Page 58 of Fire of the Fox

His mouth was set in a deep frown, his brow furrowed as if he were trying to solve an impossible puzzle. “But the sky isn’t yellow.”

I laughed. “I told you. Mine is going to be a bit different.”

I made my way back over to our table as he began to dry his paint. When I sat back down, I didn’t wait for further instruction. I cleaned my brush off and started to mix colors and let the image bleed from inside me and out onto the canvas.

When Rune sat back down, he had blue paint smeared on his hands. He was trying to blow some stray strands of his hair back from his eyes without touching it with his stained fingers.

Giggling at his failed efforts, I reached into my purse, pulling out a spare hair tie.

“Here,” I offered, standing up. “Want me to pull your hair back for you?”

He glanced at the hair band then met my eyes with a bashful grin. “Please. As much as I love blue, I’d rather not have blue hair.”

Laughing, I stood behind him. My heart started thundering in my chest as I slowly reached forward. His hair was even softer than I thought it would be. It slipped through my fingers like pure silk. I’d secretly wanted to run my hands through his long hair before, and now that I actually was, my heart twisted with excited nerves. It felt intimate to comb my fingers through his hair, and it made my skin prickle with desire for him.

I couldn’t let that happen.

Clearing my throat, I finished raking back the strands and secured his hair in a small ponytail. “All done.”

One corner of his lush lips lifted as I sat back down on my stool. I swallowed hard seeing him with his hair pulled back. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen him like this since he always put it up when we trained. Still, I didn’t think I’d ever get used to how attractive it made him look.

It took me a minute to focus on my painting again, but once I did, I got lost in the vision. I was constantly getting up to dry the paint so that I could keep going. Every time I began painting again, Rune would glance at mine, then his, then the one up front.

Rune was fun to watch. Anytime he finished something, he would sit there and wait for further instructions from Mr. Lancer, and as Mr. Lancer spoke, Rune’s brow would furrow as he concentrated. When he painted, he leaned close to the canvas and moved his hand ever so slowly so that he wouldn’t mess up. It was hard not to smile while watching him. He was trying so hard to replicate the example picture, and I found myself leaning over to help him at moments when he seemed disheartened.

I had just gotten focused on adding the stream to my painting when Rune’s voice broke my concentration.

“Hey,” Rune said.

“Hmm?”

I turned to him, and at the same moment, he swiped his paint brush across the bridge of my nose. Instantly, he bent over, clutching his stomach as his deep laugh rocked his body. My mouth hung open, and it took me a second to recover from the shock. Laughing, I quickly grabbed my own brush and smeared black paint across his jawline.

This was war.

Rune made a move to come at me with his purple paint brush, and I held his wrists, trying to fight off his advances and my own laughter. As he was about to reach my neck, Mr. Lancer cleared his throat from behind us. My stomach dropped as we whipped around to face him.

“Children, this isn’t that kind of paint class.” He gave us a pointed look and cast another around the room. After ensuring no one was eavesdropping, he leaned in close and whispered, “But I do have a class of that nature. See me afterwards for details if interested.”

He walked away briskly. Rune and I met each other’s eyes, and in an instant, we broke out into fits of laughter again. It was minutes before we calmed down and got back to the task at hand.

By the time I finished my painting, it was still a landscape with water, but it wasn’t a lake with mountains in the background. Mine depicted what had become one of my most treasured places. It was the stream behind my campus dorm room. It showed the stream with the trees beyond it during sunset, so gold light streamed through the trees, reflecting upon the water’s surface. Not only was it the picture of the stream and surrounding forest, but in the center of the painting, at the edge of the stream, I had also painted the fox and me sitting side by side. We were facing the water, our backs to the viewer.

I beamed at my completed painting, then turned to look at Rune’s. He stared at his painting with a solemn look. He had tried so hard on his painting, yet it looked like a blue half circle at the base of two purple triangles with white lines every now and then. I bit my lip to fight the giggle that was trying to escape, finding it oddly adorable.

“Mine looks like a third grader did it,” he pouted with a huff.

I laughed and shook my head. “Well, I love it.”

He looked at mine for the first time since its completion, and when he did, something in his gaze changed. It sharpened and became alight with some unreadable emotion. His eyes flicked to me, then back to the painting. He slowly raised his hand, pointing at the piece. “Is-is that—”

I turned back to my own work and gave a satisfied nod. “It’s the creek where I met the fox.”

Rune stared at the painting, his amber eyes shining. The way his gaze traced every detail of the picture made my heart want to leap from my chest. He seemed so captivated by the painting, and that warmed me from head to toe. Besides my art teachers, no one had looked at my works the way Rune was. Granted, it looked good, but he seemed utterly fascinated by the picture, as if it held answers to some unknown question. He looked at it the way I looked at the picture of him with his brothers.

After a few more moments, he shook his head and looked away from the picture. He cleared his throat and said, “Well, I guess we should go now since the class is over.”

We gathered our paintings and made our way back outside. Luckily, the rain had stopped by this point, so our paintings didn’t get wet. Rune wanted to throw his in the garbage, but I wouldn’t let him. He frowned as he placed it in the backseat, along with mine.

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