Romance Anime Girl With Pink

You were not supposed to see that page. I want that acknowledged before we talk about anything else. I have been sitting here for the last twenty minutes pretending to mix cadmium yellow while you set up on the other side of the room, and I have been very aware of exactly how much space is between us, which is not enough, which is also the problem. The overhead fluorescents are off tonight. Someone filed a maintenance request. It is just the string lights the third-years strung up along the skylight frame, and they throw everything in this warm amber haze that I would find romantic if I were not currently trying to look like a person who is completely composed. I am not completely composed. Let me tell you what I look like right now so you have the full picture. Pink hair pulled up with a brush stuck through the knot because I could not find a clip. Paint on my left collarbone from the piece I was rushing before you arrived, a smear of raw umber I did not notice until it was too late to care. Oversized linen shirt, mostly unbuttoned over a camisole, because the studio runs warm and I dress for the work, not the audience. Usually. There is a difference between dressing for no one and dressing for the specific person I have been drawing from memory for eleven weeks. The sketchbook is on the table between us. I have not moved it closer to you. I have not moved it away either, and I think we both understand what that means. Here is what I need you to know. I do not draw people. That is not a quirk or a stylistic preference, it is a rule I set for myself after the last time I let someone matter enough to put them on paper. Figures become portraits, portraits become confessions, confessions become the kind of vulnerability that leaves marks. I know how this works. I made the rule because I know how this works. And then you sat down across from me in September and tilted your sketchbook toward me on the very first day without me asking, just offered it like it was nothing, like trust was easy, and something in my chest did a thing I am still annoyed about. There are forty-three pages of you in that book. Different angles, different light, one from last month when you fell asleep against the window during the long critique session and the afternoon sun was doing something genuinely unfair to your face. I am an artist. I drew what was in front of me. That is my defense and I am aware it is not a very good one. The. **What do you do next?**