Chapter 40

As the woman studies another sketch, her brow furrows. “What’d you use to draw this?” she clarifies. “It looks so familiar but I can’t quite put my finger on it…”

Brody laughs, relieved. “Oh! Um, you’re probably going to laugh, but everything’s done in colored pencil. Crayola, actually. You know, the stuff kids use.”

She turns to look at him, the lines in her brow deepening. “Seriously? It looks almost digital.”

To prove himself, Brody reaches under the table for his backpack and extracts his trusty sketch pad and pencil case. Flipping to a blank page, he sits down in one of the folding chairs and leans forward so he can keep her in view. The first pencil he grabs is teal green, which matches the shirt she’s wearing. For a long moment he studies her, then turns to the pad and starts to sketch.

She comes closer, drawn to him like a moth to a flame. As her angular face and short bobbed hair start to take shape on the page, she gasps. “That’s fucking awesome.”

Brody shrugs as he continues the sketch. “What can I say? I like to draw.”

“How much for that one?” she asks.

He looks up to see which picture she’s referring to and sees she’s pointing at the one he just started. “It’s just a rough sketch,” he says, his hand drawing her features as if it has a mind of its own. “I usually spend some time cleaning them up when I’m done.”

“No, I’ll take it,” she says. “And the birds, too. Do you have any more like it?”

“Birds, you mean?” Brody nods at the thick binders. “There’s a cardinal in a dogwood tree in the second book there, and some blue jays, and a couple budgies. You don’t have to buy this, you know. I just wanted to show you it was really all my work.”

“But that’s me, isn’t it?” she asks, already flipping through the binder to find the other bird drawings. “No, I want it. I came to look around and didn’t think I’d see anything I liked but God, everything you draw is gorgeous. Are you married?”

With a laugh of surprise, Brody says, “Sorry, I like guys.”

“Damn. Just my luck,” she mutters.

Brody leans forward and points to his business card. On the back is a miniature sketch of Gavin—those blond waves cascading back from his forehead, those piercing light eyes, that kissable mouth curving in just a hint of a smile. It’s a candid pose Brody sketched one evening after they made love, and it captures everything he loves about the man. He loves Gavin, he knows he does, and that both frightens and titillates him at the same time. Often when they’re alone, bodies pressed together, hearts beating as one, he finds himself on the verge of saying the words. I love you.But he bites them back, because he’s said them in the past and he was wrong every time. What he and Gavin has is real, he knows, but he doesn’t want to ruin it. He doesn’t want to say something without knowing for sure the feeling’s mutual. He thinks it is—he hopes it is—but he has to be absolutely certain.

Now he tells the customer, “This is my boyfriend.”

She picks up the card to squint at it. “Damn!” she says again, laughing. “Proof positive right here that all the smart and talented and sexy ones are either taken or gay.”

Brody grins. “He is sexy, isn’t he? He teaches English at a college in Richmond.”

“If I’d have had him for a professor in Lit,” she says, pocketing the card, “I wouldn’t have majored in Communications.”

“I would’ve actually gone to school,” Brody jokes. 31

My boyfriend

The words still sound magical to his ears. Whenever he stops and thinks about it, his heart skips a beat. He has a boyfriend again. Someone to hold him, to love him, to laugh with him and talk to him. Someone whose whole face lights up to see him. Someone whose body responds to his touch.

Someone he trusts. Someone he suspects he loves.

Sometimes when he looks at Gavin, Brody’s caught off-guard by the man’s raw sensuality and innate beauty. It takes his breath away. In the months since they started seeing each other, his sketchbooks have overflowed with drawings of Gavin. In Brody’s bed, asleep, as the morning sun angles in through the window to light the shadows on his face. At his desk with a pair of glasses on as he grades papers, looking every inch the studious professor. On the porch swing out front of the house where Brody stays, his gaze distant as he looks out over the azalea bushes.