Page 31 of Yours Truly

Deuce catches me watching, and I turn back to the sketch at hand, getting to work on the layers of wild grass beneath where the lighthouse will be.

Trace is letting me shade today.

I need to focus on that.

After forty-five minutes, the sketch is complete. Deuce and Connor appear at my back, surveying it.

“Looks…” Deuce trails off.

I turn to look up at them, sliding my pencil through my ponytail. As I work out a cramp in my palm, digging my thumb into the center, I ask, “Good?”

Connor chews his bottom lip, shares a look with Deuce, then turns back to me. “Ivy, the linework and shading are great. The work itself is done really, really well.”

“Why do I sense a but coming?”

At that moment, Sandi and Trace, who took a walk for coffee (gag me), come in through the back, ending up right behind Deuce and Connor.

Trace slides his sunglasses to the top of his head, his gold watch glittering as he points to my sketch. “Cockhouse.”

“What?” I ask, immediately spinning to face my sketch. From behind me, Sandi giggles.

“Looks like a peen.”

A hand comes down on my shoulder, squeezing. I glance at the fingers and spot a tentacle clutching a shearing knife. “Got cock on the brain, do ya?”

“What?” I blink at my sketch. My attempt at weathering the tower, in this light, does kind of look like foreskin. And when I narrow my gaze and make the whole thing the tiniest bit fuzzy, the solar cap and cupola without question look like the head of a penis, the crown surging forward excitedly out of the foreskin. I slam a hand over my mouth. “Oh god.”

There’s some subtle movement behind me, and a moment later, I’m left with just Trace and Connor.

Connor brushes his finger along one of the cracks in the tower. “I know this is wear on the tower, but if you get rid of it, that may help. And the cupola could be resized to look less–”

“Like a big cockhead,” Trace offers, a pleased smirk curling his lips. I know violence is bad and stuff, but God if there was ever a time I wanted to slap someone, it would be now.

“I once sketched a memorial design for a woman who lost her husband and the flower looked like an aroused vagina,” Connor offers with a soft smile. Trace grumbles something inaudible under his breath, but I keep my focus on Connor.

“What did you do?”

“I redid it. Thankfully I caught it before it went to skin, but it happens. Art is special but when it becomes your job, sometimes, no matter how passionate you are about your art, your mind wanders.” He shrugs. “It’s natural.”

“I wasn’t— my mind didn’t wander to…” I start, but find myself unable to say I wasn’t thinking about cock.

The truth is? I was. I was and have been since Trace showed up at Hudson’s house a few months back.

I tried not to go full Dolly. I mean, that’s not my style anyhow. But no matter how hard I tried to stay focused on art and working, helping my sister get her man, helping my other sister grow her jam business, it didn’t matter.

Knowing that the man whose work I’ve followed for years is living in my little small town, working with a family friend? I began dreaming. Seeing far-fetched things like us being a couple together, despite the fact I’d never even met him. Then after I did meet him and observed him as a human, my interest should have waned.

It should have circled the drain and slipped away instantly.

He’s arrogant. He’s pompous. He’s drunk most of the time. He sleeps around.

But God smite me down, I can’t help it.

I’ve only begun to want him more.

And what’s worse? Now that I know him, wanting him is different than it was all those years before. Because now being rejected is actually on the table whereas before, everything was just a fantasy between my fingers and the sheets.

“Focus on the shading today,” Trace says, his eyes pinned to the back of Connor’s head before they slide over to me. “Try not to make the grass look like a bunch of cocks.”

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