He shook his head at her. “I already said I’m not interested in sex.”
“But we can be friends?” she said, and the innocent lilt to her voice made his heart clench.
“Yeah, we can be friends.”
She reached for his knee and gave it a squeeze.
“Just friends,” he added, eyeing her hand pointedly.
The offending hand slid from his knee, and she moved it to rest on the top of her head as she continued to gaze up at the sky. Apparently, being just friends meant that she should talk his ear off while he continued to add details to his sketch. As he drew the lines of her slender arm, she told him about how she met Melanie when they were children. And as he added the details of her fingernails and the creases and texture of her delicate hands, she told him how she’d gone to college with Melanie, skipping over the horrors of her adolescent family life because it had been devoid of Melanie. And as he tried imagining her bare breasts—yeah, it was a tough job—so he could do a decent job of drawing them around the gaping wound in her chest, she told him how Melanie always saved her from herself. Nikki had a thing for Gabe’s new flame. Even though it wasn’t any of Adam’s business, he should probably clue the guy in or someone was bound to get hurt. And in his experience, it tended to be the guy half of the relationship that was left with his heart shredded and who ended up drowning his sorrows in a bottle of beer or drawing Madison’s perfect tits on another woman’s body.
I have issues, he thought as he drew an elaborate butterfly resting on the side of Nikki’s head—the beautiful side of her, not the skeletal side. The butterfly’s wings were poised in mid-downstroke, giving the illusion of movement. The only things he like drawing as much as tits were animals. He hadn’t skimped on the details of the buzzards’ talons, feathers, and eyes or on the elaborate wing pattern, spindly legs, and slim abdomen of the butterfly. He also didn’t skimp on the details of Nikki’s breasts, because breasts deserved attention. Breasts always deserved his attention.
He was almost sad to move his work down to a slender belly and the flair of hips, with a leg bent to angle conveniently over feminine folds. It was invasive enough for him to imagine what her breasts looked like—and end up drawing them like Madison’s. Adam had no business or interest in imagining what the woman’s pussy looked like. He felt she had to be naked in the drawing, though. Clothes would have taken away from the feeling of exposure. But all of her secrets didn’t need to be completely revealed. He was still futzing over the exact shape of her big toe when he realized she’d fallen silent.
He glanced up to her face, expecting to find her asleep, but she was simply watching him. Perhaps she was tired of talking about Melanie.
“Almost done?” she asked.
“Almost.”
“I can’t wait to see it. I had my portrait drawn by a caricaturist once,” she said, “but I didn’t care much for the results. It only managed to make me very self-conscious about my horse teeth and my chipmunk-fat cheeks and my wide-spaced eyes that are practically on the sides of my head.”
Adam shook his head. He had hated the drawing that hack down by Jackson Square had done of Madison. “There should be a law about taking something beautiful and making a mockery of it.”
“Can I see the drawing now?” She was like a child who couldn’t wait to open a gift.
“Not yet.”
She scowled at him. “You gave me horse teeth, didn’t you?”
He laughed. “No, your teeth are very lifelike. Especially where half your face is missing.”
“I can’t sit still anymore,” she whined.
“You can move. I never said you couldn’t move. Besides, you didn’t have any problem jacking your jaws earlier. Plenty of movement going on there.”
She slapped his leg. “Shut up.”
He laughed, adding a shadow here and there to the nearly finished drawing.
She sat up beside him and opened her beer, which was sweating a huge puddle onto the wooden table near her hip. Her fingers toyed with the water as she took a swallow from the brown bottle.
“It’s hot out here,” she said.
It was rather warm. Adam had been so wrapped up in his work, he hadn’t noticed until she’d mentioned it.
“We should go inside,” he said.
“Not until I see the drawing.”
Poker face in place, he said, “I think I’m going to shred this one and start over.”
Her jaw dropped, and she wrenched the sketch pad from his loose grip. He’d been done for several minutes, but was a bit nervous for her to see the completed drawing. With the exception of the tattoos he’d designed for his bandmates and the sexy image he’d crafted of Madison, he usually kept his artwork to himself. His music was for the world, but his drawings were for him alone.
“I’m naked!” she squeaked, her gaze shifting as she examined every detail of the sketch. “Oh, Adam, it’s beautiful. I’m beautiful.”
“I told you that you are.”
Her eyes widened, and she lifted a hand to hover over the living butterfly he’d drawn in her hair.
“Why did you draw this?” she asked, her tone accusatory. “I never told you about Melanie putting butterflies in my hair. Were you eavesdropping on us earlier? When I told her that I love her?”
Adam shrugged. “I wasn’t eavesdropping. There was just a lot of white space there, and I thought a butterfly would look better than a scorpion, but if you want me to change it . . .”
He reached for the sketch pad, and she clutched it to her chest. “No, don’t change it,” she said. “It’s perfect. Better than perfect.”
“How can it be better than perfect?”
“It just is!” she said, her eyes a bit watery. She watched him warily and when she seemed convinced that he wasn’t going to take the drawing away from her, she tilted it away from her chest to take another look. “Okay, so it isn’t perfect.”
He leaned closer so he could examine his work more critically. “Should have made the teeth bigger.”
She smacked him half-heartedly. “It isn’t that. My boobs don’t look like that.”
“Yeah, well, that’s how I imagined them. So that’s how I drew them.”
“Mine are bigger than that, and this part isn’t that wide,” she said, matter-of-factly, pointing at the areolas. “And my nipples are larger.”