Page 44 of Iron Cross

I grabbed my cup with trembling fingers and took a sip. The apple-cinnamon coffee tasted like ash, and I swallowed the cooled liquid down anyway, just for something to do. For a reason not to answer right away.

“It’s no one,” I finally croaked, putting down the coffee mug.

“Is that right?” he said with a tilt of his head. “I don’t know anything about art.”

He pulled out the seat beside me and planted his ass in it like he had a right to, his own mug of coffee in his hand.

“That sketch thing looked… intimate.” I looked up at him, and almost winced at the sweetness in his eyes.

His eyes dipped down, taking a quick glance at my body that was curious, and almost… lustful.

I wasn’t used to being looked at that way. Not anymore.

“Where’d you learn to draw?” Was he throwing me a bone by changing the subject? I couldn’t tell, but I leapt on the new subject like it was a fucking lifeline.

“It's just something I’ve always done.”

Some days, I wish I was more like Blink. He could tell the subtext of a question with just a flick of his eyes. It was like people had subtitles that he could flawlessly read. He’d tried to teach me. I hadn’t learned much, but maybe…

I glanced at the corner of his eyes - they wrinkled with his smile. His eyebrows arched upward, indicating a general curiosity, and even a pleasant surprise. His lips tilted up more on one side than the other, which didn’t really indicate anything, but could just be a pattern of his face.

His body was open, honest. There was no sign of deception in him.

“I went to art school a long time ago, but didn’t really do anything with it,” I admitted, when the silence between us grew awkwardly long. “I wasn’t very good.”

“I don’t agree. Your paintings are extraordinary.” I felt the blush warm my cheeks. “That sketch looked amazing.”

I’d been feeling very warm the last few days, and hoped I wasn’t getting sick. But this was a different kind of heat.

His smile broadened, as he reached out to graze the back of his index finger against my jaw.

“Thank you,” I said in a whisper, as I stared into the strange, hazel-ish eyes. “But there’s far more to art than just a pretty picture.”

Maybe I was judging a book by its cover, but he did notlooklike the kind of man who’d want to discuss composition, emotion, ortones that conjure certain familiar images. How an artist wields all of that to strike the exact chord they want in the viewer.

I looked at his eyes, to see if I could read something in them. The heart of an artist, maybe? But instead, I was struck by the peculiarity of his eye color. There was something off-putting about them. The way the colors seemed so… solid. There was no blending in his irises. Instead, they looked like shards of crystal color, posted together with jagged edges.

“You’re adorable,” he smiled, gently. “And very self-deprecating.”

The latter he said as an observation, though it also sounded like a compliment.

I blushed even more, feeling like I was turning tomato red.

“I don’t think anyone’s described me that way before.”

“Well, you are!” He said, with a slap of his knee.

“You spend a lot of time watching me, huh?” I asked, letting suspicion leak into my voice. “Kind of creepy if you ask me.”

“It’s a small town, and I’m new,” he said with a gentle groan. “And you kinda stick out.”

That was the opposite of what I needed to be doing. I needed to blend.

There are different kinds of blending.

You can try to look like everyone else, which isn’t a possibility when you’ve got a darker complexion in an otherwise verymilky population. Which meant that I could try to look as plain as possible. To be neither attractive, nor unattractive. To be in the middle of everything. Which was why I dropped the black dresses and heels, and got myself baggy mom jeans and oversized sweaters. I looked like I should be slinging vegan baked goods and smell like patchouli.

Like your quirky, baked-out-of-their-mind middle school art teacher.

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