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I lift a shoulder. “Yeah, I dunno.”
“Well, I do. And you’re gonna crush this, okay? For that little girl.” Treasure peeks over my shoulder and flashes me a grin in the mirror. “And maybe just give those nice Lost Boys a heart attack while you’re at it.”
CHAPTER 14
KIT
“What do you think?”
Wendy pushes her sketchbook into my frame of view so fast she almost knocks my own pencil out of my hand.
“It’s…” I frown, pushing back a bit on my rolling stool so I can take a proper look. The late afternoon sunlight is stretching in from the shop windows, but I snap on my worklight just to get a solid view. Slow day in Neverland—two no-shows and one cancellation—so I’ve just let Wendy hang out and sketch with me for the past few hours. I’ve got her working on anatomy, just some simple Loomis-method sketches of the basic forms of the body: balls for joints, rectangles for limbs, a U-curved ribcage and the blunt, blocky form of the pelvis.
On the page, Wendy’s pencil lines are deliberate, intense, drawn with the kind of precise heaviness of a kid who really wants to get it right on the first try. And I sure know that feeling. Loosening up is an art unto itself, I suppose. But we’ll get there.
Wendy hovers, waiting.
“It’s good,” I say, both out of an automatic need to offer praise and because, well, she’s done a decent job. “The shoulders are more proportional now, see?” I gesture with my own pencil a bit. “Women’s aren’t going to be quite so broad. Although, you might—”
I pause, the tip of my lead hovering above the page, and try to consider how to phrase what I’m about to say.
“I might what?” Wendy says.
“You might, uh, need to reposition the…” I cough, awkwardly. “…breasts, a little?” I tilt my head, studying. I’m hardly a personal expert on the female form, but I’ve drawn enough girls to know how they’re put together, and Wendy’s poor manikin form looks like she’s got two paper plates stapled to her ribcage. “Here.” I take the sketchbook fully from her grip, swap my 2B pencil for a pale red, and gently sketch a correction over top. “See, they’ve got weight to them, so they don’t just, uh…float there. They attach around here, around the ribs, and then the weight of the flesh has them sort of softly hanging like—”
I hear the kitchen door open and slam shut. From her doze on the lounge couch, Nana perks up her head.
Wendy turns too, her spell of concentration snapped at the sound of footsteps from the kitchen. “Tink? Is that you?”
“Yeah,” calls a voice. “Hey.”
Wendy jumps to her feet, her drawing forgotten. “Where were you? I’ve been waiting for like—whoa.” She skids to a stop in the kitchen doorway. “You look like a girl.”
Tink walks in. And she does. She really does.
The coat she’s wearing dominates, this big puffy thing that’s obviously more for looks than for warmth, fake fur and big sleeves cropped to the waist. But she’s in a dress. I’ve never seen Tink in a dress. Of course I haven’t. And this is not just any dress, either. It’s a tight dress, a club dress, the kind of dress that clings to every edge of her body and yet looks as soft and easy as if it’s part of her. That shows her off.
Her legs, her hips.
I’m so caught up in taking in all this wild new visual territory that I don’t fully clock what my body is doing until it’s too late.
And then…fuck.
It’s too late.
I am rock fucking hard.
Like, aching, painful, raging-teenage-testosterone-tsunami hard. One-wrong-move-and-come-in-my-jeans hard.
So. Fucking. Hard.
I grip the edge of my stool for dear life. Whatever blood’s left in my brain reminds me to do something, and I manage to nudge my cart in front of my station with my foot. Without meaning to, I feel a grimace take over my face, just from the sheer effort of not trying to show anything.
“What?” Tink takes a step back, alarmed, and folds her arms to her chest like maybe she did something wrong. And yet all that does is draw my eyes right to her body. The top of that dress is so narrow, the soft forms of her tits all but bursting against its hold, that I have to think it’s just barely gripping over the top edge of her nipples. One false move and she’d—
My mouth goes dry. Instant, explicit, pornographic imagery floods my mind, of seizing her and sucking, biting her right where she’s nearly exposed, of gripping her throat while I—
Jesus, God. Get a fucking grip, Kit.
