Midnight Muse

Sleep wears on my body, trying to drag me down, but my mind is wide awake. Creative, is what I call it; insomniac, others might say. I won’t dare sleep a wink when Quinn is here to draw my attention. She sleeps so prettily with the morning sun cascading over her body as it rises, casting shadows across her skin in the most interesting way, highlighting those marks I left on her body…

For now, the marks are hickeys, but my mind is already flooded with ideas for tattoos to give her.

I take my pencil to the paper. I only have minutes to get this down in my book, if that. I don’t know when she’ll shift, if the sun will wake her or if everything that happened last night will come flooding in like a nightmare. I wonder how Quinn is going to react when she wakes up, if it will be a poor one where she pouts, or if she’ll frown and demand me back into the warm cocoon of blankets she’s surrounded herself with.

I just hope that she doesn’t regret it.

I shove the thoughts from my mind and focus back on the sketchpad.

I snag a kneaded eraser, blackened with use. There are shards of charcoal strewn about my desk, brushed to the sides for a clean workspace. The chalk clings to my skin and I breathe a sigh of contentment at its familiar texture. Rolling the stick between my fingers, I peer back over to her, the sudden urge to press my sooty fingertips against her perfect skin barreling through my thoughts.

My heart skips a beat at that, the idea of Quinn covered in the essence of my art, of me.

The drawings in my sketchpad are both rushed and not. Lazy, languid strokes when I have all of the time in the world to recount how she glared up at me. Quick, harsh lines of a fleeting smile, her gaze brushing mine.

The smooth, cream paper is fresh on both sides, a blank canvas inviting me to soil it with my charcoal. The blackness, like the voice of night I often find myself awake in, instead of letting it calm me to sleep. My eyes ache to fall shut but my mind won’t allow it, a thousand different images of Quinn from the night I have yet to add to the rapidly filling book propped over my knee.

I breathe in deeply, letting myself bask in the picture of her again, the sheet twisted around her body, barely covering her sex. I haven’t been so fortunate that she kicked it off in her sleep.

Maybe next time.

I’m quick to get Quinn’s form down. Her face, a circle for her skull, a smaller one following for her cheek where it’s pressed into the pillow. A line that marks the mattress. A box for the window so I can draw the rays of sun washing in over her. Maybe I’ll even add a halo to her disheveled blonde hair.

The curve of her body is drawn in such a fluid motion that it surprises me for a moment, but after last night, I feel like I know the dips of her silhouette better than I know my beloved motorcycle. The drawing of Quinn spans across both pages. One wouldn’t be enough to capture the raw beauty of her this morning, though I might already have five other sketches of her sleeping from when I found her in my bed a week ago.

I draw the swell of her breasts, her hand, relaxed at her hip, sketching the general shapes of her body before she shifts. Before she realizes that I’m missing from her side.

And not once do my hands shake.

With two quick drags of my chalk, there are her eyelids. My hand moves on its own and I do nothing to stop it. I almost don’t draw the fabric of the sheet. Instead, there’s a fleeting moment in my exhausted mind where I think about drawing that sweet little pussy of hers but it’s gone as fast as it comes, even if my dick does twitch in response. I drape the bending lines across her hips before filling it in with the flat of the stick, using the eraser to mark the highlights and my fingers to smudge the lines until they’re buttery smooth.

I love the way that the chalk sticks to me. The onyx dust coats my hands and covers the blemishes adorning my fingertips. It feels like a second skin, a plate of armor against unwanted stares—except for Quinn’s of course.

My mind always tends to wander to the self-hatred shadowing its corners when I’m tired. The loud music only helps on some nights, but in Quinn’s presence, it seems as if she’s scared them away like a beacon of light I’ve been missing for so long.

Tracing the lines of her fingers, I begin to add the finer details now that I have my base. I study the way the light spans certain areas of her body and hides others, filling in the paper with the thick stick of charcoal. The eraser waits in my other hand, ready to pull out the chalk from the chunk of black I’ve just colored in.

Occasionally, I blow the soot off of the page. It lifts, swirling around in the rays of the morning sun and I’m distracted by how pleasing it looks. Reminds me of the whorls of ink scattered around my body.

I scrub the powder into the grains of the paper. My hands are a mess and the medium sticks to the eraser I’m kneading into a point so I can carve out the shape of her nipples, tight from the brisk morning air. My gaze flickers to Quinn and back down to the paper again, tongue poking from between my lips as I focus on the important task at hand.

It’s a shame that she hasn’t woken up yet. I’ve finished my picture and I don’t know what to do now, what to draw because she hasn’t yet shifted in her sleep. I think about climbing back into bed with her because every blink feels like there’s sand in my eyes.

I know that I need to sleep. I know there are dark circles around my eyes and my skin is getting that sickly look my mother used to scold me about when I was young and stayed up all night studying anatomy on the internet.

Instead, I pull the chair closer to the bed. I can move behind Quinn and draw her backside, but I think better of it, wanting to sketch the more intimate parts of her like her face or where the crook of her arm barely covers the curve of her chest.

I focus on one thing at a time. Her hand. I draw her breasts and the hickeys I left surrounding them last night. Chalk up that tiny scar on her shoulder I have yet to ask about. So many things I don’t know about her, but her body is not one of them. I draw the shape of her ear and the piercings punched into them. Sketch the column of her throat, also mottled with marks from my lips.

I wonder if she’ll be upset with me when she notices them, knowing that she has class tomorrow.

I smirk at the thought of Reid getting an eyeful of those; of the guy I saw her with at the library seeing the bruises on her skin. I want them to know that she’s mine, that she’s off limits. It hadn’t been my intention when I was kissing them into her skin, but the thought makes my chest puff with protectiveness.

She hadn’t had sex with Reid, she told me. That sweet pussy is all for me. Only me.

I look at Quinn again, watch her even longer, hand frozen over the page. I’m staring again but she’s not awake to catch me.

From somewhere behind me, the buzz of my phone goes off. I place my sketchbook back on the desk and rub my filthy hands on a tissue I pull from the box on the shelf. Black streaks the thin material and it’s not enough to clean my skin, but I don’t care. I crumple the tissue and toss it into the trash can.