I was sitting backwards on one of the chairs in my tenant's kitchen, watching him cover an easel with bold strokes of varying shades of green. Sean had moved into the basement suite in late August, and we'd hit it off right away. He was a nice boy, 22 years old, a couple years older than my own son, who was also away at university.
We'd fallen into a comfortably symbiotic relationship: I kept him well-fed and he kept the little things running well around the house. By early December, we'd expanded our relationship to include much more than apple cobbler and shoveled driveways. This worked well for me, as I'd been finding that the rumour about women in their thirties hitting their sexual peak was indeed a fact.
I'd been a very horny teenager, and if someone had told me that one day I'd reach a stage in my life where my hormonal teenage sexuality would pale by comparison, I would never have believed them. So it was very convenient, and gratifying, to have a young, sexy stud living right here in my house. Looking back, I was so glad I didn't take the thirty-something female who also answered my newspaper rental ad.
He mixed a little black into the paint on his palette, making a beautiful forest green, which he dabbed along the bottom of the paper.
"Mind if I put some music on?"
He glanced over and hesitated. "Well, as long as you don't pick something loud and angry. It's hard to paint with a certain atmosphere in mind when you're surrounded by something totally different."
I nodded and headed over to his cd collection. Alphabetized and in pristine condition, every single of the over 400 albums. I scanned down the holder until I got to the N's. I pulled one out and flipped it over, checking out the song list before nodding to myself and putting it on.
"What did you pick?" he asked, adding delicate twirls of candy apple red to his picture.
"Nine Inch Nails," I stated with a straight face and straddled the chair again. He looked at me, startled. I gave him my best "wide eyed innocence" look, and then grinned as the first Norah Jones song started. He scowled menacingly at me and turned back to the artwork. I watched him work, tapping my foot quietly to the music, occasionally singing the odd lyric under my breath.
"I want to paint you one day," he said without looking over. "You'd make a beautiful nude."
I smiled and folded my hands on the back of the chair, leaning my cheek on them. Norah's gentle voice drifted through the room and I watched the muscles in Sean's forearm shift as he moved his wrist rhythmically, building layer after layer of colour, creating images on the paper right before my eyes. The hues of green took the shape of leaves, the reds magically transformed into crisp apples.
His ivory face was intense, his piercing blue eyes intent on the paper. My eyes drifted down over the sculpted cheekbone that I'd gently traced many a time, the clean jawline I'd ran a finger along, the bottom lip I'd kissed too many times to count that was now being bitten in concentration. I tried to take in every detail, wanting to burn the image into my brain to pull up at any future time.
"Sean?" I whispered.
