Drawing Lessons

by Julia Gabriel

  She sent the next batch of letters to the printer down the hall and was leaving to retrieve them when her cell phone rang. She turned back toward her desk and glanced at the caller ID.

  Luc Marchand.

  She snatched up the phone and answered. “Hello, this is Marie.”

  “Bonjour, Marie.”

  Why was it that when he said her name, all manner of things began to vibrate deep inside her body? She should have let the call roll over to voice mail so she could listen to him say her name whenever she wanted.

  “Mr. Marchand. If you need to cancel our lesson this weekend, that’s perfectly okay—”

  “That’s not why I’m calling, Marie. I’m over at the Phillips Collection right now. Do you know it?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Could you meet me for lunch here tomorrow?”

  Luc Marchand was inviting her to lunch? For a moment, her office began to sway and she leaned on her desk to steady herself.

  “Marie? Are you there?”

  “Yes. Yes. I’m here. Actually, I could meet you today.” Why wait until tomorrow? Tomorrow she might be stuck having lunch with her mother, deflecting questions about Richard. “If you’re there right now, I mean.”

  “I’ll be in the third floor gallery.”

  * * *

  Marie stopped in the doorway to the gallery, not bothering to even look at the exhibition title. Despite her love of art, she couldn’t care less about it today. Luc Marchand was the art she was here to see.

  She peered into the white-walled room. The gallery was empty, save for a lone figure standing in front of a large painting, his back to her. Faded jeans stretched from his rather fine backside down to short, distressed boots. A black leather jacket hung from his broad shoulders. She spent a moment just taking him in. Seriously, frame him and hang him on the wall.

  He turned, as if sensing her hot stare, and smiled. She joined him next to the painting, then glanced around at the rest of the gallery. A mix of large and small paintings hung on the walls, along with many smaller sketches and handwritten pages.

  “What show is this?” she asked. “I didn’t look when I came in.” She turned back to the painting Luc had been studying when she arrived. It was a portrait of a woman sitting in an upholstered armchair, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and body. Clearly, the viewer was meant to assume that she wore nothing beneath the blanket. Her bare feet peeked out from the bottom, small and delicate. Her chin was tucked into her chest, hiding her face. The whole pose was so vulnerable, so real, it made Marie want to lean in and try to look up at the woman’s face.

  “This is Elizabeth Calhoun,” Luc said, “painted by her lover, Alistair Smith.”

  Luc moved behind her, settling his hands onto her shoulders.

  “Do you think they are good?” she asked. Conversation might help her resist the overwhelming urge to lean back into Luc’s body.

  “Good is relative. What do you think, Marie?”

  She studied the painting for awhile. “She doesn’t want to be seen. They were lovers, you said?”

  “Yes.”

  “She doesn’t want anyone to know that.”

  Luc followed her as she went from painting to painting, carefully inspecting each. She read Elizabeth’s entreaties to Alistair, begging him to paint her, and yet in none of the paintings did she show her face. Who was she? Why did she not trust her lover to see all of her?

  Marie was four paintings from the end when she gave in to her curiosity and strode over to the curator’s introduction. Disappointment washed over her as the words sunk in. Wife. Senator. Mystery woman. Unmasked. This was why Luc had wanted her to come to the museum. The parallels were so obvious they were like a slap in the face.

  And yet ... there was something very hot about them all. She returned to the small partial nudes, Elizabeth Calhoun’s hip, her calf, her hand over her breast. Despite their small size and scope, looking at them felt like being let in on a secret, like peeking through a keyhole into someone else’s very private life.

  It reminded Marie of her dream, the one in which she modeled for Luc Marchand in a dimly-lit studio. Just the two of them. It wasn’t a dream that came to her every night, but it haunted her daydreams every day.

  She turned to look back at Luc. He was standing ten feet away, watching her with a wary expression on his face. He knew he had taken a risk inviting her here and yet he’d done it anyway. Marie aimed a forgiving smile at him.

  “I wish I could afford to have you paint me,” she said. She gestured toward the walls of the gallery. “Not that it would be the same ...” She rushed to qualify her wish as she realized the comparison she was making.

  “I would pay to paint you.” Luc’s voice was low, more a rumble vibrating across the air than words spoken out loud.

  She laughed nervously and turned back toward him just in time to see his chest right in front of her face. The next thing she knew she was in Luc Marchand’s arms and his lips were brushing her ear.

  “I’m serious, Marie. Name a figure.”

  A wave of heat spread across her cheeks and then downward through her body as she thought of the dream. It was completely a figment of her nighttime imagination and yet it had been so real ... and so arousing. More arousing than anything she’d ever experienced in real life.

  “Would you model for me?”

  She felt as though his words passed straight from his chest into hers. She nodded her head against the leather of his jacket. “Yes,” she said so quietly she could barely hear her own voice. “I would like to do that.”

  “Have you modeled before?”

  Her heart dropped. Great. He needed her to have experience?

  “No. Not really.”

  “Not really?”

  “Well ... I dreamed I modeled once. More than once.”

  “You modeled more than once or you had the dream more than once?”

  She could hear the amusement in his voice.

  “I had the dream more than once.”

  “And for whom were you modeling?”

  She hesitated. She feared he would laugh but already he was threading his hands through her hair, cupping the back of her head, making it clear that there was no way out of answering.

  “You,” she whispered into his chest. “I was modeling for you.”

  “Only me?” His hands tugged on the back of her head, pulling her face up to look him in the eyes.

  “And did you like it? Modeling for me?”

  She nodded.

  “Why, Marie?”

  “You’ll laugh at me.”

  “I promise I won’t.”

  “It turned me on,” she said quietly. Her eyes flicked away from his face.

  “What were you wearing?”

  His hand stroked her cheek and she leaned into it, closing her eyes. “Nothing.”

  “You were completely nude?”

  She heard the note of surprise in his voice. She nodded.

  “Did I touch you in this dream?”

  “No. All you did was look at me ... and draw.”

  She was suddenly aware of a growing hardness against her stomach. Luc Marchand was aroused by her dream. “But I wanted you to touch me.” There. It was out. “I wanted you to desire me.”

  “I’ll make you a trade, Marie.”

  His lips were lowering, getting so close she could taste his breath.

  “If l kiss you, will you agree to model for me this weekend?” His breath caressed her lips.

  That was it? No begging or pleading needed? No weeping? She stretched up to close the minute amount of space between her lips and his. “Yes.”

  She felt his hand on her lower back, pressing her body tighter against his. There was no mistaking his hardness now. She was dizzy from that knowledge, dizzy with anticipation.

  But when he kissed her, his lips were disappointingly light on hers and for a moment she feared this would be merely a chaste peck on the lips. That was not what she wanted. E
very nerve ending in her body was screaming in protest, craving his touch.

  “Kiss me.” The words, with their unmistakable note of begging, were out of her mouth and into his before she could stop them. Her body quivered in his arms. This was torture, being so close to what she needed and yet not being allowed to have it. He was going to make her beg for it, after all, like a junkie on the street.

  Well, she would beg. She was desperate enough to do it.

  “Please.”

  Just when she was about to beg again, he pulled her tighter against his chest and kissed her. Hard. She felt her body melt into his, every nerve ending sighing as the sweet relief of his kiss spread through her veins. She kissed him back, trying to get more of him, more of his taste and scent into her blood. His groan vibrated against her breasts.

  “So you think about me when we’re not having lessons?” He trailed kisses down to the collar of her coat.

  “Sometimes.” All the time.

  “I think about you too, Marie.” He unwound her scarf to get more access to her neck and collarbone. “From the day you walked into my studio, I’ve been thinking about you.”

  “But ... you sent me away.” His lips on her skin and his breath skittering beneath the front of her blouse made it harder and harder to think straight.

  “Ah, chérie, I was trying to send you away for your own good.”

  Luc buried his face in the curve of her neck, and Marie wanted this moment to last forever. Just Luc Marchand’s lips against her skin, his body pressed into hers. As soon as he moved away, her body would ache with desire again. Only this time it would be even more painful.

  She had never needed another person’s touch the way her body craved Luc Marchand. Even at the beginning of her marriage to Richard, it had never been this intense. Never touch-me-or-I’m-going-to-die intense.

  “I am a disaster where women are concerned,” Luc said, kissing his way back up to her jaw, her chin, her lips. “But you won’t leave my thoughts alone, Marie. Every time I try to push you out of my head, you slip back in. You’re tormenting me.”

  No one had ever been tormented by thoughts of her before, though Marie was familiar with the sensation. Luc was tormenting her thoughts, too.

  From across the gallery someone cleared a throat and Luc took a step back. She felt the reluctance in his parting. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a black-suited security guard glaring at them. Her face flushed furiously with embarrassment.

  “I have to get back to work,” she said. She began to wrap her scarf around her neck, to hide her just-kissed skin, to keep the feel of his lips from evaporating into the air.

  Luc tugged the ends of the scarf from her fingers and tied it for her. He gently squeezed her chin between his thumb and finger. “Practice your modeling for Saturday, oui?”

  Oh, oui.

  * * *

  Back in the office, Marie printed the rest of the thank you letters with their matching envelopes and signed her mother’s name to each—except for the one addressed to Luc Marchand. She signed that one simply “Marie.” Then she carefully folded each letter into thirds, slid them into the envelopes and affixed stamps to them. No impersonal metered postage for her mother. At Witherspoon & Associates, every piece of correspondence was handled by an actual person.

  Marie, generally.

  Eight years out of college and she was still doing an entry-level job. Oh, her business cards read “director of marketing” but she didn’t have the authority to do anything without her mother’s say so. Nishi was a senior vice president already. Her mother didn’t take the idea of a career for her seriously. First, because she had been waiting for her to marry Richard and have children. Now, because she was waiting for Marie to reconcile with Richard and have children. Return to the career she was born to: politician’s wife.

  Marie’s plans and her mother’s did not mesh, obviously. In a year, she would be finished with her MBA and able to start an actual career. One of her own choosing.

  She took the stack of letters down to Maeve. “I haven’t missed the mailman yet, have I?”

  Maeve looked up from her computer screen, smiling. She was always happy to see Marie. “No, dear. I expect him in ten or fifteen minutes so you’re good. Also, your mother phoned. She won’t be back to the office this afternoon.”

  “So I can sneak out early?” Marie joked. There would be no sneaking out. Marie needed a job at the moment and she wouldn’t put it past her mother to fire her. Her employment at Witherspoon & Associates had been terminated, without question, when she married Richard. “Ah, I’ve got plenty to do to keep me busy.”

  Starting with daydreaming about Luc Marchand some more. Every time he kissed her, it was like she’d never been kissed before. Three times now. That’s how many times she’d been kissed by Luc. She was definitely keeping count.

  He had wanted her at the museum. Sure, probably it was just an involuntary reaction. He was a man. There had been a woman in his arms, ergo he was turned on. She didn’t care, as long as he kissed her again—with any luck as soon as this weekend. She didn’t need him to care about her or—heaven forbid—love her. She just needed to feel the things her body did around him, the way everything inside her swirled around and around when he looked at her.

  But there were two more days to get through until she could see him again—two and a half, if you counted the rest of today—so she put him out of her mind as best she could. She had been procrastinating all week on finishing the report for her mother on the fundraiser’s press coverage. The Post had taken the easy way out: Eileen Witherspoon and Sen. Richard Macintyre joined forces again to ... The local television evening news shows had run clips of her mother’s major donors enjoying themselves; Maya had managed to insert herself into two of those.

  The local business journal was the only outlet that had bothered to clarify the new relationship between her mother and Richard: Witherspoon & Associates CEO Eileen Witherspoon and her soon-to-be former son-in-law Richard Macintyre, senator from Pennsylvania. Marie glanced at the byline. The reporter was relatively new and, based on his fresh-faced photo, not long out of college.

  And then, of course, there was the J Street Chronicle. Maya had written a lengthy post about the evening, name-checking as many people as she could and posting multiple photographs of herself and Richard. Marie scrolled through the photos, beginning to hope that she had escaped Maya’s lens. But no. There she was. Standing by herself, her wine glass tipped to her lips. The very picture of boozy loneliness.

  Lovely. She had spent so much time at the event schmoozing, which had been her sole purpose for being there, and Maya managed to get a photo of her alone. Looking eminently pathetic. The jilted wife drowning her sorrows in alcohol while the victorious mistress is happy and beloved by everyone.

  She took a screen shot of her photo and pasted that into the report, as well. Not that her mother would care. Marie was supposed to just suck it up and smile.

  She scrolled through the rest of the photos. Her eyes stopped on one of Luc and Samantha Smith, deep in conversation. Maya’s caption noted that Samantha Smith was adding a Dupont Circle location to her successful S. Smith Fine Arts Gallery in Leesburg. Luc wasn’t mentioned.

  Right beneath Luc and Samantha Smith’s photo was another one of Maya and Richard. Richard looked even less relaxed than usual, gripping Maya’s hand tightly but with several inches of daylight separating their bodies. She was leaning toward him. His posture was perfectly straight.

  “He isn’t going to marry her, Marie,” her mother kept saying. “He may think so now but eventually the folly of that will become apparent to him. You just have to wait him out.”

  But Marie wasn’t interested in waiting him out. Getting dumped by your husband for a floozy like Maya Redfearn was humiliating. It had been on the front page of the Post. “Sen. Richard Macintyre and Wife to Divorce.” Below the fold, but still. The front page! For months, every mention of him in the press included, “Senator Macinty
re, who recently separated from his wife of five years, Marie Witherspoon ...”

  And of course, Maya gloated to no end on her blog. Every photo of the two of them together was captioned, “Senator Richard Macintyre and his fiancee, Maya Redfearn ...”

  It just sucked. Privately, of course, some people were aghast at Maya’s brazen behavior. Some people would have the grace not to flaunt their homewrecking prowess all over town, but not her.

  She e-mailed Nishi a link to the blog. She knows I have to tabulate all the press coverage for my mother.

  Of course she does. Let it go, dear.

  Easy for Nishi to say, of course. She didn’t have someone making her look like a fool week in and week out. Not that anyone would be able to make Nishi Bhat look like a fool.

  She sent Nishi another e-mail. Check out guy in photo with Samantha Smith. That’s the artist you gave me lessons with.

  Nishi’s reply came an instant later. No. Freaking. Way. You get to spend time with him? She’s stuck with Sen. Dickhead. (Dick is a diminutive of Richard, right?)

  Marie smiled. Nishi was her ballast, her metronome. She steadied her when she wobbled, gently pushed her back on course when necessary. She leaned in toward her computer screen and stared hard at the photo of Luc and his friend. Would she rather be with Richard or Luc Marchand? No contest there.

  She finished up the report and e-mailed it to her mother, so she could get around to what she normally did at this time of day. Look busy and pull up her memories of that dream.

  I would pay to paint you.

  A dream she would get to act out this weekend.

  Chapter 10

  When Marie arrived at Luc’s studio Saturday morning, she found him arranging and rearranging groupings of flowers and fruit, a bottle of wine and a tiny china tea cup. He fiddled with a white cloth napkin, trying to get the folds and creases just so.