He’s staring at me. Spellbound.
“What is it?” I’m afraid to move. “What’s wrong?”
“I’ve never seen the sun shine directly through your hair before.”
“Oh.” I glance down at the glowing curtain. “It never looks the same, does it? Inside, it’s auburn. Outside, it’s more of a red.”
“No.” Josh reaches out. He softly touches one of the waves. “Red isn’t the right word. It’s not auburn or orange or copper or bronze. It’s fire. It’s like being mesmerized by the flames of a burning building. I can’t look away.”
I’ve blushed far less around him lately, but – at this – my cheeks warm.
“And that,” he says, as I look down at my lap. “That rosy blush. And your rose-scented perfume. God, it drives me mad.”
I lift my eyes in surprise. “You’ve noticed? I don’t wear much.”
“Trust me. You wear exactly the right amount.”
“You smell like tangerines.” I say it before I can take it back.
“Satsuma.” He pauses. “You have a good nose.”
“Yours is better. At least, the shape of it is.”
“My nose is huge.” He laughs, and it makes his throat bob. “Yours is like a bunny rabbit’s. What the hell are you talking about?”
I laugh, too. “It’s not huge. But it is interesting.”
“Interesting.” He raises a teasing eyebrow.
I smile. “Yes.”
Josh smiles back. His ink-stained fingers thread through my hair, and he leans in towards my lips. But then he pauses to smell my neck. A shiver runs through me. He kisses my neck softly and slowly, and my eyes close.
I want him to kiss me there for ever. But he pulls back, languid, letting his fingers fall back out gently through my hair. He smiles at me again. “Roses,” he says.
My head and heart are in full swoon. “Thank you. And thanks for saying such nice things about my hair,” I add. “Not everyone is that nice.”
“Who wouldn’t say nice things about it?”
“Ha-ha,” I say.
But he appears to be genuinely confused.
“Really?” I take a deep breath. “Well, okay. When I was little? Every grandmother would stop me on the street to tell me how much I looked like one of her grandchildren. ‘She has hair just like yours,’ they’d always say. ‘Except hers is more orange’ or ‘hers is more auburn’. It was so uncomfortable, especially for someone as shy as me. Hattie’s the only one who ever talked back. ‘Then it’s not just like mine, is it?’ she’d say.”
Josh laughs.
“And when a redhead hits puberty? You become this magnet for gross men. A month doesn’t pass without one telling me that I must be good in bed because all redheads are sex fiends, or I must be a bitch because all redheads have fiery tempers. Or they’ll tell me that they only date redheads, or that they never date redheads, because we’re all ugly.”
Josh is stunned. “They say those things to you? Strangers?”
“At least a dozen men have asked if ‘my carpet matches my drapes’. And now there’s the ginger insult – thank you, England – and some cultures think we’re unlucky, and ohmygod, you know what the French say about redheads, right? They think we smell.”
“Like roses?”
“Then there’s the crap that comes with it naturally. The sunburn, the freckles—”
“I love the freckles.” Josh taps his sketch pad with an index finger. “I have plans to hang these on my walls, you know.”
He does?
He does. The next day, my face appears in all of his prime-viewing locations – above his desk, beside his bed, on his fridge. Drawings with leaves in my hair and my eyes closed in rapture. Drawings with delicately exposed collarbones and neatly tucked legs. Drawings with a stare as direct as it is vulnerable.
I feel like his muse. Maybe I am.
“It’s still so surreal,” I tell Kurt, one afternoon in the Treehouse, “to be the object upon which his eyes are focused.”
“Object,” Kurt says.
“I don’t mean object object.”
“It’s wrong to objectify people.”
“You’re right. I used the wrong word.” It’s easier to agree than to explain the perplexing and disconcerting truth. When it’s Josh looking at me…I don’t mind.
Kurt is petting Jacque. He scratches underneath his chin, Jacque’s favourite place, and the grey tabby purrs accordingly. “Where’d you find that?” He inclines his head towards a heart-shaped stone.
“Oh. Um, near the Arènes de Lutèce?”
“So your boyfriend found it.”
“We found it together.”
“And you brought it here together?”
I pause. And then I nod.
Jacque jumps onto his lap, but Kurt pushes him off. “I have to work.” He yanks out his chemistry textbook, and someone else’s ballpoint-pen-drawn map of underground Paris flies out of his bag and hits my arm.
I hand it back to him. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. We come here sometimes at night.”
“Mm,” Kurt mumbles. We work until dinnertime, but the next day, when I ask if he wants to study at the Treehouse, he declines.
The following Sunday at the Treehouse, Josh surprises me with three brushes and a large plastic jar of cheap dark-green tempera paint. “The brushes are my own, but the paint was found. And free.”
“Where’d you find it?”
His expression turns devilish. “The art room.”
“Cheater.” But I return his smile. “What are you gonna paint?”
“I like that. Not what do you want to paint, but what are you going to paint.”
“I trust you, if that’s what you mean.” I tug out the plaid blanket from its trunk. “Not that I should. Art thief.”
“Paint thief, thankyouverymuch. The art will be my own.” He helps me arrange the blanket, folding it over an additional time so there’s more space than usual around the rooftop’s perimeter. “I’ll need the space to work.”
I shrug happily. It’s sunny, probably one of the last warm days of the year, so I’m already slathered in SPF. I slip out of my wedge sandals and wiggle my toes in the air.
He studies the concrete wall. “Where will we go when the weather turns?”