Page 5 of Happy Ending

“Hey! Uh- come in,” she says softly, opening the door and stepping aside to let me in.

As soon as I step inside, the familiar scent of her mom’s famous empanadas fills my nose.

We walk through the kitchen to the basement door, and I spot her mom happily humming away by the kitchen counter, mixing some sort of meat in a bowl.

“Ay, Drew! Good to see you around again. Where have you been?” Marissa asks, whipping around to face me.

“Hi, Ms. Loveum! Oh, you know, just trying to get through this last semester.” I feed her the same line I’ve been telling everyone this past week.

“Laine, this is what you should be doing instead of doodling in your room all the time.” Marissa gestures to me as she shakes her head at Laine.

“It’s not doodling, Mother! It’s a personal project I’ve been telling myself I’d complete since I was young.

” Laine argues back. She looks hurt, and although my first instinct is to wrap my arms around her and tell her that I believe in her and her project and that I don’t think she’s wasting her time by doing what she loves, I side with my better judgment and decide against it.

Laine leads me downstairs to her room, and her sweet scent of strawberries and cinnamon floods my nose once again.

I try to remind myself that the comfort attached to the scent isn’t there anymore, but inevitably, my body relaxes at the first whiff of it.

“You can take your shoes and shirt off and lie on the bed,” she says, nodding towards the bed and sitting on the floor.

She swirls around so her back is towards me.

“I’ve been working on the floor because it’s way easier to work on this big of a canvas this way.

” I can tell she’s trying to make casual small talk, but it feels uncomfortably superficial compared to the deep and vulnerable conversations we’ve had before.

I untie my Converse and kick them off onto her floor, nodding my head slightly even though her eyes are fixed on the floor, focusing on the array of brushes laid out on the tarp she’s covered the carpet with.

As I slip off my shirt and throw it in a pile on the floor onto my shoes, I glance down at the painting of a woman lying on her side on the canvas.

Instantly, I can tell Laine is far too hard on herself.

The line that was once the torso is ever so faintly visible, but it looks perfect.

From the curve to the ratio of it compared to the whole body, to the thickness of the strokes, it’s flawless.

It’s Laine’s. I’m almost angry with myself for being able to recognize her torso solely from holding it in the lake, sitting against it on the log by the fire, and lying beside it at the playground.

Angry for letting myself learn so much of her, knowing that none of it was promised.

Angry for thinking I had something stable, something unchanging.

“You can turn around,” I say, quieter than I intended to, letting it ring out almost as a whisper.

Laine spins around and gets up on her feet, slowly walking toward me on the bed.

She grabs my legs and gently spins them around to put them in a mermaid-like position behind me.

Just the feeling of her long, familiar fingers on my skin makes my heart pound incessantly, and I’m suddenly praying to the God that’s slowly taking her from me that she can’t hear it through my chest as she stands over me, leaning against the mattress as she positions my limbs where she wants them just as she did when she drew me at the cabin.

My legs stiffen as I try my best to lock them into place, which also happens to be my pathetic attempt to hide how much of my body is shaking with nerves under her touch.

Instantly, the reluctance to come here feels like a huge mistake, but I’m already too far in to quit now.

The best I can do for the rest of tonight is to act normal and lie still until she’s done.

It’s just a side, how long could it possibly take?

******

Sixteen tries and two hours later, Laine claims to have finally gotten the curve right, though I believe she got it right fifteen tries ago. But what do I know? I’m not the artist here.

By now, there’s paint smudged all over her face, and her overalls are barely blue anymore.

Her fingers, however, are still stained delicately to the point where it looks like the paint is supposed to be there.

It feels surreal watching the colors accumulate on her skin after memorizing the way they looked so natural for so long, as if this is confirmation she doesn’t just wake up this vibrant.

I’m still lying on my side where Laine’s positioned me as she tilts her head sideways, looking down at the canvas intently.

It’s almost completely painted, except for the torso she just fixed.

My legs feel numb and tingly from lying at that angle for hours, and my abs are definitely feeling it from holding themselves up for this long.

Finally, she clicks her tongue against her teeth and slowly walks over to me. I stare up at her as she leans against the bed again, this time reaching out her colorful hand and tracing along the side of my torso.

Her eyes dart carefully between the canvas and my side, her warm fingers sliding up and down the curve of my side. She looks into my eyes as she touches me, and my insides feel warm again, like they do every time she’s touched me before.

Instantly, I forget everything I had been angry at myself for. I give in to her, melting into her warm embrace so comfortably like I had before at the lake, by the fire pit, at the playground.

My legs unstiffen, and my whole body goes limp as Laine traces her fingers up my side, eventually reaching my shoulder, then around to the back of my neck.

She tenderly guides my neck down so I’m lying flat on my back atop her bed, and she swings one leg around me, her knee digging into the mattress.

With one foot still on the floor, she leans down so her face is inches away from mine again, the gap between our lips slowly closing.

Despite the heat rushing through my body, I’m ironically frozen in place, afraid that if I move or say something, she’ll run like the last time she did when we were face to face like this. But this time, she doesn’t.

Instead, she leans down until our lips meet, pulling her other hand up to my waist. Laine kisses me like she’s using her last breaths to do so.

Like I’ll disappear if she doesn’t. I kiss her back, bringing my hands up to hold her face.

She tastes like herbs, surprisingly. Like a mix of basil and mint, and rosemary.

I let out a heavy breath as she holds my bottom lip between her teeth, moving her hand from my neck and up through my hair.

My lips burn, and my head feels pressured, but in the best way possible.

My body feels electric as I learn her lips in ways I’d been yearning to for months.

Ways I’d only learned her body through holding it for comfort.

I undo the side of her overalls that hadn’t already been hanging before and slip her shirt off, running my hands down her upper body and stopping to rest them on the sides of her abdomen, gently guiding her body as it moves into mine, each kiss getting more passionate than the last. Even though she’s seen me in less than I have on right now, my cheeks burn bright red from giddy embarrassment now that she’s seeing it in this context.

Laine pulls away, looking into my eyes and making everything around me a dizzy blur.

Paint splotches are stained all over her face, and most of her hair has fallen out of her messy bun.

She looks deathly attractive even when she’s a disheveled mess.

Her lips are swollen, and her eye bags have sunken even further, and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

I study her face, dropping my gaze from her eyes to her lips, then back up to her eyes again before gently grabbing the back of her head and moving my other hand to her waist, pulling her into me.

Her body is warm against mine, and despite never having much of an interest in art before, I’ve never wanted to be a starving artist more than I do right now.

14

Laine

I ’m not sure what came over me when I texted Drew to

come over. I told myself I wouldn’t call her, no matter how stuck I felt on my project.

I wouldn’t pull her across the line I drew in the dirt that fogs my head.

Part of me is disappointed with myself that I became so desperate.

So desperate that I let her infiltrate what was supposed to be my distraction from her.

So indulged in my own feelings that I lost my artistic touch without her.

The more I hung out with her, the more the yearning inside me grew. But the more I went to Holy Trinity, the guilt came back. I can’t help but feel like there’s something wrong with me. I can’t figure out why I harbor these feelings, I know I’m not supposed to.

I stare down at the canvas, studying the smudges of the torso I drew perfectly fifteen times before finally settling for the sixteenth. I’d made Drew lie in a mermaid position for close to two hours, stalling the final outline, doing anything to keep her here with me. At my house, in my room.

The original plan was to use her for my project, then distance after.

Dick move, I know, but I figured I was already a villain in her story after walking out on her at the playground, so what’s one last hit to the heart?

After all, it would be easier to distance myself from her if I told myself she already hated me.