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To say Nathanaël loved Alix Kubdel would be inaccurate. He loved to draw her, yes, but he did not love her.
He loved the way her movements lent themselves so easily to his sketches and the way every action she made could let you know how she was feeling; her petite nose scrunched up or flared when she was irritated, her eyebrows arched downwards sharply and her eyes narrowed when she was angry, the little finger of her left hand tapped against her desk when she was bored in class. She was a perfect model for drawing studies and Nathanaël was grateful she had given him permission to sketch her whenever he pleased.
But being grateful to her was not the same as being in love with her.
He was introverted by nature and would much rather be tucked away in the library than out in the noise filled courtyard most of the time. But, of course, with so much energy crammed into such a small body (and, coming from him, she was so very short) there was no place but the courtyard she would choose to be. So, in order to sketch her movements, he had to start frequenting the same people filled locations as her with increasing regularity. He was not particularly pleased with this development.
He also had problems with her style. Personally, Nathanaël had a preference for symmetry in the things he sketched. Her hair was not symmetrical. Once he had tried to ask her to put her hair up so that half of it wasn’t left loose at the side; she had laughed and handed him her pocket watch before starting her first of twenty laps. She was rarely compliant and that irked him as well.
In fact there was a long list of ways she acted that certainly didn’t endear her to him. Alix was loud and boisterous, especially when she was around Kim, but whenever they talked about something that wasn’t sport related, a topic Nathanaël had zero interest in, then her eyes glazed over, the finger tapping would resume, and it generally looked like her spirit had just given up and left her body. He was actually quite offended over that after he had seen her nodding in agreement to something Chloé had said.
If that wasn’t bad enough, she was also very confusing. Whilst switching from apathetic to ‘I’ll-break-you-knee-caps-if-you-look-at-me-wrong’ was not something he would consider normal, he considered the timid and contemplative side of her that he’d recently met even less normal, at least for her.
It had started a few weeks before; he didn’t know why it started, or if his sheer association with her was the reason she always sought him out, but every time it was the same. She found him on whatever bench he was on and sat beside him, curling her legs in tight to her chest. Her back would arch in what must have been an uncomfortable way to accommodate her position and she would press her face against her knees, nose being forced up slightly whilst her forehead creased and her eyes glazed over. It was such a startling change to the normal attitude present in her actions that Nathanaël couldn’t help but memorise every aspect of it.
It felt wrong to draw her when she was like that though. He had tried, once, but could only sketch out the curve of her back before his eyebrows furrowed beneath his hair and his grip on his pen loosened. It didn’t help that he couldn’t talk to her either – every time he tried he was met by a “shut up,” that sounded just as pathetic as he felt for not being able to help her like he wanted. The more often it happened the more he came to accept that he could only sit there with her until she inevitably stood up and left without warning.
The most recent time he saw her coming he was in the middle of drawing a cat that had snuck through the school’s fence and was sunbathing on a patch of grass. She approached quietly, sitting to his left and slowly, as if the sheer effort of doing so was exhausting, brought her feet up onto the bench. Her face was already pressed against her knees by the time he glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. Slowly, she wrapped her left arm around her shins, keeping her legs in place, but her right hand seemed to hover.
It was a change from her usual routine, an inaccuracy from what he expected, but he took that as his cue. Wordlessly, he took his left hand off of his sketchbook and placed it in the space between them. When he felt her small, calloused fingers curl around it he continued his drawing. She left with a small smile that time.
To say Nathanaël loved Alix Kubdel would be inaccurate. But to say he didn’t care about her? Well, that would be inaccurate as well.