Page 26 of Breakaway Goal

“I suck at sketching,” I moan, letting my head drop back to look up at the ceiling.

Figure Drawing is by far my hardest class this semester. Anatomically accurate, detailed sketching of the human body just isn’t something I was ever into as an artist.

I thought my first series of sketches were pretty decent—and so did James—but when my professor returned them graded this morning, I got a C-minus.

Now my confidence is shaken, which makes getting started on this next series of sketches even harder.

“Bullshit,” Rhys declares. He drops his pencil and swivels his chair towards me.

Rhys is always like this. When I have a problem, he instinctively drops whatever he’s doing to shift all his attention to me. Butterfly wings flap in my stomach, but I force them to settle down.

“I’m supposed to sketch a muscular male figure in the middle of a discus throw. Discus! What is this, Ancient Athens? I can’t get the pose right, or the muscles right, or the proportions right, or anything right!”

“Have you tried to find, like, a picture online to copy or work off of?”

I sigh. “Yeah, but most of them are clothed, obviously, and this is supposed to be a nude. Emphasizing the effect of the motion on the physique. I can find other drawings or sculptures online of similar poses, but I don’t want to just copy someone else’s work. That seems like it defeats the point of the assignment.”

“What if you had a live model?” Rhys asks.

I laugh. “Yeah, that’d help. I’ll just go down to the live model store, rent one for an hour, and ask him to strip down and pretend to be throwing a discus.”

Rhys leans back in his chair. An idea glows in his tawny eyes. “You act like that can’t be done.”

“Uh. It can’t,” I deadpan.

Rhys holds up his big, thick index finger; then he curls his wrist so he’s pointing it directly at his chest. “I’m your man.”

Rhys saying those words while his eyes are locked with mine scrambles my brain for a minute. I can’t put two and two together right away.

“Huh?” I ask.

“Use me.”

Thosewords make a knot of hot tension pull low in my core. My mouth goes dry, and my gaze ticks down to where Rhys’s finger points at his chest. The sight of those big slabs of muscles stretching out a grey Brumehill College t-shirt doesn’t do any favors to my state of discombobulation.

Rhys laughs after a beat of silence. “I swear, I never have to work so hard to make a girl realize I’m offering to strip down for her.”

Heat blasts in my cheeks. Rhys really needs to stop saying things like that if he wants my brain to function any time soon.

Wait a minute. Rhys is offering to strip down so I can use him as the model for my sketch?

Mynudesketch?

I try to swallow through the tight knot in my throat. “You … you don’t have to do that,” I squeeze out the words.

Rhys’s chuckle carries a familiar cocky tone. “Are you kidding? Having all this,” he elevators his hands up and down his torso, “be immortalized in the soon-to-be-famous artistic hand of Maddie Larsen? It would be an honor.”

He unfolds himself from his chair, suddenly towering over me as I lie on his bed. Hot tremors skitter up and down my back as I imagine the hard, sharp lines and firm contours of his muscles hidden underneath the shirt and jeans he’s wearing.

“I don’t have to be totally nude, right?” Rhys asks. “Just stripping down to my boxers would work for you?”

Waves of sizzling heat roll through me. I take a deep breath and try to steady myself.

I know he’s just trying to be helpful. And itwouldbe helpful.

Rhys has the perfect athletic physique to serve as a model for the sketch that’s giving me trouble. Having someone like him pose for it right in front of me would make this assignment so much easier.

It makes perfect sense why he’d volunteer to do this and think nothing of it. To him, stripping to his boxers to help me with this assignment is no different than him wearing a bathing suit at the beach around me, something that’s happened tons of times.

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