Stepping out of her panties, she pauses and mutters a prayer before emerging from behind the dusty post. She doesn’t believe in God but she doesn’t quite believe in nothing, plus it’s basically a reflex when her heart is hammering like this.

Nic stands with his back to her in front of the workbench.

“Okay,” she announces.

Nic turns around and they switch spots. She does not look at him as they pass each other. Another reflex—she crosses an arm over her chest and keeps her other hand between her legs. She debated this moment beforehand, whether she should stay modest or choose not to make a big deal of it and walk casually to her place as if this was no stranger than a trip to the ice cream shop or an afternoon at the swimming pool. Apparently, she can’t help but make a big deal of it. Which is silly. Because everything is going to be exposed in a moment anyway.

She wipes the workbench with her hand.

“Do you need help?” he asks.

“No,” she says sharply. She can’t stomach him touching her right now.

She hops up, hoping the table holds her. There weren’t many options for her to pose on. The toolbox was too tall, the sawhorse impractical, and the one available stool too wobbly for her to sit comfortably for any extended period of time.

Nic stares at her from beside his easel. His lips make a stupid grin. She leans forward, her palms gripping the edge of the bench. She has no idea what to do. Her tits dangle. Her short legs swing above the filthy concrete. Despite the heat, she is somehow cold.

To her horror, he approaches. She leans back and crosses her arms, squeezes her thigh together—more reflexes.

“Here.”

He crouches in front of her and sets her feet on a stepstool.

“Do you want me to do something in particular?”

“Just get comfortable,” he says. “Be yourself.”

She sighs. “Yea, sure.”

He returns to the easel. He takes his palette and brush. He looks her in the eye one last time.

“You’re incredibly beautiful, you know. Thanks for doing this.”

She smiles despite herself. Her body relaxes a bit.

Nic thought he was her boyfriend, but he really wasn’t. Her life is like one of those liquid motion toys—every day she is shaken and squeezed anew and all the glitter and plastic pieces swirl and come together willy-nilly. All of it so beyond her intent, her control.

Nic had been wanting to paint her and he had been wanting to have sex and he had stuck around long enough that she felt obligated to allow him one or the other.

She already regrets her choice.

He probably had the romantic belief that one would lead to the next. But he doesn’t understand that nothing in the world makes her feel more unsexual than this. She is as dry and splintering as all the rotten wood surrounding them here in his father’s workshop.

She fears being discovered; she keeps imagining his dad bursting in, the whole neighborhood peering in the windows. She keeps her arm pressed against her nipples, she turns her hips.

Sunlight slicing in through the square windows spreads over her thighs. The smell of sawdust; all the grease and dead bugs and his dad’s half-finished projects stacked awkwardly. The workshop is a sauna. Now she feels the sweat beginning to run down her forehead, to leak out from her armpits, from underneath her breasts. How can any of her be worth painting?

Nick has the ubiquitous unbuttoned flannel and the stringy long unwashed blonde Cobain hair (which she kind of digs), and his smile is full of crooked yellow teeth often filled with meals-old gunk (which she does not). Sometimes when he smiles she is nauseated and it makes her feel sick in a deeper, different way, and so she smiles bigger, she laughs harder, she touches him as if in apology. Everything she does is wrong and so she ends up here… spiderwebs in her hair, bare, fat ass planted on grime and stains she doesn’t want to think about, naked in front of a boy she has no desire to have see her this way.

But then she remembers the ride home he gave after Daniel’s house party completely out of his way, or the comic he drew of her with the cute seal and the funny walrus. It made her laugh on a day she had felt like a nuisance to everyone.

She wants to give him something in return. Something real and of herself.

“Sorry,” she apologizes.

She swings her feet up on the table and bends her knees and leans forward, laying all her weight atop her legs. She rests her cheek on her knees. Her hands meet on the scabs just below.

Nic flips the page and begins again.

She spreads her toes and curls them over each other. She looks only at him, trying to be free, trying to let her eyes… confess.

He works and stops. Works and stops. His face scrunches up. He comes to her again.

“Can we try something?”

He takes her wrist, lightly, and spreads her arm out. He takes her hips and guides her to face him. He stands in the center of her.

“Can you…?”

He taps the inside of her leg and stands straight, rolls his shoulders.

She does as he wants. What does it matter anyway? She wiggles and spreads her thighs apart, she lifts her shoulders and arches her back. She puts her hands behind her head.

He flips another page and starts again. His brushstrokes on the coarse canvas sound like scratches. She is in a dentist chair, emptying her mind as the drill bores into her. She stares at her clothes in a pile on the cement, hiding herself away in a place where she doesn’t exist.

When Nic says he is finished, she jumps down and trots straight to her clothes. Keeping her back to the easel, she bends over right in front of him to scoop up her underwear. She tugs on her bra, her t-shirt, her jean shorts. She feels him waiting, eager to show her. But she knows no matter how talented he is or his depth of feeling for her, she is going to hate his work.

And she knows, stepping into her sandals, that she will have to turn around and somehow pretend she doesn’t.