Page 8 of Illicit Illustration

When the bell rang indicating this round was over, I scrubbed my hand over my face, scratching the hair covering my jaw. I’d been debating getting rid of the beard for months, but at this point in my life, it was my emotional support facial hair. Weren’t beards supposed to make every man exponentially more attractive?

And Colorado winters were cold as fuck, so it was like having a built-in face warmer.

“It was like nice to meet you,” she chirped, and I braced myself for the next woman. Charley hadn’t warned me I’d be bored out of my fucking mind during this.

Adding one last crosshatch to the bottom of the letter E on my paper, I drew a line through the #5 written at the top of the pageand chuckled at the incredibly detailed block letters spelling out the word LIKE that covered thelikepage.

It was clear I did notlikenumber five.

Number four wasn’t much better. She didn’t talk unless I asked a question, and even then, she gave one sentence answers. After asking most of the questions on my prompt sheet, we lapsed into awkward silence for the last minute. She didn’t even say goodbye when the bell rang, and I wondered why some of these women had taken part if they weren’t taking it seriously.

I was trying to, but after three more soul-sucking rotations, my patience was waning. Number three whispered everything, and after I asked her to repeat herself multiple times, I just ended up sketching a very detailed set of lips across the page with tiny words floating around it.

By the time I got to bachelorette fourteen, I was ready to just lay my head down on the table and take a nap. If I wasn’t afraid of Charley grabbing the pink bat she now kept stored underneath the counter at the bar and whacking me with it, I would have.

“Hi,” she greeted, and a grin pulled across my face. Finally. Even from one word, I’d know that soft dulcet anywhere. It had been haunting my dreams for months.

“Hey,” I responded, pitching my voice slightly lower so she hopefully wouldn’t recognize it. While actually talking to each other over the last few months was a recent development, we’d spent enough time shooting the shit at the bar while she cleaned glasses after a shift for her to know what I sounded like.

“Okay, I’m just going to ask…” she trailed off, and I sat up straighter, ready for her to call me out. If she flat out asked me who I was, I wouldn’t lie to her.

“Hmm,” I hummed, hoping that was enough of a prompt for her to continue.

“Are you super bored right now?”

Laughing, I looked down at the once blank sheet with the #14 written on the top. The soft jawline of a woman had curved around the page, my fingers moving on autopilot as I shaded a slightdimple in her right cheek, the shape of her lips long committed to memory.

“Like you would not believe.”

Her soft laughter did something to my chest that I was not going to acknowledge right now. But this was the first rotation where I dreaded the clock counting down and our turn being over.

“So, we should probably get to it. Do you want to ask the first question, or should I?”

“Go for it, H…” I trailed off, clearing my throat before course correcting after I almost said her name. “Hun.”

“Ah, a nickname guy. Do you call everyonehun?”

“No, not really. At least not in everyday conversation. I’m more of a nickname in the heat of the moment kind of guy.”

“Oh, really?” she laughed. “And what’s your go to?”

“This is our first date, and you already want to know what I call women in bed? Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself? We’re supposed to be askinggetting to know youquestions.”

Her laughter warmed my heart, and I was almost embarrassed for myself at how much I lit up when I talked to her lately. I was a thirty-one-year-old grown ass man, not a sixteen-year-old.

“You can tell me,” she coaxed, her voice taking on a throaty quality that had other parts of me taking notice.

“Are you going to be agood girland use the questions on the sheet if I do? Hmm?”

She let out a little squeak of surprise and I turned my attention to the page I had absentmindedly been sketching on. The image of Hazel’s lips on the paper prompted me to lick mine, and I shifted in my chair because that unassuming noise should not have been turning me on.

“I think you just gave yourself away, handsome.”

“How do you know I’m handsome?” I asked, deciding to tease her a bit.

“Just a hunch. Any man with a voice like yours and delivery of agood girlthat smoothly has to be attractive. You’ve clearly got practice with those words coming off your lips.”

“Is that so?” I hummed, wanting to keep her talking. Even though we were completely off the rails and only had a few minutes left, I was enjoying this flirtatious side of her.

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