Beneath The Skin (A College Obsession Romance) (16 page)

“What do you do with them?” I ask, curious.

“Sell them, if I can. Or leave them. Or burn them. I don’t know.”

“Wow. How much do they go for?”

“Doesn’t matter.” She crosses her legs, hangs one arm over them while helping herself to another swig. Her eyes turn to glass and she licks her lips. “I don’t do it for money.”

I lift my eyebrows, taking a step toward her. “So what do you do it for?”

She considers the question, her eyes drifting off somewhere far, far away. “I do it for all the girls in the world, the girls in their pretty green dresses.” She swallows hard, her jaw tightening. “Maybe every time I create something beautiful, it makes me a little less aware of the ugliness around me. But sometimes I make ugly things too. I guess it’s just human nature, trying to put out fires by setting new ones. And sometimes,” she says, looking up at her headless puppy-pig creation, “all I want to do is make something beautiful … just to watch someone else destroy it.”

I stare at the piece, wondering if maybe it was, in fact, whole at one point. “Did someone take off its head?” I ask, trying to follow.

“The name of the piece was
B.F.F.
,” she tells me, tilting her head and observing it curiously. “I made it a year ago for a midterm project. When I brought it to class, it was criticized. Cheeks too puffy, like a rabbit. Ears too perky, of course. Nose looked like a marshmallow. They even criticized the glossy, lifelike sheen I gave its eyes.”

“They weren’t too fond of its whole head, seems like.”

“So I took it off,” she concludes. “I turned it in again the next day and called it
Headstrong Henry
.”

“Who’s Henry?”

“No idea. I got an A.” She puts a hand over her mouth and sucks in air, as if she were smoking an imaginary cigarette. Then, with a sigh through that same hand, she says, muffled, “I think I make art to reconcile with all the parts about myself that I hate.” She pulls her hand away. “With art, I’m able to put that ugliness somewhere. And maybe, if I’m lucky, someone will find the ugliness beautiful.” Her eyes meet mine. “And I’ll keep doing it until it isn’t needed anymore. Until we’re so far into the future that all my lovely work becomes just … some forgotten evidence of how shitty our past was. We live in such a shitty time.”

“It’s not
that
shitty,” I finally put in. “There’s so much that’s cool about life nowadays. We have … little pocket-sized machines that can access the whole scope of … of human intelligence with just a tap of the finger. That’s cool as hell, right? And we have—”

“Wait. ‘Human intelligence’ is what you call that phone in your pocket? Is it Facebook that you’re referring to, full of ego, judgment, and soapboxes? Not something I’ll be proud of fifty years from now when I’m looking at retirement home brochures with my children.”

“Jeez! Bleak, much?” I stifle a laugh.

Nell stares at me hard.

I should maybe exercise some sensitivity and try not to mess this all up. “Sorry. Just … I tend to be a positive, happy-go-lucky kinda guy. I don’t mean to insult you or anything, Nell. It’s just that I always—”

“Penelope.”

I lift an eyebrow. “Sorry?”

“Penelope.” She takes another swig, blinks away the sting of it, then says, “My name’s Penelope Norman.”

“Penelope … Nell. I see.” I smile, appreciating it. “When’d you start going by Nell?”

“When I left high school. I couldn’t stand the …
sound
of my own name. I needed to … shed my old skin, I guess you could say.”

“Didn’t have a good childhood?”

“No.”

She stares down at her bottle, lost in a thought. Somewhere in those infinite, green eyes of hers, I feel like there’s a hundred things she’s not wanting to say. I need to tread lightly.

“My childhood sucked, too.” I take a seat on an empty platform next to her. “Well, I mean,
school
did. Kids are fuckin’ mean.”

She looks at me curiously, as if appraising me. “Mean little shits, they all were,” she agrees, squinting.

“I wasn’t always … like this,” I admit to her, then instantly regret it, feeling a wave of discomfort surge through me as I recall prepubescent Brant and the way he’d freeze up in front of any girl, pissing himself at parties while pre-deaf Clayton confidently strode forth, showing little me how it’s done. “Anyway, I—”

“Like what?” she asks, pursuing the subject I was trying to avoid. “You weren’t always like what?”

I reach for my neck, then make a sudden and timely discovery that I decide to use as a distraction. “Shit. I … I left my camera in the car. Didn’t even put it back in its case. Left it sitting out on the passenger seat, I think. I wanted to, uh … take another photo of you.”

Nell crosses her legs the other way, then smiles. “Take it now.”

“Now? But I gotta run back down a hundred flight of stairs and grab—”

“Take it on your phone. Who cares? We make art with nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“You don’t need your big flashy device. You just need whatever you got on you, always. And if you didn’t have your phone, you’d take pics with your mind.” Her green eyes are ablaze. “Take my picture, Brant.”

I fumble, diving into my pocket and retrieving my phone. Quickly lifting it, I get her in frame, angling the pic to capture her legs and long, beautiful hair, then snap a shot of her.

“Let me see,” she says at once, snatching the phone from me before I’ve given her an answer.

I watch as she stares at the picture, peering curiously at it. The silence in the room grows thicker and thicker the longer her face is lit by the screen. I smile, watching her watch herself.

Then she asks, “What do you see in this?”

“What do you mean? It’s … you. Nell.”

“I mean … you don’t ever
just
take a photo.” She turns my phone one way, then the other, squinting. “You consider the lights and darks. The balance. Depth. Where my eyes are and … I mean, look. You even caught the white canvas behind me, contrasting with my dark hair.”

“I did?” I lean over, peering into the phone with her. My shoulder grazes hers. I’m so close, her scent invades me and it’s intoxicating.

“See?” she murmurs quietly.

I look at the photo. I guess I see what she means. “Yeah, totally.”

“Hmm.” She continues to study it as if she were analyzing some great piece of art she happened across. And I study the side of her face as if she was some great puzzle I was trying to pull apart.

Then another puzzle comes to mind. “Hey, Nell. Where’s your, uh … bathroom?”

“Other side of the fridge near the door.”

I help myself, crossing the narrow space to a short hallway I didn’t notice when coming in where a salmon-colored opened door leads me into a dim bathroom with a combo tub-and-shower squeezed next to a sink and toilet. The first thing I smell is bleach and paint, then notice the bathtub stained with various colored splotches.
Guess she uses the tub more in the name of art and less in the name of actually taking baths.

I close the door softly behind me and touch my back pocket, just to be sure it’s still there.
Condom, check
.

Then I take a deep breath and look at myself in the mirror, leaning forward to inspect a red spot, curious if I got a bug bite or something. I push down a strand of hair that’s sticking straight up in the back. I lick my lips and check my breath, huffing into my palm.

I could very well move to the next step with Nell and I need to make sure I do this right, because it’s clear to me that her whole “art” thing can shove me away as easily as it can pull me into her bed. She’s not as tough as she looks; minute by minute I’m peeling back the layers and finding the sensitive Nell I know is in there, the one who will respond to my advances, the one who’ll let me kiss her.

And maybe other things, if I can keep her attention.

Maybe things involving her boobs, which I can’t stop staring at in that sexy red crop top.

Maybe things involving that ass of hers, that ass I want to grab and lift her up by, that ass I want to slam against a wall as I thrust myself into her.

Penelope
… I smile at myself, as if just the revealing of her name was some admission of letting down her walls. She’s let me inside of her.

And now it’s time for her to let
another
part of me inside her.

I flush her toilet, fake-wash my hands, then let myself out of the bathroom. I clap my hands together, give them a good rub, and return to Nell still sitting on that pedestal staring at my phone.

“I can print out that pic and frame it, if you like it so much,” I tease.

“Candace.”

Candace?
“Who?”

“That’s your dancer’s name,” she says, lifting her eyes to meet mine. “She sent a text. Popped up suddenly, covered my face for a second. Candace. Not Clara. Unless that’s yet
another
‘artist of the stage’ you … spent time with. Got a thing for C-named dancers?” she teases dryly.

I glance down at the phone in her grip, making the realization. “Oh. I … I know. She really wasn’t any—I mean, she wasn’t a big—Well, like, what I mean is …”

Each time I try to spin it, the explanation sounds worse.

“No, no,” she returns calmly. “Brant, I’m not … No.” Suddenly, Nell laughs. “I’m not jealous. I’m not hurt. This isn’t …”

“I’m just trying to explain that she—”

“No need, really, seriously. Brant, I knew what I was getting into.” She rises and hands me my phone. It lands in my palm with a resolute, fleshy thud.

“What you were ‘getting into’? Wait,” I blurt, frustrated. “Nell, you got this wrong. I’m into you. I’m, like … I’m
way
into you.”
I don’t even know what Clara—fuck, I mean Candace—texted me for.
“You’re not ‘getting into’ anything.”

“Of course I am. Listen, I don’t know where you were expecting this thing to go …” she starts.

“Not straight into your bed,” I lie. Or maybe I mean it. I don’t even know. “We’re just getting to know each other, Nell. Totally innocent. I’m not here to just …
score
. I’m—”

“Great. So, we’ve gotten to know each other. You’ve seen my home, and not many people have. I just thought …” Her eyes detach for a moment, searching for the words. “I guess I just lost track of the time.”

“The time?”

“It’s late. I have an early class.” She folds her arms.

I stare at her.
She’s throwing me out. Because of the text, which I still haven’t read.
My insides are worked up so much, I could spit acid. “Nell, don’t ice me out just because some dumb girl texted me or whatever.”

“Dumb girl,” she murmurs.

Fuck.
“I didn’t mean … Ugh, listen, Nell—”

“You really don’t owe me an explanation, Brant,” she says, her voice annoyingly calm. “We’re not boyfriend and girlfriend. We had dinner tonight. That’s all.”

“But I don’t want it to be just a damn
dinner
,” I retort, feeling myself getting angry. “I want more with you. I want to like, talk art and, like, get all deep and shit with you.”

“Deep?” She chuckles dryly. “You? Deep?”

I feel my eyes narrowing. Okay, now she’s digging at me personally. “You think I’m just some shallow dude?” It’s like she’s pulling my fears right out of my mind. It’s like she knows my insecurities. She’s playing my heart the way a seasoned pianist pulls wicked music out of thin air the second he sits at the bench. “The idea of a guy like me having any …
depth
… is a fucking joke to you?”

“They all leave.”

“What?”

“They all … always leave,” she mumbles. “Just go. Spare me the pain of having to figure it out later when you get bored of me, just like every person in my life has gone away. Leave, along with the rest of them. I don’t even care. I don’t even really like you,” she adds.

“Now
that
, I know, is a lie.” Something else is happening here. There is something …
dark
… going on in her head that she isn’t telling me.

“I never really liked you,” she repeats.

“You’re just saying that because you’re afraid of being hurt,” I state, despite the nagging doubts eating away at what little confidence I can muster in this situation. “You’re tearing down what we got goin’ on because you’re afraid.”

“There’s nothing going on.”

“You’re afraid.” I close the distance between us, startling her when my face appears inches from hers. “You’re afraid of me, Nell.”

“Fuck you.”

“Wish you would.”

“That’s all you care about.”