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Pope had spent his entire life questioning if God was real and beyond that, if God cared for him; now, standing at the kitchen sink as you crouched over your tablet and drew, he knew the answer to both. Never would he come to understand your ability to pluck entire worlds from nothingness, and even less comprehensible was the fact you deemed him worthy of your company.
God was when you picked up the pen at a restaurant and whipped up a quick doodle of the waitress next to his 20% tip. God was when you forced him to sit on the ottoman and pose for a drawing, or the polaroid photos you’d taken a sharpie to and drawn on top of. God was the purse of the lips and the way you tilted your head as you corrected your “rendering” (whatever that was, he still didn’t understand) for the second hour in a row.
You were so unbelievable that Pope refused to believe you loved him. Not when you said you loved him, nor when you showed up at the hospital in five minutes (it was normally a fifteen minute journey for you) when you were called as his emergency contact did he believe it. When you showed up to dates, he attributed it to pity. When you held him at night or smiled at the security camera while waiting for him to open the front door, he wrote it off. It wasn’t until you stared at him silently over dinner, acting much more like Pope than yourself, and finally said: “I love how draw-able you are.”
Then, Pope knew you loved him.
After a lifetime spent being shamed for his staring issues, a byproduct of the survival skills required to make it in the Cody household, you slowly revealed yourself to be ten times worse than him. More than once he’d woke up to find you hovering over him with a stitch in your brow.
“Don’t move,” You mumbled, smoothing out the wrinkle of concern that creased his forehead.
“How long have you been starin’ at me?”
“Couldn’t sleep,” You grunted, reaching over and producing your physical sketchbook. Rifling through it, you angled it to show him the pages of sketches of a sleeping man. It looked sort of what Pope figured he looked like, except that the man in your sketchbook was all soft edges and lovely expressions and you had spent hours drawing page upon page of him. Surely, that was not Pope, because there was no chance of Pope being something worth your studying.
Once every few minutes, you’d look up from the sketchbook a bit longer. You might instruct him to shift this way or that, close his eyes, stop smiling while staring up at you, but his favorite moments were the ones you would extend the pencil from your lithe, graphite-smudged fingers and drag the non-drawing edge along his cheek or jawbone. Your lips would move with silent mumblings to yourself and, every time, he’d repeat that he didn’t know what there was to critique.
“I can’t get it right.”
“It was perfect the first time,” Pope mumbled. His voice dripped with the same sickening amount of honesty that it always held when speaking to, or about, you.
“No, it’s,” He prepared for you to say he just didn’t get it, that it was beyond him and he wasn’t worth explaining it to. “It’s your eyes, your eyelids. They’re deepset, so there’s this double fold-”
“Sorry.”
“No! No, Pope, it’s not bad, are you kidding?” You tossed the sketchbook off the bed and disregarded how it fell right off. It disgusted him: your sketchbook shouldn’t touch the floor. None of your work should. It was too perfect, and it was done at your hand, and it mattered to you, so it should never be treated so recklessly. Still, he was more preoccupied with you throwing your leg over him and leaning down to rest your forehead against his.
“I love drawing you, Pope,” Your hair fell out of its claw clip and tickled the tips of his ears, “You’re my favorite to draw ever. And I especially love your eyes,” You grinned, pressing your lips to his left, and then his right eyelid. He allowed them to flutter shut; allowed himself to shed the role of the observer, in favor of the role of your worshiper. He was your muse and your devotee, and he may be an idiot but he would never be reckless enough to refuse the gifts you bestowed upon him.
“I wish I could draw you,” Pope whispered against your lips. His arms snaked around you and pulled you against him, peppering kisses all over your face. You were wise enough never to tell him, but you loved his way of kissing. It wasn’t normal kissing; Pope had a habit of just pressing his lips against your skin, letting them linger, then picking his lips up just to do the exact same thing elsewhere. You adored it, and you never wanted it to change.
“You can. I love when you draw with me.”
He cringed at the memory of the awful doodles he’d done on your tablet for your entertainment. “Nah, that’s- not that bullshit. I wanna draw you good. I wish,” He sighed, rolling you over and kissing your collarbone. Pope cuddled into your side, nuzzling into you chest and slotting his head under your chin. You wasted no time holding him as close as possible to you, your fingers tracing shapes all across his back. “Wish I could draw you like you are.”
“How’s that?”
“Dunno. Warm. Fancy colors, like the,” He racked his brain, “Sistine Chapel, that shit. All fancy and gold and red. But a tree. And the statues.”
Your hand drifted from his shoulderblades, where you had been drawing on his freckled skin, to the nape of his neck. Playing with his auburn curls, you asked, “All in one?”
“Yeah. And fancy glass shit. All that combined. But warm, like a blanket.”
You tilted your head and jutted out your bottom lip, knowing he could not see it. After a short ‘awe’, you said, “You think I’m multimedia?” And after Pope hummed affirmatively, you placed a kiss atop his head. “That’s the sweetest compliment anyone’s ever given me, Pope.”
“Ain’t a compliment. S’just true.”
“Well, you’re very sweet. Thanks for letting me bug you for drawings, baby,” You smiled into his curls, pulling him impossibly closer and draping the comforter back over you both.
As months turned into a year, Pope grew bitter at the thought of you doing anything but art. Over dinner on your front porch, staring out at the crashing waves on the Oceanside shore, he finally proposed what he’d thrown out there for months but that you never took seriously:
“I think you should quit your job and focus on your art.”
“Yeah,” You laughed through a mouthful of half-chewed burger, “Right.”
“Hey, I’m not kiddin’. I hate it. Hate the thought of you doin’ anything else. It’s bullshit. Your boss is bullshit, I make enough money. You told me it makes you happy.”
“Of course it does, but- well, making money makes me happy, too.”
“That’s bullshit! That’s bullshit. Listen,” He shifted in his seat to face you, resting a hand on your knee. Clearly, he’d been preparing this for some time, so you let him go on. “You’re a waitress. You can be a waitress anywhere. But we got the money, I’ll give you whatever you want, even if you break up with me or, or-”
“Pope-”
“But I hate it. I hate that you’re wasting time. If you spent 8 hours doin’ art instead of bein’ a waitress, imagine where you’d be. Not that you’re bad, but,” He sighed, officially having lost his momentum and feeling that he was word vomiting far more than he was actually making his original point. “On our third date you told me you felt like you were born to be an artist. I ain’t felt like that about anything other than you. It’s not fair. I get to be with you, so you should get to do what you love, too. Just try it. Six months.”
“Pope,” There was a quiver to your voice that wasn’t normally there, and the worry it stoked in him allowed Pope to meet your eyes again. They were glossy, which he hated, because he really didn’t like making you cry. At the same time, it made him understand what you said when you called someone draw-able; you were beautiful when you were smiling, or laughing, or making spaghetti or trying not to cry. You were beautiful, and you made him understand what art was for, after all.
“That’s not- it’s not that easy. You can’t just pay for my life.”
“It is. I’ll do it.”
“Why would you do that?!”
Pope resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He felt his point had already been made very clear, but it sounded like you needed one final push if he wanted a chance at truly making his case. So, after twiddling his thumbs for ten seconds, he said: “Because you would do it for me, and you’re too talented to be a waitress. You’re not, like, normal good at art. You’re really good at it. I like your art. I want you to keep making it. I want you to make it all the time.”
Your bottom lip crinkled, and you bent your knees to pull them as close to your chest as possible.
“I think you’re biased.”
“I am. But your art is genuinely good. You know how many fancy art galleries I’ve been in? Your shit is way better. And I’ve been looking at, uh, commission sheets, you can make, I dunno, 20 or 30 bucks at least. You can sell your shit, or don’t, but you should be makin’ it anyways. Think it’s stupid that you’re clearly meant to do somethin’, and you aren’t doing it.”
You still refused to look at Pope. After another sniffle, you asked, “You mean it?”
When Pope nodded far too earnestly, as he often did when it came to you, you rolled your eyes and looked back out at the beach. For several minutes, all either of you heard was the sound of waves and seagulls, and children yelling at each other as they collected seashells and ran ahead of their parents. Finally, you spoke.
“I feel like the only time I’m as happy as when I’m drawing is when I’m with you. Is that stupid?”
“No.”
“I mean, it’s drawing. You know how many people on this Earth can do that? Way better than me. Plus, I’m a terrible painter. I failed perspective class-”
“So you can work on it. You can work on all of it. Please- please,” You felt his hand in your hair; at some point, he raised it to tuck it behind your ear. “Let me do this for you.”
“You’re crazy,” You sniffed. You instinctively leaned into his touch and allowed Pope to wrap you in his arms. He brought you close to his chest, holding you like you’d disappear if you let go.
“If I could draw like you, I wouldn’t ever stop. I don’t think you should have to.”
Two months later, you were rifling through the bottom of your shared closet, desperately searching for a pair of sandals that must have gotten lost in the months you slowly moved into his (now, your) beachfront home. While the search for the shoes was ultimately a failure, you stumbled upon a shoebox you hadn’t seen before. Pope was off working, and there wasn’t anything about him you were unaware of, so you didn’t think twice about popping it open.
Immediately, the box seemed to overflow: receipts, photos, sticky notes, gum wrappers, index cards and kids menus. Every drawing, doodle, sketch, and tic-tac-toe game had been collected. Some of them were specially kept in an airtight bag and even dated on the front- first date. Fourth date. First I love you. First time Pope was brave enough to return the I love you.
Your personal favorite was buried all the way at the bottom- it was a drawing you had done of Pope on your third date. You begged him to draw and finally, after three dates, he admitted defeat; you still remembered the genuine displeasure on his face as he took the pen from your hands and scribbled on the back of the receipt. Next to a cartoonish Pope, drawn at your hand, was a stick figure. Next to that stick figure was a heart.
The first time you’d ever gotten Pope to draw.
You slipped that one out of the box, then tucked the box back into the closet with a smile on your face, off to the storage room to find a frame.