Page 62 of Roads Behind Us
“Lately though, I’ve had time.”
“What else have you drawn?” she asked, and she balanced the sketchpad over her arm so she could flip the page with her finger.
“No! Don’t look at that.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Bea
Bax threw out his arm to take the sketchbook away from me as I flipped to the next page, but the swift movement stole his balance, and he toppled to the ground like an old telephone pole in a stiff wind.
I dropped the book. “Shit! Are you okay?”
He groaned on the ground. “I’m fine. My ego’s just a little bruised.” He rolled onto his back in the grass and looked beside him, to where his sketchpad had fallen. It lay open to the drawing I’d been trying to see.
A drawing of me.
“Whoa,” I breathed, and I lowered myself to the grass, too, and crossed my legs in front of me.
In the mostly black-and-white sketch, Bax had captured an image of me standing in the dark next to my truck, dressed in the same clothes I’d been wearing when I first arrived at his house after my harrowing encounter with Wooly Wally. My hair was as dark as the night, and it flowed over my shoulder like silk. The only color on the page was the purple hue of my oversized RedHead sweatshirt.
The expression he’d given me in the drawing looked kind and warm, even though I’d felt tension between us that night. I’d still thought he was an asshole.
I’d never seen myself look so… pretty.
I picked up the sketchpad, securing the previous page underneath. “Can I have this?”
“No!” he said, and he sat up. “Sorry, I meant, if you don’t mind, I wanna keep that one. It’s not done.”
“Okay, but will you draw somethin’ for me?”
“Like what?”
“Dunno. I don’t have an artistic bone in my body. Whatever inspires you.” I stood, brushing dirt off my butt.
He cocked his head and reached for my hands again. I closed the sketchbook and secured it under my arm, then grasped Bax’s hands and held steady while he pulled himself up and balanced on one foot.
“Where are your pencils?”
“There,” he said, and he looked at the ground as I bent to grab his fallen crutches and handed them to him. A few feet away in the grass lay a plastic baggie with twenty or thirty different graphite pencils contained within.
“Will you draw somethin’ for me now?”
“Okay.” He blushed. It was hidden a bit in the dark, but the fire behind us and the white moon above us, slipping through slow-moving clouds, lit his face a little so I could see. “Come to my room.”
“Grab that chair,” Bax said when we were in the safety of his bedroom. He nodded to the hardback chair in the corner and the mud-crusted Tecovas on top as he sat on the edge of his bed. “Bring the boots too.”
Athena and Shaylene were in the middle of a Friends marathon in Athena’s bedroom, but I locked Bax’s door just in case. A sly light glinted in his eyes. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure what that meant, but I had a hope and a guess.
“Where do you want ’em?”
“At the end of the bed.”
I dragged the chair to the end of Bax’s unmade bed, set the boots on the floor next to the chair’s leg, and then stood there, waiting for further instruction.
He looked at me, tilting his head this way and that, and when he found whatever light or angle he’d been looking for, he scooted backward and stuffed a pillow behind his back. He bent his good knee and rested the sketchpad on top.
“Take off your clothes.”
