Say Yes (Nostalgic Summer Romance)

“Focus, Mr. Benson,” I said, kissing his lips swiftly before I wiggled out of his grasp. “And maybe we can have playtime after class.”

“You’re cruel.”

“Hey, this was your idea,” I reminded him.

With another dramatic sigh, he peeled his eyes off me and back to his canvas, and I put on the Jagged Little Pill album by Alanis Morissette before taking the seat next to him.

Hours passed with little being said between us. When the music stopped, I’d get up long enough to change CDs before I’d be back next to him. And when our sketches were complete, Liam tossed his pencil behind him and threw me over his shoulders like a sack of potatoes, hauling me to the bed.

This was the way our week went after that night of the Olympics kicking off.

We watched our country battle for gold, while we each overcame our own hurdles abroad. You would have thought I was torturing Liam, for the way he fought me on every little lesson I tried to teach regarding how he could hone his craft.

Sketching was just the beginning. We branched into edging and blending, desaturation and color temperature, and though he threw a fit nearly every step of the way, I could see it at the end of each day, how proud he was of what he’d done, how it was clicking for him — the way one small adjustment could lead to a huge impact on his work.

To be fair, Liam wasn’t the only one getting fussy.

There were times I’d be deep into a painting, and he’d pull me from my chair, making me put the brush down when I was so far in the zone, it felt impossible to walk away. He’d choose those exact moments to take me back out into the real world, and every time, he’d lead me to something new, something unseen, something to shake me up — like reading to an older gentleman at a retirement home on the edge of the city, or eating pork blood cake, a Tuscan delicacy.

It wasn’t always about taking me out for bite-size experiences like what we had on our yes night, though. Sometimes, he’d stand behind me when I was intensely focused and cover my eyes with his hands. He’d hold them there, just breathing, until I realized my breathing was shallow and tense, and his was long and relaxed, and we’d just breathe together until mine matched his.

I’d critique his work technically, and he’d critique mine creatively. We were pushing each other to be better and, I had to hand it to him, he’d been right that night by the river.

We were a perfect balance.

One night, when we were both tired and had been working entirely too long, I hit my boiling point.

“No, do it again,” Liam said, dragging his hand across the canvas and marring my work so that I had no choice.

I gaped at the sight of his fingertip smudges destroying the field of sunflowers on my canvas. “Liam! How could you do that?!” I whipped around, tears stinging my eyes. “We’ve been here for hours. It’s ruined. How could you… how could—”

“It’s boring, Harley. It’s tired and you know it.”

“You’re so rude. Do you know that? You’re the rudest boy I’ve ever met.”

His nostrils flared. He hated it when I called him a boy.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” I said, wiping my tears before they could fall. “I want you to leave.”

He sighed, bending at the waist until his eyes were level with mine. “Harley, look at me.”

I shook my head, eyes on my feet, arms crossed hard over my chest.

“Please.”

My throat tightened, exhaustion and weariness making it impossible for me to discern what I actually wanted in that moment. Reluctantly, I pulled my gaze up to meet his.

“You can do better. Okay? That’s what I’m saying. Just like I hated spending an entire night on stupid blending, you knew it would help me. You knew I was capable of more.”

I swallowed, not wanting to admit he was right.

“You’re so focused on getting everything right — the lighting, the shade, the edges, the blends. You should have seen the wrinkles between your eyes, and the way your shoulders were tied up to your ears while you painted this past hour.” He shook his head. “What if you looked at it a different way? What if you gave yourself permission to not have to get it right the first time, but to simply play? What if instead of intense focus, you laughed and drank wine while you painted, and you didn’t get frustrated at the first misstep, but instead took it as a cue to go a different direction, to flow with your creativity instead of trying to wrangle it?”

I couldn’t explain it to anyone who wasn’t there — not Angela or my parents or Professor Beneventi — but the words Liam spoke to me in that moment seemed to pull back a curtain that I thought my whole life was a wall. He revealed a whole world behind that curtain, one that had been there all along, but that I had been too afraid to find.