Draw Me In

by Megan Squires

  “And I draw with a pencil and paper.”

  Leo sighed a little. Not an uncomfortable or exasperated sigh at all, but one that indicated he was trying to settle in.

  “It may sound crazy, but sometimes when I draw a statue, I find it helps to actually touch them. To imagine them on a physical level. Feel them in 3-D before I lose that one dimension by putting it on paper.”

  Leo nodded. I wasn’t sure if he understood, but he pretended to.

  “I got into a lot of trouble at the Uffizi. They don’t take very kindly to patrons touching their priceless artifacts.”

  “Kinda like how I didn’t take too kindly to you frisking Renaldo?”

  “Yeah. Same sort of thing.” The bust was really beginning to form under my pencil tip, and I was finally pleased with where this was heading. “I just feel like I get to know my subject better when I have that physical contact. I’m not just seeing with my eyes anymore, but with touch too. It helps to add other senses into the process.”

  I’d spent all afternoon staring at the statue and hadn’t realized how quickly darkness had coated the walls and slid over the furniture. It was nightfall, and the room was now blanketed in thick shadows, an opaque covering. It made drawing a challenge, but I kept at it.

  Leo noticed my struggle and walked around the edge of the bed to the lamp on the nightstand. He flicked it on, his wrist turning over. Then he followed that same path back to me. But he didn’t sit down this time.

  I was still sketching, so I could only sense him out of my periphery. A flicker of movement. Only a few more strokes and life would be recognizable on the page. Renaldo’s life. One that had ended centuries ago, but was now birthed once again in a new form. My fingers moved wildly across the paper.

  With my eyes still cast downward, I could see Leo grasp the hem of his shirt between his two fingers. His arms were crossed over one another, an X over his body. In a fluid movement, his shirt was off, tossed into a balled-up heap of cotton on the floor.

  I swallowed thickly.

  “Wha—?” Swallowing once more, I gasped, “Wha—? What are you doing?”

  “Draw me, Julie.” There was no air left in the room. I was sure of it, because there wasn’t any making its way into my lungs. It was all a vacuum, sucking the available breath—and words—right out of my mouth. It pulled at my insides, twisting them, coiling them. “I want you to draw me.”

  I dropped my pencil onto the paper. My mouth gaped open.

  Leo came to the edge of the bed and his shins hit the mattress. He held out his hand the way a man does when he asks you to dance—almost like he’s beckoning you—and waited. A pause.

  But I’ve never been beckoned before. Not like this. This was different. He was different.

  I lowered a shaky palm into his, uncrossed my legs, and dropped one over the side of the bed. But it didn’t do a good job supporting me, and when I tried to push up and bear weight on it, my knee gave out.

  Leo pulled me up completely.

  Taking my hand and placing it flat against his chest, he pressed his own hand to it so mine pushed harder onto his bare skin. His eyes were searching. “Please.” His heart hammered against my palm, uneven and erratic. Blood coursing through him, yet felt under my skin like it was my own. “I want you to know me. I need you to draw me.”

  I wanted to know him too. I hadn’t figured this would be how. I thought maybe it would be through a game of Two Truths and One Lie or by looking at a scrapbook or watching old family movies. But as Leo slid my hand from his chest, guiding it up to his collarbone to trace his shoulder, then the shallow dip at the base of his neck, and onto the other shoulder, my fingertips felt more of him than I ever thought possible.

  But I wasn’t brave. I couldn’t command my hands to trail along his skin on their own, so he continued leading me until I was ready. He slipped out my finger and drug it along the stubble forming on his chin. Fine sandpaper that I imagined chaffing my skin as he kissed me, a delightful mix of pleasure and pain. I closed my eyes, envisioning the dotted strokes of my pencil that could match this shadow. I was drawing him—not on paper—but in my mind. Etching him into the recesses of my heart.

  My eyes were still shut when my finger felt the ridge of his upper lip, followed by the fullness of his lower one on my thumb, pulled slack against the friction of my skin. My eyes flew open and it was the most intense thing I’d ever seen or experienced: my finger outlining his carved lips, his eyes permanently meeting mine, even when I’d closed my own. We were connected, in our gaze and with our touch.

  I swear it was like that pottery scene from Ghost. I could even hear Unchained Melody ringing in my ears. Or maybe that was the buzzing that floods your eardrums right before you passed out. I didn’t know which.

  “Julie,” Leo sighed, a groan. He cupped my hand in his along his jaw and leaned into it, closing his eyes as he pressed against my palm. Content. Tortured.

  I decided to take over.

  Steadily, I moved both of my hands onto his broad shoulders, then ran them down the length of his arms, feeling the muscle and veins that wrapped around them. His skin was hot. It radiated out of him and into me, like we were somehow joined and were passing back and forth our emotion through touch and temperature. A part of me here. A part of him there.

  When I got to his hands, I lifted one to my face, studying it. His rough knuckles that were strong and masculine. The lines and creases of his palm. Even his fingerprints. I examined everything that made Leo uniquely him. I don’t know if I’ve ever appreciated an artist more than I did whoever or whatever it was that created Leo. He was perfect. Every square inch of him. Perfection.

  I could see his chest rising and falling fast. Something in me wanted to calm him, to bring his breathing down to a steady, maintainable cadence. But the other part saw the vulnerability in his shaky breath. In his quickened pulse. It was raw. Real. Emotional and beautiful. Four new words to describe him. Four news ways to know him.

  I dropped his hand and placed my own onto his chest. Just my right one. I kept it there. With my left, I slid it down the front of him, my hand flipped over and my fingers pointed downward. It slipped down to his stomach where his muscles contracted against my fingertips. The distinct ridges deepened with every breath he sucked in, like they were being carved out every few seconds. I lost count as to how many there were as my hand pressed onto his chiseled abs, my thumb running up and down over the sections of defined muscle.

  Leo laughed a little, maybe from nerves, but it made his stomach clench and tighten under my hand. It was such a strange sensation to feel him laugh. Not just to hear it.

  I placed my fingers to his mouth to feel his smile there, too. It was like I needed to not just hear or see, but actually touch every reaction he had. To truly know him. To take him in with all of my senses. To experience the very essence of him.

  I was certain with all of this sensation pulsing on my skin I could not only draw his exact likeness, but I could carve a statue from marble and it would be identical to this man standing in front of me.

  I memorized everything about him as my hands skated along his body. I replicated him in my mind. In my being.

  At some point I stopped breathing. There was a dizziness that infiltrated my head, rocking me back and forth like I was tossed at sea. I think Leo sensed it too. Like he could give me some of his own breath, he pulled me into him and suddenly crashed his lips onto mine. My chest pressed up against his, feeling so much more sensation than just my fingers had earlier. I curled my hands around his neck, tugging him toward me so he bent forward, bowing me backward.

  His mouth was warm. The heat of his lips melted my own, making them putty that he could coax and shape without applying much pressure. His tongue traced their outline, then slid into my mouth, exploring it slowly, cautiously. Everything he did I mirrored, reflecting his actions and his movements. I’d become his echo. I mimicked everything about him, duplicating him.

  I wasn’t even aware th
at my body was responding like this because it instinctually moved along with his. Taking my waist between his large hands, Leo gripped onto my hips and walked me backward toward the bed, our legs aligned as one. My knees buckled, but I didn’t fall back. Instead, Leo snaked an arm out and held my head as he slowly lowered me down. I felt the give of the mattress, that thick, downy embrace of the comforter and sheets enveloping me. Pure ecstasy this time. Leo lowered himself too, and remained suspended above me, two solid arms bracketed on either side. He slid his strong legs between mine, but his chest hovered over me.

  The space between us was electric and alive. It was heavy with the emotion we were communicating, firing all the things we’d felt but not spoken back and forth. His words and thoughts traveled through me with each touch, each lock of our eyes, each pressing of his lips to mine. There was language in our movements, meaning in his gaze.

  There was a vibration against the mattress, the shaking strain of his arms trying to keep his weight from slamming down on me. He didn’t have to do this. In fact, I didn’t want him to. I lifted my hands to him and wrapped them onto his back, embracing him, and guiding him lower. Slowly, Leo pressed forward, his long body lining up with mine, inch by inch, until he was fully on me. Pressed against me. Instead of on his hands like earlier, he now balanced on his elbows, his forearms flat against the mattress on either side of my head, his fingers twisting into my hair. Our foreheads touched, the tips of our noses brushed.

  In any other time in my life I would have wanted more. I would have hastily shed all of the layers of fabric between us and taken things so quickly it would have been a hurried blur of hormones and lust-filled need. But I didn’t want to blur this moment. I wanted it to last forever. I wanted this slow, thoughtful union between us, because it wasn’t a union of our bodies, but of our selves. I’d never been joined to someone in this way before. I didn’t know it could feel like this. I didn’t know this feeling even existed.

  But that’s because I didn’t know Leo existed.

  “You’re perfect,” I breathed, not sure if I said it, or if it was just a thought.

  But I must have uttered it, because Leo snapped.

  Maybe I’d told him one too many times, but he quickly rose back up to sit, his body rigid and upright, pulled taut like a wire. For a labored pause, he just stared over his shoulder toward the wall. I could hear his breathing, could see the rise and fall of his chest feathering out into his shoulders, a whole body shudder. Then, just as suddenly as he’d pulled away, he twisted at the waist so his back was completely to me, too.

  “Give me your hand.”

  I couldn’t understand what he was doing, but I obeyed and held it out for him to take.

  His face was downcast. I was unable to read his expression, nor see his eyes, as he took my hand and placed it onto his back, right between his shoulder blades. There was something he wanted me to know, something he hoped to convey, but I couldn’t figure it out.

  But I did as I was instructed.

  And then I found it.

  Close to the curve of his spine. At first it felt like a shallow dip, small in size, but enough of a ridge that I could sense it under the tip of my finger. There was a raised line of flesh around it, almost puckering the skin, a line maybe an inch in length.

  “Everyday I’ve survived, I’ve won.”

  Oh my God.

  I hadn’t expected that.

  “Do you have cancer?” I felt like an idiot for asking, but I couldn’t possibly think of what else this could mean. It wasn’t like he was just sharing some meaningless scar with me—one that he’d gotten from chickenpox or a fall from a skateboard as a child. The moment was too intense for that, the scar too emotionally deep.

  “Not now, no.”

  Leo turned around.

  “But you did.”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “When?”

  My fingers weren’t on his back anymore, but instead woven through his. Our hands rested on his thigh and the fabric of his jeans itched the skin on the back of my hand. I squeezed his fingers tightly, so tight my heartbeat pulsed through them. Half of me was here, the other was somewhere else. I couldn’t focus on his words and needed to grip onto him to stay in the present.

  “When she did.” He smiled. He shouldn’t smile. He should be sad. I was overwhelmingly sad and couldn’t think about attempting a smile. “And then again when I was twenty.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Was I crying? I shoved the heel of my hand to my eyes and pushed back any rogue tears that threatened to break through.

  “You say it like you had something to do with it, Julie.”

  I instantly recognized those words. The same ones he’d uttered back in the dressing room the day I threw iced coffee all over him. The same ones he’d said when I told him I was sorry to hear his mother had died.

  “I’m saying I’m sorry because I didn’t have anything to do with it.” I held his hand like I was hanging on to something for dear life. I was. I was hanging on to Leo. “Because I wish I could have been there for you, somehow.”

  “You don’t know what that means, though.” Leo lifted his hand to my cheek. It was that moment where his expression held an infinity of words—something you could never articulate—but something so intense it passed through the barriers of space and time. That glare gripped his eyes, squeezing them with a look that stuttered my heart. He was cracking. Shards of his former self, displayed for me to gather into my possession. “Sometimes being the caretaker is harder than being the sick one.”

  My mind flashed back to the night in the ER with Ian and Joshua and that look of sheer panic that draped across Ian’s face. I understood that reality, even though on an obviously smaller scale. It was terrifying to be the caretaker, the one aware and lucid and responsible for another human being’s health.

  And to be fifteen.

  And to take care of your dying mother.

  And then to be left with no one to care for you.

  I felt the crack in my own chest, my heart splitting in two.

  Honestly, maybe he was trying to show me some imperfection here, but I couldn’t see it. Those scars I felt? Those weren’t imperfections or impurities. They were chips in the stone of his exterior, but they didn’t make him any less whole in my eyes. They only added to who he was, and they allowed me to see deeper into him than just that seemingly perfect façade everyone else saw.

  They made him human. They made him mine.

  “You said I’m hard to get to know.” Leo’s aqua eyes met my eyes. I know it belonged in a cheesy 80’s love song, but I swear I could see forever when I looked into them. Maybe not forever. Maybe the past. I could see the history that molded him into the man he now was at this very moment in time—the man laid bare before me. “I find most people don’t want to know the hard stuff. It’s too much.”

  I suddenly understood. “It was too much for her.”

  He was sick as a teenager. And he was sick again at twenty, when she had cheated.

  “I don’t blame her for it, Julie. It’s a lot to take on. The treatments and the tests and the results and the diagnosis. It’s hard to live life when you’re waiting on someone to be healthy enough to live it with you. I would never ask someone to wait for me.”

  “You waited for your mother.”

  His shoulders slumped. It was cold in here. I pulled the edge of the comforter up and lifted it so it draped over my shoulders like a shawl. Leo helped adjust the fabric over me. “Of course I did. She was my mom.”

  “But she was your fiancée,” I reasoned, but it didn’t sound like a good enough one. “When she came crawling back... you were healthy then, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, and I’ve been healthy ever since.” Leo expelled a breath that was enough to lift the hair from my forehead. “I’m sorry, Julie. This is a lot. I feel like we should get drunk or something just to take the edge off.”

  Though I wasn’t opposed to popping open a bottle, it wasn’t too much
for me. It was just enough. “I’d rather talk about this than meerkats and lemmings, Leo.” There came those confused crow’s feet again. “I said I wanted to get to know you. This is a big part.”

  “Well, if you look at the actual scars, it’s a very small part. At least on the surface.”

  I hadn’t looked at them, but I’d felt them, and that was enough to clue me in on what a big deal this really was, even though he was trying to dismiss it. Cancer was a big word. One that once uttered within the confines of a doctor’s office would change your life forever. It wasn’t a word you could ever get away from, but one that instead tied itself to you like it legally became part of your name. It was more than a diagnosis. It branded you both physically and emotionally.

  “What stage was it?”

  “Stage one the first time. Stage three the second.”

  I had no idea what that meant. My expression must have given that away because he added, “The second time it spread to a lymph node.” He raised his arm up and pointed just under his shoulder, near his armpit. “Only one, right here. They took it out.”

  “And your mom? Was it the same kind?”

  Some cancers were genetic, that much I knew. I’d always focused so much on Leo and his wine enterprise inheritance that it never entered my mind he’d be heir to something else—something this tragically unfortunate.

  He nodded. “It’s called familial malignant melanoma.” I shuddered involuntarily because those three words strung together sounded like he was cursing. Leo pulled the blanket tighter around me. “Mom got really paranoid one summer when she found a spot on Gio when we were at the beach, and she made all four of us go in to have any ‘suspicious’ looking ones removed the next week.” He used air quotes around his words, like suspicious made it out to be some type of predator. But that’s exactly what it was. “She and I were the only ones to test positive.”