Life Drawing, Part II

He thinks about her on the way home—not cinematically, not as fantasy, but as a fixed point his memory keeps revisiting. Her drawings are good. He can admit that silently. Good enough that his own progress feels possible and insufficient.

The next session he chooses an angle that keeps her in peripheral vision on purpose—cowardly, human. She arrives with her hair pulled back differently; the change is small and enormous. He wonders whether anyone else notices.

During break she pours tea from a thermos and offers the spare cup without ceremony. "Extra," she says, softening generosity.

He takes it. Steam rises between them. "Thank you," he means for more than tea.

She smiles—quick, not performed—and returns to her easel. He returns to his, warmer at the throat, alert, as if the paper became a door.