Work Text:
The blonde drops her robe in front of the easel before prompted. Maybe once Mandy would have hated her for it, the sheer sexual boldness and that smirk of daring. Back when Mandy was in high school, before she knew her doodles on the edges of pop quizzes where more than doodles. Back when everything was a battle and people were meant to be conquered and destroyed, lest they conquer and destroy you.
Now Mandy is two years and 700 miles away from the Southside and all the things that chained her into a self-destructive spiral like the rest of her family. An art scholarship a nosy but well-meaning teachers had pressed her into apply for had unlocked Mandy from that old life and its accompanying mindset. Mandy doesn’t believe in angels, but…
The blonde isn’t the first nude model Mandy’s worked with, not the second or even fifth, but easily the least shy. She presses her hands to her naked hips and asks, “Like this?”
“More towards the window,” Mandy says as she shifts through her oil paints for the right shade of yellow. She likes how the sunlight glances of the blonde’s hair.
Mandy paints this one with mostly white, pink, and yellow – very bright and pastel for Mandy’s work.It takes a few hours, but when Mandy gets in her zone, it’s like all time collapses into a single moment. One blink, a blank canvas, another blink, it’s there.
She tips her brush into the water cup. “Done,” she says.
The blonde doesn’t bother to pick up her robe as she rounds the easel. “Wow,” she says, standing at Mandy’s shoulder.
Mandy stretches a cramp out of her paintbrush hand. Her fingers are all smudged with paint, but she prefers them that way. It’s feels like a second skin.
“It’s that really how you see me?” the blonde asks, a seriousness to her tone that’s almost never there.
“This is why I don’t paint people I know, Karen.” Art’s inherently vulnerable. It says what you won’t, what you can’t, what there aren’t words for.
“You aren’t even looking.”
Mandy turns her head up to Karen. She rolls her eyes.
“At the painting, dumbass.”
Mandy looks, leaning back on her stool to the full perspective. Oh.
“Shit,” Mandy swears.
“Yeah,” Karen chuckles beside her. She slides an arm across Mandy’s shoulders. “You love me, don’t you?”
Mandy and Karen hang out. They fuck. They take each other as dates to things you take dates to. When Mandy gave in to Karen’s exhibitionist demands to be painted in the nude, Mandy only thought it would be her practice and Karen’s foreplay. And here she had just painted Karen with an ethereal glow around her, like a fucking halo.
Mandy didn’t believe in angels, but she sure as hell just showed all her cards.
Karen leans down behind her, whispers into her hair, “I love it.”
It’s not ‘I love you’ and Mandy hadn’t exactly said those three words either, but it's a step. So when Mandy pivots on her stool so she can pull Karen into a kiss, her fingers smudge paint on Karen’s waist where she grabs. Mandy’s glad she’s learned to leave a mark on a person that isn’t a bruise.