I Paid My Grumpy Neighbor to Be My Fake Boyfriend, and He Took the Job Way Too Seriously novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The Drawings

"Is that a yes?" Eli said against my neck.

"I don't know what it is."

"He used a period. After 'him.'" He lifted his head and read the screen. "Your father's the only man alive who texts with periods."

"That's how you can tell he's serious."

"About what?"

I didn't know.

His hand was still under my shirt, flat on my ribs.

My key was still half turned in the lock.

He looked at the phone, and then at me.

"Your father's in this hallway now," he said.

"He's three hours away."

"He's in this hallway." He took his hand out from under my shirt and smoothed the cotton down, very carefully. "I'm not doing this with your dad's punctuation in my head."

"You're serious."

"I'm always serious."

I groaned and let my head fall back against the door.

He kissed me once more, slow, like an apology.

Then he stepped back across the hall.

I turned my key the rest of the way and went in alone.

A minute later he knocked on the wall.

Twice.

I knocked back so hard my knuckles hurt.

The portfolio review was August twenty-first.

That gave me eight weeks.

I turned my dorm room into a studio.

I moved my bed against the wall and dragged in a folding table from the lounge.

I taped drawings to the cinderblock until you couldn't see the paint.

The program wanted twenty pieces.

I had about three hundred, and maybe six that were good.

So I drew.

I drew in the morning before my cafe shift and at night after Eli came back from the shop.

I drew the dishwasher at the cafe, who finally had his car.

I drew my professor's hands, chalky, mid-sentence.

I drew the old man who swept the Halsey lobby every morning at five.

Eli sat for me on Sundays.

He was a terrible model.

He kept checking his phone and asking if he could move.

One Sunday it was ninety degrees, and the dorm had no air conditioning.

He sat on my bed against the cinderblock wall in an undershirt, with a box fan pointed at him.

Three hundred drawings fluttered on the wall around his head.

Half of them were of him.

He'd noticed that.

He hadn't said anything, which was worse.

I sat at the folding table and started his mouth for the fourth time.

I couldn't get it.

I kept looking up at it, and then looking up at it longer than a drawing needed.

"You're staring," he said.

"I'm drawing."

"You've drawn the same line six times."

"Don't move."

He picked up his phone.

"Put that down. You can move your mouth," I said. "Nothing else."

He put the phone down on the quilt.

He looked at me across the room for a long moment.

"What am I supposed to do with my mouth?"

The fan ticked around.

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