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“Dammit,” Jayce hisses as his knee collides with the side of the living room end table.
He shouldn’t have been looking at his phone. Nothing broke at least, and it wasn’t his bad leg that made contact with the table. But the impact was enough to knock Mel’s sketchbook from the end table, pages falling open as it hits the ground.
Jayce quickly puts his phone in his back pocket, leaning down to pick up the fallen sketchbook. He’s never looked inside of it before— Mel’s opened up to him over the years they’ve been together, but he knows there are some things she would rather keep to herself or bring up in her own time. But as he looks over the book, catching a glimpse of the opened pages for the first time, his curiosity is piqued.
Jayce didn't know exactly what he expected to see in the sketchbook. Mel’s medium of choice is typically paint, and her works are usually sweeping landscapes. Sometimes they're real— a city skyline dotted with tiny lights, a beach that she and Jayce had visited one summer. Other times they're more fantastical, images of vistas seen in some other life, warships with red banners that wouldn’t look out of place in a fantasy movie. Maybe he was expecting that to be what was inside this sketchbook too.
What Jayce wasn't expecting to see was pages full of drawings of him.
The first page he lands on is one with several sketches of him. One shows him working on a vintage car, careful hatching done with pencil to illustrate the way light and shadow falls over him. Another shows him grinning, the gap between his two front teeth and his sharp canines on full display, while yet another looks like a study she must have done while he was puzzling over some equations for a work project.
It’s an impressive likeness of him. Jayce has known from the first time he laid eyes on one of Mel’s paintings that she’s a gifted artist, but it’s different to see her drawing him. It feels more personal— like a look at him through her eyes. And Jayce thinks that he likes what he sees.
He flips to another page, moving to sit at the couch without thinking. He finds even more drawings of him. One is of him in side profile, following the line of his jaw, hair pulled back in a ponytail to keep out of his face. Another shows him in his gym clothes, a particular care seeming to have been shown to drawing the muscles of his arms.
As Jayce keeps looking through the sketchbook, he sees it's not just pictures of him. There are drawings of flowers and buildings, landscapes and animals. But he certainly seems to be the focus of this sketchbook. There's a page that seems to be focused on various studies of his hands rendered in painstaking detail, then another showing him at work, fingers smudged with oil as he tinkers with a small gadget that’s hard to identify from what she’s drawn alone. It has spinning gears though, each one looking tiny in comparison to his hands.
He wonders how many of these sketches were drawn from memory and how many were drawn off of him. He sees a couple studies of his face that are familiar, probably referenced off of a photo they’ve taken together, and he’s seen her drawing in her sketchbook sometimes as he works. He never thought to ask what she was working on in it, figuring that anything she would want him to see, she would openly show to him. Knowing she’s spent so long focused on him though is different— it makes him feel special.
Especially because there are some drawings Jayce knows she couldn’t have done off of an image or as they spent time together. One page is completely dedicated to an image of him in bed, eyes closed. There’s a dream-like quality to it, the lines of the pencil blurred and smudged, but with a precision that feels intentional. In the drawing, Jayce’s face is half buried in the pillows, and a blanket is tangled around his legs. His left leg sticks out from the blankets, and he’s impressed to see not only the way she drew the scarring on it, but even the faint indents left in his skin by his brace. The level of detail must have taken hours to achieve, and the fact she seemed to have done it from memory only makes the piece all the more impressive.
Then one page near the end there's a list written in Mel’s neat handwriting of superheroes, Iron Man, Superman, and Batman crossed out while Spider-Man is circled, with a note in smaller print next to it.
His favourite!
Next to the list is a drawing of him from the chest up, careful pencil strokes rending the webbed patterning of Spider-Man’s suit. A couple of simple poses are drawn around it, not as detailed as the image of him in costume, but clearly different ones she was considering to match the superhero. More notes are written at the bottom.
A birthday gift?
See about if a set tour for the new movie could be arranged.
The amount of thought that Mel put into everything is flattering. Jayce knows how much time Mel spends on her art. To fill these pages with images of him, it would’ve had to take up days worth of her time. And the fact that it seems she was able to capture so many details of him from memory is an even higher compliment. It’s an honor to think that he could take up so much of Mel’s time and thoughts, that she would spend enough time thinking about him to be able to memorize every detail of his appearance and commit each one to the page.
“Jayce?”
His head shoots up, and he suddenly feels like a child getting caught looking at something he wasn't supposed to. But when Mel’s eyes land on the sketchbook and all the pieces fall into place, she doesn’t look upset with him. Instead, a faint smile tugs at her lips as she approaches him, holding a mug of tea in hand. She sits down on the couch next to him, putting her mug on the coffee table before she rests a hand on his thigh.
“Most people would ask before looking in someone else’s sketchbook,” she notes.
“It wasn’t on purpose,” he says. “I knocked it over. And all the pictures of me were pretty eye-catching.”
“You’re quite inspiring,” Mel says.
Jayce nudges her knee with his. “I could say the same to you.”
Mel rests her head on Jayce’s shoulder, suddenly seeming more hesitant— almost shy. “Do you like it?”
“I love it,” he replies, turning to press a quick kiss to her forehead. “I didn’t know you spent so much time thinking about me.”
“Of course I do. You’re a wonderful muse,” she replies.
“So are you.”
“Am I?”
“Uh-huh. I have a whole notebook of my own ideas of things for you,” Jayce says.
Most of it’s simple— small metalworking projects he might work on for her, bits of custom made jewelry that would go well with the rest of her collection. He has plenty of sketches of his own for that, images of rings and necklaces, small devices that might be useful for her in her day to day life.
But even beyond that, Mel has an impressive ability to inspire. Whenever he’s with her, it feels like anything is possible, like all the worries that hang over him in his daily life fade away. He still has low moments where everything seems hopeless, he still struggles at times to tell himself that there's anything to like about himself. But digging himself out of the dark of depression is easier when there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. With Mel, he knows that he doesn’t have to be alone, and he knows that there's someone who adores him.
“Maybe I’ll have to take a look at your notebook then. It only seems fair after you’ve seen mine,” Mel says, a teasing tone creeping into her voice as she glances up at Jayce.
“Good luck finding it. I’m not giving up any surprises for you that easily,” he replies easily.
“Keeping secrets, are we?”
“Only the good kind,” Jayce says.
Mel makes a soft “hmm” sound in response, reaching with one hand to flip another page of the sketchbook.
“I love you,” she says, and it’s nice to hear just how easy it’s gotten for her to say it over the time since they got together, how naturally it flows off her tongue.
And it’s easy to know that she means it. With a physical manifestation of her love for him in his hands, her body fitting perfectly against his as they flip through the remaining pages together, it would be impossible for Jayce not to know how much she cares for him.
So he rests his head against Mel’s, pulling her closer to him with one arm. When he speaks, his voice is low, only just loud enough for her to hear. “I love you too.”