My nipples stood erect beneath a constant flow of AC that, for some reason, was still running even though it was December.
A class of art students committed the scene to canvas. Why did I have to be half-naked for this? The thin white sheet covering my legs waved under the air flow and tickled my thigh. But I wasn’t allowed to move, not if I wanted the fifty dollars. Verona glanced up from her easel to wink at me.
The clock on the wall said it was 1:44 PM, and I tried to subtract that from the time I got here but couldn’t remember when that was. Stacy sat in the far back, trying to make eye contact with me. She wasn’t even pretending to draw anything on her canvas as she ran her necklace across her lips. Some sort of cat pendant. A fox? She let it drop between her breasts. Making the Naughty List. The thin sheet brushed against the inside of my leg.
Hair stood along my thigh, and blood diverted to my trunk. I bit my lip. Hard. Anything to stop the oncoming erection. Some guy in a blue satin shirt stared directly into my eyes, not even looking at his canvas as he ran a pencil over it. Warm liquid bled between my teeth from inside my lip. The girl at the very front of the class was even more distracting. I could see directly down her shirt, and her nipples were as hard as mine.
My dick grew heavier, stretching outwards. Why did everyone here look like a model? Skin pressed against fabric, and my makeshift dress pitched forward. A small chunk of something came off in my mouth, blood gushed against my tongue.
“Fuck,” I grabbed my jaw and stumbled off the small stage, making sure to turn away from the crowd as I did. My erection instantly deflated, and Verona shot up from her chair. “Sorry,” I muttered to the sea of faces, holding a hand up to stop Verona from coming over. “I think I just bit my lip, is all.” Hot blood funneled down my throat like liquid rust. I kept swallowing to hide the amount.
Stacy bit into her fox necklace, trying not to laugh.
It looked like a photograph, this girl’s painting. Every detail, even down to the scar on my lip. It wasn’t like Verona’s, there was no mistaking it for a coyote. There was no mistaking it for anyone but me.
“I’m a glad you like it,” the girl from the front of the class said as she zipped the life-like image into some protective case. “I’m a still need to color it in though. It’ll be hard to replicate those blue eyes.” My nipples stayed hard beneath the blowing AC, even though I finally had my clothes back on. “Hey,” she said, looking up at me. “Do you do any private modeling?”
Before I could answer, Verona interjected herself between us, the nazar bouncing around her neck like an all-seeing eye. “Guess what,” she asked, wrapping one arm tight around me and pointing the other towards the direction of some person in a silk shirt. “That guy over there? He was just telling me he has some jobs that you,” She pressed a long, manicured nail against my chest, “would be perfect for.”
What kind of jobs would I be perfect for? I pictured myself fully naked, lying in a concrete basement somewhere. A chicken with its head cut off.
The girl from the front seat looked over her shoulder. “Oh, him?” she asked. “He represents me too.” A fake star glittered from her thumbnail as she stuffed a handful of erasers into her bag. None of them even looked used. “He’s great,” she continued, collecting the rest of her things together. “I a guess that means we’ll be seeing each other around.” She flashed a quick smile, brushing past me as she did. The wound on my lip throbbed.
Verona squinted her eyes, looking at the girl from the front row, then back at me. I faked a cough into my hand. “So professional model, huh?” I asked. “Not a job title I ever thought I’d have. How’s the…uhh…pay?”
Her all-knowing eyes pierced through me. “If you want to keep your balls, don’t even fucking think about it,” she whispered, nodding her head in the direction of her classmate. My nipples pressed harder against my shirt as she pulled away and walked across the classroom. “Now,” she said, picking her own canvas off its easel, “let's drop this off at the storage place and go home.”
It didn’t look like anyone else’s, her picture. Instead of sketching me, she had drawn two birds. One with a red mohawk that looked like the one she had doodled on the front of her sketchbook, and one with a cracked beak. The AC clunked off.
“Have you read this?” Verona pushed a newspaper across the table while I chewed on eggs and some sort of pork sausage. The title stretched across the top of the page in big, block letters.
Who Killed Me?
The picture of a young Nathan stared out from the paper. Clear skinned. Styled hair. This wasn’t the Nathan I ever knew. This Nathan looked like a model. Open smile. Jeweled eyes. I tongued a piece of pork that was stuck between my teeth and scanned through parts of the article. Everyone looks different through the laminated glass of a police car, one of the sentences said. Guilty.
“People think it was a drug deal gone wrong…like, really wrong,” Verona said. She hadn’t touched the breakfast I had made for her. “They think Nathan was wrapped up in something pretty bad.”
Her body shook, and the nazar bobbed up and down around her neck like a turkey’s chin. The chewed up pork didn’t sit right in my stomach. Police aren’t talking, but everyone else is. We got in contact with one of Nathan’s old classmates. Verona’s fork clinked against her plate as she pushed her eggs around, turning them brown as they absorbed sausage grease. “Are you sure you don’t know anything?” she asked into her plate.
I reached my hand out to steady hers, and she let her fork clatter against the table. “We have nothing to worry about,” I said in a voice I didn’t recognize. “You’re going to get into the best art school there is, and by this time next year? We won’t even be on this continent.”
Her necklace quit bouncing and even her hand steadied. He was a pretty angry guy. Last time any of us saw him, he had picked a fight with some freshman. Left the kid pretty beat up, too. I think he still has scars from it. She pushed her red hair from her face, revealing a soft smile.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do without you this week,” she said, squeezing my hand.
Shit. Christmas vacation. I forgot.
It was just going to be me here. Alone. My guess? He probably started a fight he couldn’t win. I hadn’t realized how empty the apartment looked. With all Verona’s paintings in storage, she was the only thing keeping it alive. The walls were just a collection of tiny nail holes. My stomach filled, trying to churn through the pile of food inside it.
“Try not to burn down my apartment while I’m gone.” Verona winked.
I smiled, keeping my hand in hers. “Try not to kill your dad.”
Muffled laughter floated up from the street as people walked by. It was quiet enough to hear the refrigerator hum. I stared at the blank wall. Maybe I could find something to hang on it while Verona was gone. Where does someone buy art? I guess he was doing the best he could. He definitely didn’t deserve to die.
“Kurt?” Verona asked. I raised my eyebrow, giving her my attention. “I think I love you.”
My stomach tightened, forcing the bits of pork and egg it had been digesting into one big clump. The mass sloshed inside me. “Verona…” I squeezed her hand tighter as if it would loosen the contents of my stomach. “I…” My gut gargled like a dying cat. Even Verona heard it.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I pressed my fist to my mouth, but it wasn’t going to stay down. Honestly, the whole thing makes me sick. I shot up from my chair and darted to the kitchen sink, making it just in time for the ground sausage to spew scattershot across the dirty dishes. Yellow drool hung from my lips like egg yolk and the back of my nose stung. The sink smelled like old milk and dish soap. I breathed waves into an unemptied cereal bowl, waiting as the next wave of nausea built back up.
Woo! Thanks, Maegan.