his time raising them back to my face, his gaze leaving a slow trail of heat up my body. I shivered involuntarily.

Now my hackles were up for real.

“What are you doing taking introductory fine art, anyway?” I said, my words taking on the tone of an interrogation. “You’re not an art student, are you?”

Surprisingly, Lucas didn’t seem the least offended. He shrugged lightly. “I convinced them to make an exception for me,” he said. “I wanted to try something new.”

I couldn’t exactly fault him for that. I cast around for some other way to chastise him, but couldn’t come up with anything, especially not while he was watching me so closely, the beginnings of a smirk at the corner of his lips.

“So what’s the problem with the assignment?” I said instead, pointing at his canvas, drawing his gaze away. We were restricted to using a limited colour palette, and, as always, we had to paint from a photo. The painting itself could be of anything.

“I just can’t decide what to paint. I’ve been going through my photos for over an hour but…I can’t settle on one,” he said, and there was disappointment in his voice. He sighed as he looked down at the photographs in his hands. For some reason this block was really bothering him.

“That happens to me sometimes,” I admitted. “Usually when there’s something on my mind, something I could paint but I don’t want to.”

The look he gave me was full of recognition before it drifted back to the canvas in front of him.

I wondered what it was he was trying to avoid.

Settling myself in front of the easel next to his, I said, “You’ll get better at getting past blocks like this as you paint more. Just keep telling yourself to pick the photo that matters to you, the one that makes you feel something.”

“You mean I should paint what I love?” he asked, and was I imagining it, or did his eyes linger on my lips as he said it?

I cleared my throat. “I mean paint from the gut,” I said. “The best artists always do.”

“Is that what you do?” he asked.

This time I avoided his eyes. “No,” I said. “I paint the past.”

Then I put in my ear buds, turned on my iPod, and tuned him out. It was easier than I’d expected. Within moments I’d slipped into what I liked to call my “artist trance,” losing myself in the act of painting and letting the rest of the world just fade away. Sometimes when I did this the painting sitting on the easel when I was done looked entirely foreign to me and I had no memory of creating it at all. Those paintings were often the most abstract, full of dark, angry strokes and spatters of paint. I never showed them in class or hung them on my wall. Truthfully, they frightened me.