The Real Deal

I shake my head. “It was probably your average guy-meets-girl story. He was mad about my mom. She was his heart.”

April smiles ruefully. “That’s beautiful and sad at the same time.” She lifts the flask and takes a sip. She shudders from the drink, then hands it to me.

“That describes him perfectly,” I say. Then it’s my turn to drink, and I let the alcohol course through me, warming me up.

I close the flask and slouch back on my bench. My eyes drift to the sky above. To all those stars. “So you grew up under the stars.”

“That’s why I started painting faces.”

I look up, meet her gaze. “How does one follow the other?”

“I loved looking at the stars, and I wanted to paint them. Stars were literally the first thing I ever tried painting.”

“That explains your tattoo,” I say.

“Well done, Detective Theo.”

“How was your first star painting?”

She shrugs and takes another drink. “It wasn’t bad, but I don’t think I made anything truly good until I painted on my arm. That’s when I fell in love with the art, and I think it fell in love with me, too.”

Her passion for her work is yet another thing that’s insanely attractive about her. “So skin really is your medium.”

She nods. “I can definitely paint on canvas, but I vastly prefer flesh. It’s weird, isn’t it?”

I remember the other night when I stared into the mirror as I looked at the lips she painted on me. “When you painted me, it was unusual. It was sensual. It was clever. But it wasn’t weird. Not in the least.”

“What about you? When you were younger, did you know you wanted to act?”

A bolt of tension shoots down my spine. I’m not an actor. I’m good at it only because I can act. “No,” I say, telling the truth.

She furrows her brow. “You never wanted to be one when you were younger?”

I shake my head. “Nope.” At least I’m not lying.

“That’s so odd. I always think with creative professions that we usually feel that calling from when we’re young.”

I swallow. “It wasn’t that way for me.” I hate that I can’t be truthful with her. But now isn’t the moment to reveal my past to her, so my present has to remain shrouded.

“What did you want to do?”

“I wanted to be an English teacher. Like my parents. It was all I knew. I wanted to be that guy in the front of the room. Be the teacher who truly entertained. Maybe do some funny voices as I read Shakespeare.”

She smiles. “You like Shakespeare?”

“You say that like it’s the strangest thing you’ve ever heard.”

She nibbles on a corner of her lips. “It’s not strange. It’s intriguing. What lines did you like?”

I slide into my best stage orator impression. “‘All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, / And one man in his time plays many parts.’ As You Like It,” I add, since everyone thinks that line’s from Hamlet. “Or this one from Othello: ‘Speak of me as I am.… Then must you speak / Of one that loved not wisely, but too well.’”

“Do you believe that?” she asks.

“I believe Othello was a jealous bastard who was vulnerable to a man that Disney turned into a parrot in Aladdin,” I say, and she laughs. “My mom taught that play, using the Aladdin movie as a modern-day example. One of her last classes before she was too sick to teach was that play. She was my English teacher in eighth grade.”

Her eyes widen. “You had your mother as a teacher.”

“I was that guy.” I slap my thumb and forefinger onto my forehead in an L.

“Did you think you’d teach Shakespeare?”

“Honestly, I never really understood the finer meanings of his works. But the quotes sounded totally badass to me. I would record them in this little portable recorder. I would mess around with different voices. They were just cool words to say, and I liked the way I could play with them. Make it sound like a cowboy or a truck driver or a swamp creature.”

She leans forward, sets her chin in her hand. “It’s like you were a DJ mixing your voice.”

I nod, digging that comparison. “Yeah, maybe I was.”

“Do you want to teach? To tend bar? Act? Record snippets of Shakespeare into a phone?”

I laugh, and lean my head back, staring into the abyss of the night. I’m so far derailed from my childhood dreams. I can’t really think about them anymore. Or maybe the issue is that I haven’t been able to. “I want to do all of the above and none of the above.” I return my gaze to her. “Right now, though, I’m not thinking of any of those things.”

“What are you thinking?”

“You,” I say, and it feels like the most honest thing I’ve ever said. “Why you brought me here. How I’m hardly your fake date anymore.” I grab the flask and knock back a slug. My reward for speaking my mind. The liquor warms me all over, and I’m heading into a slight buzz.

“What am I now?”

A firefly races past, flickering against the night. Water slips against the wood of the boat.

I set down the container on the floor of the boat and stare into her dark green eyes. Heat seems to radiate between us. The air crackles.

“You’re the woman who’s going to tell me what you’d paint on me.”

She screws up the corner of her lips. “What?”

I laugh, since I can hear the subtext of her question: Why are you ruining a romantic moment with talk of paint? I making a rolling motion with my hand, like I’m reminding her. “On the train, I asked what you’d paint on me. You said to ask in a few days and you’d have a better answer.”

She nods, remembering.

“Tell me,” I say, since I’m fascinated by her job. I’ve been fascinated since she told me about it, and my interest has only intensified since she painted lips on me.

Her eyes seem to twinkle even in the dark. She speaks softly. “Starry Night.”

“The painting? By Van Gogh.”

She nods.

“You can paint a painting?”

“I can.”

“That’s what you’d paint on me?”

She lifts her hand toward my shoulder. “There. I’d start there.”

The mood shifts inexorably away from childhood dreams, and on to the present. Only the present. Energy thrums between us. Was there ever a doubt in my mind that something would happen tonight? I don’t know what, how much, or how far. But my skin heats all over with the aching desire to touch her.

And to be touched.

“Show me,” I say, and I grab the hem of my T-shirt and tug it off.

Her breath hitches. She licks her lips. I fight off a smile. Yeah, she’s seen me shirtless before, but I can’t deny her reaction now feels like every reason I’ve ever been motivated to lift weights or hit the gym early in the morning.

“I would paint your shoulder a midnight blue, and then add in the first bright swirly star. Right there.” A spark tears through me as she touches me.

“I’d layer in more blue swirls all across your chest, making it my canvas. And then, I’d color in all the yellow and gold lights from the stars,” she says, her finger mimicking a brush. She draws an outline on my pec in the manner of Van Gogh. A groan works its way through me. “There are eleven stars in the painting, and I’d paint them all on you.” She spreads her fingers across my pecs to my abs.

I breathe heavily, as though I’ve run a race. Jesus, I’m not sure I’ve ever been this turned on in my life.

“I’d finish here.” She runs the pads of her fingers softly over the hard planes of my abs, down to my jeans. Her eyes follow her hands. She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at what she’s creating in her mind’s eye. She’s mesmerized by what she’s imagining. I stare at her fingers, at the way she’s lost in her own world as she traces a sketch of a painting on me. I burn. With lust. With desire. With a deep and potent need. I want to feel connected to her.

“I’ve never wanted to kiss someone as much as I want to kiss you now.”

She raises her face and blinks, like she’s coming out of her artistic haze. “Are you drunk?”

“God no.” Then a dangerous idea plants itself in my head. “Are you?”

Please say no.

She shakes her head. “No. A little tipsy, but that’s okay.”

“Why’d you ask?”