Will pushed his cheek out with his tongue, regarding me. “I could show you now.”
I paused, index finger still in my mouth.
“I have a sketchbook with me,” he said. “I always carry one around. It’s mostly ideas for Roommates. There are a few portraits.” He shrugged. “If you want.”
“Really? You don’t mind?”
He scratched the back of his neck. “I don’t love watching people look at my stuff, but I trust you not to say something terrible.” He gave me a serious look. “Even if you think it’s basic.”
“I would never.”
But as Will rummaged through his bag, I began to worry. I was terrible at faking it.
“Here.” He handed me a battered green Moleskine, then sat, elbows resting on knees, chin perched on one hand.
I started at the beginning and went slowly, studying the figures on the unlined pages. The same four characters were drawn many times over, sometimes rendered in fine black ink and sharp, confident lines and other times in scratchy pencil.
“You are good,” I said, glancing up at him, but he didn’t respond, just watched as I turned the pages.
One of the characters was dozy-eyed, slumped, and always carried a sandwich in his hand. Another wore a man bun. The one who was obviously Will was a beanpole with an exaggerated nose. One page was full of notes. He wrote in tidy capital letters.
“Ideas for strips,” Will said when I got to it.
Scattered throughout were realistic sketches of trees and bridges and everyday objects—a bowl of lemons, Will’s backpack dropped in a corner. There were a few portraits. My favorite was of a girl swimming, her hands splashing up water, a toothy smile on her face.
“This is incredible,” I told Will.
“Thanks.” He cleared his throat. “That’s my sister. It’s not always easy to find people to sit for me, so mostly I use photos. That was from our family vacation to Prince Edward Island when we were kids.”
“You can do me if you want.” I closed my eyes. “I mean, if you wanted to draw me, you could.”
Will didn’t say anything, so I opened one lid. “Was that weird? I just thought you might want the practice.” I picked up another slice of sourdough, examining the holes with new fascination.
“Actually, I’d like that.”
I peered up from the bread. “Really? So how do we do this? Do you want me to put a chair over there?” I motioned to the other side of the room, near the door.
Will took the piece of bread from my hands and set it on the plate. He looked around the space, his eyes settling on the bed. “No. You go there.”
* * *
—
It started with me at the head of my bed and Will on a chair by the foot. He turned to a fresh page, staring at it for a full minute and then at me, first my face and then the rest. His hand moved across the page in quick, short strokes. He kept tilting forward, squinting at me in the darkness.
“Do you want me to move closer?” I said after his third tilt and squint.
He looked up, pausing. “Yeah, that’d be great.”
I shimmied forward. “Can we talk, or will that mess with your process?”
“We can talk.”
“How long do you usually stay when you come back to Toronto?” I hoped I wasn’t being completely obvious.
Will gave me a lickety-split smile before he went back to drawing. “Depends. This trip was a bit over a week. Usually it’s just a few days.”
Not very long, then. Not enough time to visit me up north. “Oh. Why the longer stay?”
“My dad’s getting remarried. There was an engagement party last weekend, and I hadn’t met his fiancée, so there was a lot of getting-to-know-you stuff.”
“Did it go okay?” I’d never had to navigate the ins and outs of parental love lives. If I didn’t know better, I might have believed Mom willed me into being.
“I guess. She seemed genuinely into my dad. But I wanted to be like, This guy, really? You know he washes prewashed salad, right?”
I laughed, and he thought for a moment.
“It was weird to see him with someone other than my mom. Annabel has met her a bunch of times and likes her, and my sister is a tough critic. I hope . . .” He stared down at the sketch.
“Are you all right?”
He nodded once, then looked up at me. “It bothers me. That I left, like our mom did. Dad is so hard on Annabel, but maybe when Linda moves in, things will get better.” He rubbed his eye. “Anyway, I unloaded on him last night, not that it will make a difference. It was good to have a distraction today, to not have to go home and deal with him.” Will went back to drawing.
“If you want to crash here tonight, you can,” I blurted out.
The pencil stopped.
“If you want.”
He looked up at me.
“You can.”
We watched each other, and then Will resumed sketching. Neither of us spoke for several minutes until he said, “So what’s he like—the boyfriend?”
“Jamie?” I stared at Will, trying to intuit why he was asking, but all I absorbed was the length of his eyelashes.
“Yeah. Jamie.”
“He’s great,” I said slowly. I hadn’t described Jamie to another person in such a long time, and I didn’t love the task of explaining him to Will. “He’s very chill. Funny. He’s the kind of person everyone likes—he’s the caramel pudding of humans.”
“You’ve lost me,” Will said.
I looked at the surrealist pin on his collar. “It’s kind of an inside thing—what type of dessert we’d be. He’s caramel pudding—sweet and smooth and crowd-pleasing.”
Will glanced at me. I could have sworn he was smirking. “And what about you, Fern Brookbanks? What kind of dessert would you be?”
“Me?” I swallowed. “Jamie thinks I’m a lemon tart.”
I watched Will’s chest rise and fall. He tipped his head toward his book. “And what do you think I’d be?”
I could taste Peter’s salted chocolate torte, that hint of chili. “I dunno . . . a chocolate log?”
“Chocolate log?”
“Yeah. You know, with the chocolate wafers and whipped cream?” I should have thought before I’d opened my mouth.
“Uh-huh,” Will said. “What else?”
I knew he didn’t mean what else about the log. I took a deep breath.
“I’ve known Jamie for a long time, but he was always just an older lake kid.”
Will glanced at me. “How much older?”
“Three years. His family has a cottage near the resort. Anyway, I was kind of a mess at the end of high school, and Jamie and I were working together. He was the only person who didn’t judge me.” Will looked up from his drawing. “That was the beginning.”
“Four years ago?”
“Right. We work together at the resort every summer. Jamie stays in the staff cabins instead of his family’s cottage because he likes it there so much.” I picked at the blue polish on my index finger. “I do not relate.”
“That’s not the sense I got.”
“Are you serious?” Had I not explained to him how I didn’t want to go back to the resort?
“Yeah. At the gallery today . . . and the way you spoke about it. I don’t know. I got the impression you love it up there.”