The Man Next Door

by Mia Madison

Her mouth fell open with surprise, and the tension I hadn’t even realized she’d wrapped around her entire being dissolved away. “You do?”

  “I do!” I wanted to jump up and hug her, but my scream of pain would have derailed the unveiling of the rest of her paintings, and I really wanted to see what else she had done.

  She turned around the next painting, and I took a moment to drink it in. This one was a painting of a fully naked, gorgeous red head. She had her luscious backside and elegant back turned to the artist’s eye, but she stood before a full-length mirror so that the front of her could be seen as well. She had the gentlest fullness to her lower abdomen, a detail that added to her feminine beauty rather than detracted from it, and though she was young, gravity had touched her succulent breasts in a way that made my palms crave to cup them, to hold them up and caress them. She was glorious as she stood before the mirror with one arm up and her chin tipped down as her probing fingers examined the supple, pliant flesh of her breast. A bronze placard at the bottom of the frame bore the paintings name, “Self-Examination.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was speechless. I waved for Constance to continue in her reveal and one by one she turned the paintings around for me to see. This private viewing made me feel somehow singled out as special or unique. I felt as though I could have been a king being presented with priceless treasures because that’s what they were to me. Priceless. And that Constance’s hands had created such wonders for my eyes to see made me want to kiss each one of her fingers and then her eyes and the spot in the center of her forehead where it said that the third eye resides. Only someone who could see so much more than me—and most others—could highlight the simple magnificence of each small moment before me.

  “So, you like them?” Constance asked after she had turned the last painting around to face me.

  “I love them,” I said. There was no exaggeration in my voice. None was needed. Everything that I needed to say poured its way up from my heart, and Constance had done that. She’d evoked this response from me. She had manipulated me and shaped me just as she had done with the paints smeared across the canvases before me. My response was an extension to her artist’s stroke.

  Constance crossed her legs and played with her fingertips like a shy little girl, and the contrast between her sweetness and her ability to see and capture such beauty in truth had my blood raging with the desire to know her in a way that a man knows a woman when all the world is stripped away and is no longer an obstacle between them.

  “Do you have a favorite?” she asked.

  To my surprise, I did. “It’s the middle one.” She bent forward from where she stood at the end of the line of paintings so that she could see the one I meant. There, in the middle, stood a painting of a naked man sitting in a chair with the back of his bare shoulder visible as he crossed one ankle over his knee. His arms rested on the chair’s armrests, and his long-fingered hands hung limply off the end. The ease of his body bespoke an acceptance of the place he was in within his life, but his head leaned forward the smallest degree at his forehead and his eyes were fully open as he stared out the window before him, as if looking for what next was to come. The picture reminded me of myself. I’d “retired” when I’d sold my carpentry business, even though I’m only forty-two. That is young by anyone’s standards, and, God willing, I had a lot of life yet to live, I just had to figure out what that life was.

  “So… you don’t think different of me? It’s always weird showing people my work for the first time. Never know how they’re going to react.”

  I sucked in a breath as I pulled my eyes away from the sitting man and trained them on her. “I think more of you… I mean, now there is more of you for me to think about. These are incredible.” I waved my hand at the paintings without taking my eyes from her. “You’re incredible. You’re an artist. The real deal.”

  The lids of her eyes fell as she looked at the ground and her cheeks pinked.

  The girl was going to give me blue balls. But she’s allowed me to peek into her life, a very intimate part and it swelled my heart in a way I’d never known before.

  Chapter Seven

  Constance

  “Do you use live models?” Ander asked as I sat down on the couch next to him.

  “Only when the dead ones won’t do,” I answered with my best straight face.

  “Huh?” Light dawned in his eyes a second later as a smile lit his face.

  “Gotcha,” I said, sneaking a little tickle of his ribs. It was the first time I’d touched him for anything other than when I’d helped him at the hospital or for wound care afterward, and I worried that I was trying to take things in a direction that he didn’t want. Maybe he only saw me as the nice girl next door. Maybe we didn’t have enough in common for him to be interested. Or, worse yet, maybe he saw me as just a kid and not as someone he could ever get serious with.

  He turned his attention back to the paintings, and I did the same. We sat in a comfortable silence. I’d been to my fair share of art galleries and I knew enough to stay quiet and to let a person have time in their own thoughts when they looked at a piece of art, so I resisted the urge to fill the silence and patiently waited for Ander to be the one to speak first.

  “I feel like I can see inside of every person up there, and then I remember that it’s through your eyes that I’m seeing. It’s just incredible,” he said finally. “Where do you find your models?”

  “Here and there.” I pointed at the middle painting, the one that was Ander’s favorite. “I found him at a coffee shop. He was sitting at a little table reading a book, and he had this… I don’t know, this sad knowing on his face. It made me think of a hundred-year-old granny sitting up to watch her newborn great-great-granddaughter struggle to survive her first night with the accepted certainty that she wouldn’t make it to the first morning’s light. But, it was all there in a young man’s face who shouldn’t yet know that much life. Turns out he was worried about being able to afford tuition.”

  “Wow…”

  I nodded, lost in my own thoughts as I remembered painting him. “I almost slept with him.” It had been a desire to capture some small essence of who he was, then it hit me what I’d just said. My eyes tore away from the painting to look at Ander to find his eyes on me, and what I saw in them made me swallow as my heart did a jackrabbit start and my breath came quicker. He wanted me.

  “Sleeping with your models…” he said with a low voice that rumbled out from somewhere deep in his chest. It was a sound that made my toes curl and my sex squeeze tighter. “What’s the world coming to when a guy can’t sit naked for hours in front of a girl without her wanting to jump his bone?”

  “Hey!” I exclaimed, redirecting all my desire to launch myself at him into a verbal parry instead. “If he’d been a woman and me a man, he’d have been expected to give it up!”

  “Maybe two-hundred years ago,” Ander said with a laugh, but his body leaned toward me just a little, and I imagined that I could feel his heat. I wanted to slide my hands under his shirt and over his muscled chest as I nibbled his neck. He was so damn intoxicating! Every time I got near him, his scent of sweet, oaky musk made me wish we were both stripped naked so that I could rub my body over his and make myself smell like him. I wondered if I could sneak a shirt from his laundry basket to take home with me. There would be only one thing better than holding his shirt close in bed once night came, and that would be snuggling myself up to him.

  “No, no,” I said, shaking my head as I readied my response to his claim. “See that red head in that painting? She told me that she recently posed for a guy that expected her to blow him after every session. When she didn’t, he threw a huge tantrum and acted as if she’d insulted him, even demanded she apologize.” I couldn’t hold back my laugh. The guy’s expectations had been over the top, but they hadn’t been unheard of. Truth was, he’d been so offended by her saying no because everyone else he’d painted had said yes.

  “So, you’re say
ing that if I posed nude for you that I’d be safe from you trying to molest me, cause I’m not buying it. I think we should test it out right now. Go get your paints and I’ll be all fainted-lady on the couch here.” He was smiling like he was joking, but there was still that heat in his eyes.

  I opened my mouth as I tried to figure out what to say, but then closed it again. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to proposition me or not. If he was, the answer was a big, “Yes!” But, I really wasn’t sure.

  Ander’s smile faltered as he took a sudden deep breath and the color in his cheeks deepened. “I just made things weird, didn’t I? Oh God, I—uh—I’m sorry.”

  “No, no.” I reached out a hand and put it over top of his, but I had to withdraw my touch just as fast. If I didn’t, I would have been on top of him a second later, pressing my lips to his to make it clear exactly how I felt and what it was that I wanted to do to him.

  An awkward silence filled the space between us. “I’ll go, let you rest,” I said as I got up and collected the paintings. My cheeks were hot thinking of how I would compose a nude of Ander, and it was everything that I could do to get out of his house without spontaneously combusting.

  Chapter Eight

  Ander

  I made my own lunch of grilled chicken breast over salad fixings. I topped it off with oil and vinegar plus some sun-dried blueberries for sweetness. Constance hadn’t been by in three days—the longest three days of my life.

  “Why’d I have to go be a C.O.D.?” I grumbled to myself as I limped my way over to the dining table. Creepy. Old. Dude. That’s what I was. I should have kept my damn mouth shut. Now that she thought I was a total perv, she was probably house hunting, eager to get away from me.

  My mind tripped over different scenarios of how I could make things right between us as I sat down and propped my throbbing foot up on a nearby chair. The pain was an annoyance now more than anything difficult to bear. The nail had sliced through muscle, had possibly nicked a tendon, and had given a hairline fracture to one of the smaller bones, but all in all, I was feeling pretty good. Foolish, but pretty good.

  I stared out at the unfinished frame of the gazebo in the backyard through the set of oversized windows before me. “If I got the thing done, I could invite her over to show it off,” I mumbled to myself, hoping she’d appreciate the artistry of creating something where there once was nothing with wood. I knew what I did required a different kind of artist’s vision, but I hoped that she could appreciate the beauty of it anyway.

  I was outside a half hour later, and this time I had on proper work boots, ones that a sharp nail wouldn’t be able to puncture. I started back in on the frame, measuring, sawing, and nailing boards into place to create each side of what was going to be an eight-sided gazebo. I’d been at work for an hour and a half when I lifted my head at the right time and spotted Constance beyond my fence’s gate. She was carrying trash out to the curb.

  I started to lift my arm to wave at her when her face shifted to my direction. I got it halfway up before realizing that her eyes were downcast and that she wasn’t even looking my way. Pivoting at the hips, she reached for another bag of trash, but this one tore as it snagged on the jutting lip of the large green trash can.

  Dropping my hammer in the grass, forgotten, I did a hopping limp—a hop on my good foot and a limp on my injured one—out of my yard. Kneeling on the ground as she tried to wrangle the contents of her torn bag back in place, she finally looked up when my fence gate banged close behind me.

  “Let me take care of that,” I said. “I’ve got gloves on.”

  She didn’t argue but instead stood and moved aside as I knelt to capture coffee grounds, paper towels and other kitchen related discards and put them back inside the torn bag. Mixed in with the foodstuff were empty paint tubes, paint stained rags, and an empty turpentine container.

  Glancing up, I noticed the dark circles under her eyes and the pale sallowness of her skin. “You okay?” I asked as I stood, placing the reconstructed trash bag carefully inside of the trash can.

  She nodded while she was overtaken by a huge yawn. I wanted to be mad at her, to turn a chill shoulder her way. I’d grown accustomed to her company, and I felt as discarded as her trash that she hadn’t been around. But something about her seemed frail and used up, and it made me forget my feelings of rejection.

  “You shouldn’t be out working on your foot yet. The doc said it was pretty messed up,” she chided after her yawn had past.

  “Speaking of docs,” I said as I stripped off my gloves, “Have you seen one?”

  “Huh?” Her eyes went wide and her attention finally fully focused. Before that moment, she’d felt only half here.

  “Have you slept? Have you eaten?” I wanted to take her by the hand, drag her inside the house and take care of her for a change.

  “Oh!” Constance smiled sheepishly and then rubbed the back of her hand on one eye as she fought off another huge yawn. She finally gave in, and I saw her body waver, unsteady, as it past.

  I was a half second away from scooping her into my arms and carrying her inside my house.

  She waved a dismissive hand. “I get to working sometimes and forget to do anything else.” Her large eyes looked down and away then as a timid smile tugged at the corners of her lips. “You are talking about modeling for me just took over my head and I had to get it out. I’ve been painting since later that night.”

  My breath hitched in my chest and mini-me between my legs woke up. “You’ve been painting me? A nude?” Dang it. If she’d just asked, I’d have been over there stark, buck naked letting her do anything she wanted to me. I wouldn’t have made her work from her imagination. “Did you at least cover the bald spot?” I asked with a laugh to hide the fire of desire she was stoking into a torrent of flame within me.

  “You don’t have a bald spot,” she answered with complete candor, “But you are thinning just a little.”

  Holy fuck. It took every ounce of my self-control not send my hands to my hair.

  “I’m teasing!” She gave my arm a little slap, but instead of breaking the contact, her hand lingered on my arm. Her delicate fingers trailed down over my sleeve until they hit skin where they created a path of desperate want. Finally, her fingers hooked with mine, and she gave me the gentlest of tugs. “Want to see it?”

  “Yeah,” I answered, nodding. It was all I could make my mouth say. There was no witty response on my tongue. My mind was too full of her soft touch to do anything but follow her in the hopes that the touch of her fingers would grow to the touch of her hand, her lips, her body. She could have been leading me to a firing squad and I would have followed. Anything, just so long as I had the gift of her touch.

  Chapter Nine

  Constance

  “Are you hungry? Have you been eating?” I asked after we’d got inside. My house was laid out like his house, except that my bedroom was upstairs.

  “Me?” Ander laughed. “I want to know if you’ve been eating.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said with an embarrassed chuckle. “I get so caught up in my work sometimes that I forget.” I still had him by the hand, and I was leading him to the glass doors at the back of my house where I did most of my painting. I knew that I should let go, but it felt so good to touch him. I’d been sketching and painting him for days now, and I felt as though I already knew him inside and out. I felt as though we’d already made love and our holding hands now was simply the aftermath.

  “After you show me what you’ve done, you’re going to rest and I’m going to cook for you,” Ander declared.

  What I’ve done… Those words hung ominously in the air for me, and my belly tickled from a host of tumbling butterfly wings within me. Whenever I’d painted from memory, inspired by someone or something I’d seen, the people I painted always morphed and combined with other people. But not this time. This time my hand stayed true to the soft lines of Ander’s face and the sloping flare of his bottom lip. I didn’t deviate from the
way his eyelids always appeared closed part way or the crinkle that could be an old scar that cut up into his eyebrow on one side.

  My heart beat faster as we reached the back of the house. My dining table was strewn with all my art supplies, and two easels stood with their faces pointing away, turned to capture the natural light from outside. On one was a canvas, its paint still wet. The other held a two by three-foot sketching pad on which charcoals were my preferred medium instead of oils.

  I held my breath as I brought Ander around the front to see the images I’d created, starring him.

  “Oh…”

  My heart plummeted, lost within the now-tornado of twirling wings within my stomach as Ander stared at my painting of him. In it he wore a corduroy jacket as he stood in grass that hadn’t seen a mower in weeks. In his hands was a hammer that had been pitted by time and use, and he studied it as if he could see its entire history, from its birth forward.

  “You don’t like it…” It had been hard to say those words without sounds as though tears might follow them, but I managed it. I didn’t normally care what my subjects thought of the paintings I did of them. They were my interpretation of a single part of them, and it wasn’t overwhelmingly important that they like my vision—but this time, I was crushed.

  “I do like it. It’s just that, well,”—his voice was heavy with disappointment— “I’m wearing so many clothes.”

  Understanding finally dawned for me, and relief brought with it a bark of laughter.

  Ander turned his gaze to meet mine, and soon I saw his disappointment fade into his usual good humor. “It’s not like you spend your time painting a bunch of old dudes like me.” His hand slipped away from mine and he shoved it in his pocket, a solid barrier between us.

  I turned my attention over to the sketchpad. On it was a charcoal version of the oil painting. Stepping over to it, I flipped the huge, visible sheet over the top to reveal the drawing beneath. It was again of Ander, but this time he wore no shirt and his low-waisted jeans exposed miles of tone, muscled chest and abdomen as he held a stretched measuring tape up to the length of a piece of wood.