The Reluctant Nude - Meg Maguire [41]
She grabbed her eyeglasses from her bag and went to the bathroom. She considered using Max’s toothbrush then decided it was one intimacy too far. Instead she smeared toothpaste on a clean washcloth and used that, rinsing it thoroughly after. She peeled off her sticky contact lenses and washed her face, studying it in the mirror. Her freckles were fading with the close of summer. She wondered where the past few weeks had gone.
She wandered around the studio, lost. She poked through Max’s metal shelves, among the tools and books and supplies and the many, many clay studies he’d created of hers and other people’s bodies. They weren’t polished and perfect like his finished statues, merely sketches—rough and gestural, quick and intuitive. Sometimes Max didn’t even look at his hands as he worked.
On one shelf stood a long line of black Moleskine notebooks, perhaps close to a hundred of them, all identical save for the different dusty finger marks smudging the spines. Fallon pulled the leftmost one down and opened it. Sketches in Max’s elegant style. Pencil, charcoal, ink. Dated close to seven years prior. The drawings on this page were of a woman with a severely hunched back and a pronounced nose. Beautiful images of the ugly. So Max, as she was coming to realize.
“You’re a strange man,” she murmured and replaced the sketchbook.
She climbed back up the staircase to peruse the ramshackle library piled in the corners of the loft. Lots of books but sadly most of them in French. On the table beside the bed, beneath an old analog alarm clock, lay another sketchbook.
Fallon slid it out and opened it to the first page. Herself. Her face, plus she’d know those hips anywhere. She flipped the pages, watching the progression of his renderings as they transformed, gradually, from exacting, rigid, anatomical studies to fluid figure drawings. Transforming as Fallon had, day by day. Each new series was dated and by the time she reached mid-September Max’s hand had relaxed, just as she had herself.
She flipped a few pages onward and gasped.
The date was Saturday’s, the day he’d forced her take the afternoon off by herself. Drawn before her on the page in fine, classical lines was both of them. Herself and Max, together. Together. And it was clearly Max, tattoos and all.
Her body buzzed hot with adrenaline.
The first of the highly erotic sketches had them wound in a deep embrace, kissing, him sitting cross-legged with her legs wrapped around his waist. This wasn’t pornography—nothing properly obscene was depicted, but still. She flipped another page, nerves jolting anew. The image of his body above hers. The next page, her on top of him.
She swallowed. “Holy shit.”
Fallon went back a few pages, confirming that these “studies” had only begun a couple of days ago, after the charged night at the bar and her doorstep. She was relieved he hadn’t created these images before then, before she’d flirted back.
She took another look at those most recent pages. He clearly knew his own body as well as he did hers. Fallon didn’t know which unnerved her the most—the subject matter or his undeniable talent.
No…she did know what disturbed her the most.
It was exactly how much she liked these drawings.
Chapter Seven
“Oh my God—what are you doing here?”
Two days after the tipsy spooning episode, Fallon opened the door of her rental cottage and gaped, shocked to find her best friend standing on the little porch at nine in the morning.
“Surprise!” Rachel held out her skinny arms and drew Fallon down into a warm, sister-quality hug.
“Whoa. I’ll say it again—what are you doing here?”
They hadn’t spoken for several days and Fallon had never mentioned where she was staying. She stood aside to let Rachel in, dumbfounded.
“Your mysterious sculptor called me a few days ago. Or he left a message.” Rachel set her purse down and glanced around the humble accommodations. “Do you have a coffeemaker? I just drove an all-nighter.”
“Yeah, hang