Drawing Lessons Read online

  “How did it go today?” he asked as he refilled her wine glass.

  Marie contemplated the burgundy liquid in her glass, and the flicker of golden candlelight reflecting through it. “You might be wasting your time with me.”

  “Non, Marie. You have the skill. You have good instincts. But you draw from your mind, from how you think something should look. I will teach you how to draw what you see, not what you think.”

  He scooped pasta onto her plate. “But first, we eat. I will show you after dinner.”

  When the second bottle was empty, Luc cleared the table and brought back the sketchpad and pencil.

  “I’m not sure I can draw right now,” she protested. “I’ve had too much to drink.”

  “Actually, you’ve had just the right amount to drink.” He blew out the candle on one of the candlesticks. “Enough to shut off your brain for awhile and let your other senses take over.”

  “No, I’m pretty certain I’m too drunk to even draw a straight line.” Marie drew her finger in a wiggly line across the table. “Am I slurring my words?”

  Luc covered her hand with his, stopping it in its path. “If you’re drawing lots of straight lines, you’re not seeing properly anyway.” Then he leaned over her and covered her mouth with his. His lips were warm, his breath spicy with wine and garlic, and Marie froze, unable to move or even breathe. Had her heart stopped entirely or was it simply beating too fast for her to feel? She couldn’t tell.

  His lips teased hers open so he could suck gently on her lower lip. A mellow warmth began to spread through her body, her arms and thighs prickling with tiny fingers of heat. When she felt his tongue brush against her lip, she tensed in the chair. He placed his hands on her shoulders, leaning into her.

  “Am I slurring your thoughts, Marie?” He breathed the words, hot and low, into her mouth.

  She had just enough consciousness left to nod.

  “Good. You don’t need to think anymore tonight. And you definitely won’t need to speak.”

  “But—”

  He resumed the kiss, harder and more insistent this time. “You are not to speak again tonight until I say you may. Or the lesson ends.”

  Just as Marie began to allow herself to kiss him back, he groaned and lifted his lips from hers, breaking the kiss. The look in his eyes was dark and wild.

  “For the rest of the evening, you’ll need only two senses, Marie. Seeing and touching.”

  Marie bit down on her lower lip, pulling it into her mouth—not to stop the flow of words swirling in her brain—but to keep the taste of Luc Marchand from evaporating off her skin. He had done that on purpose, she was certain. Commanded her to use only two senses, but made it impossible to ignore a third.

  “Close your eyes, Marie.”

  Luc stood behind her chair. She closed her eyes, then gasped in surprise as a velvet blindfold was tied around her head. She opened her mouth to speak, but Luc cut her off.

  “Shh. No words, remember?”

  A shiver of fear raced down her spine. She was to use only two senses tonight, and now he was cutting off one of the two. Maybe Nishi should have run a background check on the guy. Maybe Marie should have done that herself before agreeing to come back here. She could see the headlines now: Congressman’s ex-wife found dead in artist’s studio.

  She felt something cold and heavy placed in her hands.

  “Here.” Luc’s voice was soft now, less commanding. “Hold this. Touch it.”

  Marie held the object in one hand while her other hand roved over it. It was long and slender, cool to the touch. She tapped her fingernails against it. It was made of some sort of metal.

  “Oh, it’s—”

  “Shh. I know what it is. Just feel it.”

  Her hands continued their exploration. She was holding a candlestick, but not one of the candlesticks that had been on the table while they ate. Those had been sleek and glass. This one was cast from an intricate mold. Her fingers glided over its curves, stopping to explore when they came to sharp points or shallow ridges. Her thumb dipped into the hole at one end. She scraped away a sliver of old wax with her nail.

  Just as suddenly as she had been blindfolded, the candlestick was gone from her hands. Luc untied the blindfold and laid it on the table, next to the sketchpad.

  “Now draw what you just held.”

  Marie looked around for the candlestick.

  “It’s not here. Draw it from memory, from the way it felt in your hands.”

  She picked up the pencil and began to sketch in the candlestick’s curves and points as best she could recall them. Quickly, though, she realized she couldn’t remember which end of the candlestick had been the top and which had been the bottom. Luc sat opposite her and watched intently as she worked.

  When she finished—or gave up—she set down the pencil and pushed away the pad. Luc went into the next room for a moment. When he returned, he set the candlestick down next to her drawing. Marie groaned and closed her eyes. She wasn’t even close.

  “It’s okay, Marie,” came Luc’s voice, soft and understanding. “This is where most people start, blind. You just need practice.”

  Her eyelids felt like lead weights and she was unable to contain a sudden yawn. Too much wine and too little sleep last night.

  “It’s late. Why don’t I show you to your room?”

  Silently, Marie followed Luc to his guest room. Her weekend bag sat on a wooden luggage stand, the bed’s covers had been turned back to reveal fluffy white pillows, and a grey cashmere robe hung from a hook next to the room.

  “This is—”

  “Shh.” Luc closed the window blinds. “We’ll talk at breakfast.”

  When he left, Marie let out a quiet, controlled exhale. Was this how he conducted all his lessons? It was odd. She’d had some weird birds for art professors in college, but Luc Marchand took the cake. No talking. Blindfolds. Kissing. DWI, drawing while intoxicated. She giggled, until her mind wandered off to pursue other questions. What would it be like to kiss Luc Marchand while blindfolded? Whom else had he tied a blindfold around?

  Stop it. You cannot be jealous.

  But she was.

  Outside, the storm that had been brewing all day on the horizon arrived with a rolling shudder of thunder. Rain slapped against the windows of the room. She sucked in her lower lip, searching for any lingering trace of garlic and wine, any last faint taste of his kiss, and thought unkind thoughts about every other, unnamed, faceless student who had been kissed by Luc Marchand.

  * * *

  “Did you sleep well last night?” Luc asked as he cleared away the breakfast dishes. He looked well-rested, clean-shaven and with none of the dark shadows that marred Marie’s eyes. His navy linen shirt was pressed and tucked neatly into unwrinkled khakis. Marie thought of the sweat-soaked pajamas stuffed into her weekend bag.

  “Yes, I did,” she answered. She hadn’t, of course, and offered up a silent prayer that he wouldn’t call her on the lie. The last thing she wanted to do was explain the dream she’d had, the one that had left her unable to go back to sleep.

  In the dream she had been not a student, but a model. A model like the ones she had drawn in her college drawing classes. She sat on a wooden stool in the middle of a studio, her blouse and bra and jeans in a heap on the floor. But instead of modeling for a class full of undergraduates, she’d been modeling for just one person. Luc Marchand.

  Normally, Marie wasn’t one to remember dreams in vivid detail. When the sun rose, the contours of her dreams faded into the light and usually she was thankful for that. But this morning, she couldn’t seem to shake the details of last night’s dream. Nor was she sure she wanted to. It had been nighttime in the dream, the windows of the studio black against the darkness outside. From overhead, a pool of yellow light illuminated her. She’d had to squint to see Luc behind his easel, his eyes shifting between her and his sketchpad as he drew. No one said a word. The only sound had been the thunderstorm washing over the vall
ey.

  Marie had never worked as an artist’s model before, nor ever had the desire to. In fact, she’d always felt vaguely sorry for the classroom models with their gooseflesh and muscles quivering from the strain of holding still. In her dream, though, it had been the most arousing thing she’d ever done, sitting there perfectly still while Luc Marchand drew her breasts.

  “Marie?” Luc’s voice broke into her reverie. “Is that your phone?” The smirk on his face and the carefully-lifted eyebrow said well, are you going to answer that?

  Marie shook off the last of the dream. Yes, that was her phone trilling from the bottom of her purse. She dug it out.

  “Hello?”

  It was her mother, asking her to come into the office today.

  “I can come in later ... late afternoon, mother ... I’m sorry ... not before then ... I’m not at home ...” Where was she? “In Middleburg. I’m shopping with friends ... no, we can’t leave yet ... I’m sorry ... I’m helping her look for ... a wedding gown ... there is now ... I’ll see you later this afternoon.”

  She ended the call and dropped the phone back into her bag. Then she pulled it back out and silenced it.

  “Bon,” Luc said.

  She turned to face him. He was sitting at the table.

  “There’s a line between apologizing and groveling. I think you just crossed it,” he said.

  She shrugged.

  He did an exaggerated imitation of shrugging. “What’s this? You do this all the time.”

  “It means I don’t know.”

  “I think it means you don’t want to talk about it.”

  Marie stood awkwardly, her arms hanging by her side, at loose ends—the way she was so often these days. She crossed her arms over her chest. She knew the protective gesture was ridiculous even as she did it. She hadn’t really exposed her breasts to this man. A dream didn’t count.

  “So you’re helping a friend shop for a wedding gown right now?” Luc sipped from what surely must be cold coffee by now, an amused smile playing around his lips.

  She shrugged again, which made him laugh and say something in French that she couldn’t understand.

  Marie sat down in the chair, scooting it away from Luc a few inches. He hooked his feet around the chair’s front legs and pulled it back.

  “You can’t tell your mother that you’re here?”

  She looked at him incredulously. “That I’m at a man’s house this early in the morning? Not unless you want a few uninvited guests with badges and guns.”

  “You could have said you were taking a class somewhere else. Isn’t that a reasonable weekend activity?”

  “Then I would have had to tell her where. And run the risk that she knows someone there, and will talk to them later, and then my lie would be found out.”

  “You’re really afraid of your parents, aren’t you? That’s why you pushed me away in your car.”

  “I don’t have ordinary parents. And unfortunately, my life doesn’t operate separate from them. I’m just a teeny-tiny little planet in their orbit.”

  Luc leaned forward and placed his palms on her knees. “Do you want to leave? I don’t want to cause trouble for you.”

  “No, I don’t want to go,” she said at last, lifting her gaze from where his hands were burning a hole through her jeans. His body was so close to hers, distractingly close, that it was hard to think. “I just have to keep certain parts of my life private from them. Even if I didn’t, I don’t know that I would tell them. This is something I want to do for myself.”

  “It will be challenging. I don’t let my students slack off.”

  “I understand that.”

  “I will push you, Marie. I will push you to push yourself, because that is the only way to learn anything that is worth knowing.”

  When she nodded in agreement, he lifted his palms from her knees and flattened one against the table, splaying his long, charcoal-stained fingers. “Close your eyes and touch my hand.”

  “No blindfold this time?” she asked.

  “I have to be able to trust you, Marie. If I tell you not to look, I have to trust that you won’t.”

  She closed her eyes tight, then began tracing the outline of his hand with her fingers. Her touch was tentative, feathery.

  “Harder, Marie. You won’t break me.”

  She pressed harder, feeling the soft veins just beneath his skin, the bony knobs of his knuckles. When she ran the tip of her finger gently along the curve of his cuticle, she heard him draw in his breath sharply. She waited for him to ask her to stop. When he didn’t, she continued, flattening her palm over his hand, taking in the heat of his skin. How does one draw heat, she wondered. That was probably something Luc would expect of her. She flipped her hand over and ran the back of her hand over his, concentrating on the texture of his skin. It was softer and smoother than she would have guessed. She’d never really paid attention to a man’s hand before. When Richard had held her hand, it had been to keep her next to him, to keep her in line. It had never been a romantic gesture.

  She turned her hand palm down again, and began to slide her fingers between his, slowly, stopping at the knuckles, trying to picture the way the lines grew wider at each one. By the time her fingertips reached the soft skin at the base of his fingers, his breathing beside her was shallow and deliberate. Marie was suddenly aware that their arms were resting against each other on the table’s edge. Luc’s skin was hot. It took every ounce of willpower not to open her eyes and look him in the face.

  But she kept them closed. Without saying a word, she lifted her hand from his and reached for the sketchpad. She turned away before opening her eyes so as not to catch a glimpse of his hand. She began rapidly drawing in the lines of his fingers. She had to do it fast before the memory of how his hand felt faded from her mind. When she was finished, she set down the pencil and looked at her work.

  It was awful.

  She began to tear off the sheet so she could crumple it up and throw it away. Luc stopped her.

  “It’s terrible,” she protested.

  “It’s a start. To be good at anything it has to be your obsession. You have to be so obsessed with drawing that you begin to look at everything in terms of lines and planes, light and shadow.”

  “But how can I look at lines and planes if my eyes are closed?”

  “Not all seeing is done with the eyes, Marie.”

  He took her hand and placed it on the table, closed his eyes. He had long lashes, like a child’s, she saw. She watched as he ran his fingers, all of them, lightly over her skin. His touch was registering in parts of her body where his fingers had no business being. She could feel them on her scalp, tugging through her hair. They were leisurely tracing her spine, vertebra by vertabra. They were tweaking her nipples into hard little peaks.

  She glanced over at him to see whether his eyes were still closed. He had to know what this was doing to her. She could hear that her breathing had gotten louder, unsteady.

  “You chew your thumbnail,” he said.

  “I do it when I get nervous. It’s a bad habit, I know. I should try to stop.”

  “I’m not passing judgment, Marie. I’m simply observing. That’s important if you want to draw well. Seeing without judging.”

  He continued his exploration of her hand. His index finger traced a spot just below her third knuckle. “You have a scar here.”

  Marie frowned and leaned over her hand to look. “Oh, that. How can you feel that? It’s tiny.”

  “The texture of the skin is different.”

  “Or you noticed it earlier, when your eyes were open. Isn’t that what palm readers do? They watch people before they sit down, figure them out ahead of time.”

  “I’m going to pretend I didn’t just hear you accuse me of being a charlatan, Marie.”

  When she turned her head to look at him, his jaw was tight, his nostrils flared. She’d angered him.

  “How did you burn yourself?” he continued.

 
“I was at a barbeque at a friend’s house.”

  “You were helping to cook?” He continued to finger her scar.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re lying.” He pressed more firmly on her hand.

  “How do you know that?” she challenged him.

  “You started to pull your hand away as you said that.”

  She sighed. “We were burning my wedding dress. A spark flew up and landed on my hand. Satisfied?”

  He was silent for a minute, continuing to touch her hand. “Putain,” he said at long last. His fingers stopped, resting—finally—on her skin. He seemed to be momentarily at a loss for words. “You really burned your wedding dress?” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him—long-lashed eyes still closed—shake his head.

  Victory swelled inside Marie. She had Luc Marchand flummoxed. Surely that didn’t happen often. He said something in French she didn’t understand, then his fingers began roving again. They stopped at a bruise she’d forgotten she had, his thumb pressing tenderly into the slight swelling there. She closed her own eyes now and let herself sink into the sensation.

  “Burning your dress, that’s rather extreme, isn’t it? You must really hate him.”

  Did she hate Richard? She considered the idea. She had at times, yes. Those nights he didn’t come home. The day she discovered the letters from Maya in his closet. The morning she’d opened the divorce papers—she could have killed him at that moment, if he’d been standing there. But did she hate him now? Right this minute?

  No, she didn’t think she did. It was more that she just wanted to be rid of him. She no longer wanted him—or Maya—in her life anymore.

  “It wasn’t my idea,” she said to Luc. “Burning the dress was a friend’s idea.” She giggled. “It was kind of fun, actually. A relief, you know?”

  “And this friend, was it the one who gave you these lessons with me?” Luc was no longer touching her hand. He had covered it with his palm, just resting there.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “I think your friend knows you better than you perhaps know yourself.”