Work Text:
Jesse had started painting over the graffiti that covered the walls of the downstairs floor days ago, but he’d only managed to paint about half of his living room. Apparently, you need to layer the paint quite a few times to completely cover the spray paint. Jesse’s arms are sore, but he keeps focused on the task. The sooner the house looks less like a drug den, the better.
By his side, Andrea hums along to the tune playing through the speakers. She’d volunteered to help, even though Jesse had assured her he could do it by himself. Brock had gone on a school trip, so she wasn’t too eager to spend the afternoon alone at an empty house, anyway. If he’s being honest with himself, Jesse wasn’t, either.
Most of the graffiti are names or shitty drawings or just straight-up illegible, but Jesse can make out a few creative or interesting ones. There’s a pair of initials written with bright red spray paint near the window, inside of a weirdly shaped circle Jesse assumes was supposed to be a heart. Hope things worked out for you, A.J. + M.D., he thinks right before he covers it with white paint.
He hears Andrea snicker and looks over at her. They had been working together in silence for a while, taking turns using the ladder and picking the music. “JJ was here,” she reads. “Screwed two bitches here. Riley is a slut. This looks like a high school bathroom wall.”
Jesse smiles. “Does it? Back at Wynne the teachers were really strict about this stuff, they’d give you a whole speech on vandalism or whatever if they caught you writing on the walls or on the desk. And make you clean it up."
“I bet you did it anyway, though.” Andrea goes over Riley is a slut with her paint roller a few times before it disappears under the white paint. “You seem like you were quite troublemaker.”
He puts a hand over his heart dramatically, feigning hurt. “I feel personally attacked."
Andrea rolls her eyes, an amused smile forming in the corners of her lips. “Sorry. You are quite the troublemaker,” she corrects herself. Jesse elbows her at her side and she elbows him right back, laughing when a few droplets of white ink from her roller splash across his shirt.
The playful teasing, the little side smiles when their eyes would meet – Jesse hasn’t had that with anybody ever since Jane. It feels good. To feel so comfortable and at ease in someone’s presence again.
“Hell yeah, I wrote my initials all over that building. Hardcore, huh?” says Jesse. “I bet you used to be a troublemaker back in high school, too.”
“What makes you think that?” Andrea doesn’t look over at him, but he can see thr mischievous gleam in her eyes.
Jesse shrugs. “Just a feeling.”
“I was more of an outcast in high school. You know that one girl who sits in the back of the class and doesn’t really talk much or hangs out with anyone?” she says. Jesse realizes he doesn’t know too much about Andrea’s life before he came along – except for the whole thing with Tomás, which he mostly tries not to think about – and he wants to know her better. “But I did get in trouble for some things from time to time.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
She sets the roller aside and bends down to pick up one of the brushes near the can of paint. “This,” she laughs, bringing the brush over to Jesse’s face. He ducks out of the way, but he’s not fast enough, the brush leaving a streak of white across his nose and cheek.
“Bitch–” He swings the roller in her direction and she turns around to protect her face. He runs the roller down her back and she gasps, trying to grab a hold of the handle to stop him.
“H-Hey, not fair!” she protests; admittedly, his paint roller against the small brush she’s holding is like a sword against a knife. But she’s speaking between giggles, smiling so wide it’s contagious.
“Yo, you started it,” Jesse retorts. When he moves the roller in her direction again, she ducks underneath his arm and runs the brush through his forehead. Some of the paint sticks to his buzzcut.
They wrestle for a few more moments until, finaly, after they’re both covered in white ink and their cheeks hurt from laughing so hard, Jesse raises his hands in surrender.
“Okay, Jesus– I surrender.”
Andrea eyes him skeptically, waits until he puts his roller down before she does the same with the brush.
“Truce?” she offers.
“Truce.”
He sits down on the newspaper-covered floor to catch his breath. He gives her hand a tug and she follows, sitting cross-legged and resting her head over his shoulder.
“We made one hell of a mess, huh?” says Jesse.
The paint had splattered everywhere – the walls (good thing they’ll just cover everything in white later anyway), the ladder, the spots on the floor where the newspaper had been crumpled and tousled aside due to their wrestling.
“Yeah,” Andrea smiles. “I totally kicked your ass, though.”
“It’s ‘cause I was going easy on you.”
She laughs. “Of course you were.” She removes a small drop of paint that had gotten stuck to his eyelashes. “We should probably clean this up before the paint dries.”
“Yeah.” He takes a few more seconds to get up, just to savor the moment with Andrea for a little bit longer, before he rises to his feet. He holds his hand out for Andrea, and she takes it as she pulls herself up as well. “I think I’m done with the living room for today. Wanna wash the brushes while I clean this up?”
Andrea nods with a small smile. As she moves away with the brushes and paint rollers on hand, Jesse walks over to the kitchen to get some paper towel to clean up their mess. A lot of paper towel.
When they’re both finished, Jesse leads her upstairs to the bedroom.
“Mind if I take a shower” Andrea asks. She takes Jesse’s hand in hers and pulls him closer, giving him a suggestive, seductive smile. “I guess you could use one, too.”
“That was the sexiest way of telling me I smell, like, ever.”
She rolls her eyes jokingly. “I meant, maybe you wanna join me?”
Jesse smiles. “Actually, I… kinda wanted to do something first.” With his hand still inside of hers, he tugs her towards his nightstand. There’s a box on his third drawer, for lack of a better place to keep it, which he picks up and sets over his bed. Andrea eyes it curiously, sitting on the edge of the mattress.
Inside, there’s a bunch of art material that has been untouched for weeks – colorful paints, his sketchpad, a set of brushes, a pencil case. He’d bought it all around the time he got out of rehab, after some of the staff and patients had complimented his works in art therapy and someone had suggested using art as a coping mechanism. It had worked, for a while, until everything came crashing down after Gale.
“I didn’t know you were a painter,” says Andrea, looking inside the box.
“I’m better at drawing. Painting is kinda new to me,” he answers.
He’s in no way an artist like Jane, but the people at rehab had been right when they said drawing and painting could be good coping mechanisms for him. It calms him down, even when the paintings turn out horrible. It gets his mind off things too, which is good when the craving for a hit gets too bad. It hadn’t worked back in the first couple of weeks after he’d killed Gale, when getting high and losing himself in the wild parties he’d thrown at his house were the only things that actually made him feel better – or, at least, not feel anything at all. So he’d abandoned the hobby once again, just like he’d stopped drawing a few years after high school.
But the idea of coming back into it now feels good. Jesse wouldn’t say his life is taking a turn for the best – Gale’s death is still an open wound, he’s surprised Gus and Mike haven’t offed him yet, and there’s also Mr. White being a dick and pressuring him to kill Gus –, but at least he’s not using anymore, and he’s got people that make him feel happy by his side, like Andrea.
Slightly less awful and hopeless, he’d say. But it’s still better than completely awful and hopeless.
“So you wanna paint?” asks Andrea. “I don’t see a canvas."
“Yeah, that’s the thing. I’ve been wanting to practice body painting lately. Would you be up for it?”
Andrea frowns, but doesn’t seem displeased by the idea. “You wanna paint on me? That doesn’t sound very practical.”
He shrugs slightly. “Not really. But I still wanna try it.”
“Alright. Should I take off my shirt?”
“You can take off your shirt any time you like around me.”
Andrea rolls her eyes with a small laugh, but pulls her shirt over her head. She unhooks her bra and takes it off as well, leaving both on the other side of the bed. Jesse can’t help the pang of arousal that hits him at seeing her topless, but he’s too intrigued by the idea of painting her right now. They’ll have plenty of time for other stuff later.
“Lay down on your stomach,” he instructs her. “Wait just a sec.”
He walks out of the room and returns a minute later with a glass of water to clean out the brushes, placing it on the bedside table next to them.
“What you’re gonna paint?” says Andrea, her head over the pillow as she lies on her stomach, like Jesse had told her to. She’d pulled her hair up into some sort of messy bun to keep it out of the way. He takes a seat on the edge of the bed beside her, placing the box on the floor.
“It’s a surprise.” Truth is, he still doesn’t know. He takes a seat on the edge of the bed right next to Andrea and stares at her. He wants to paint something good, something that does her justice – Andrea’s body is way too pretty for some mediocre painting. He remembers once seeing an artist doing henna tattoos on this chick when he was younger and his parents had taken him on a trip to the beach (he’d asked them to get one as well, but gave up on the idea once his parents told him he wouldn’t be able to swim for the rest of the day if he did), he was doing those geometrical, kinda looks like a flower but not quite a flower things. What’re they called–? Mandalas. Yeah, a mandala would look really good on Andrea.
He pulls out a plate to put the paint on from the box, still dirty with dry ink from the last time he’d painted but hadn’t been bothered to wash the plate afterwards. He squirts a little bit of black paint on the plate. Jesse runs his hand up and down Andrea’s back a few times, caressing her soft skin in small circles, before he grabs a thin brush and dips it into the paint.
“You comfortable?” he asks Andrea, and earns a nod in response. “Okay. Stay still.”
He begins creating the outline of the mandala, starting from the spot between her shoulder blades. Right where his own back tattoo is placed. Careful to keep her back still, Andrea moves her hand inside the box next to the bed. She pulls out one of the paints, a bright blue one that is almost the same shade as the meth he cooks. Just the sight of it nearly makes him nauseous.
“Washable paints,” she reads. “I gotta get some of these for Brock. One time we were painting together, and I left him alone for– five, ten minutes, tops? I didn’t think he’d make that much of a mess. Damn, I was wrong. He painted all over the walls and himself, I think we spent at least an hour in the bathtub trying to wash it all off.” She laughs at the memory. “We still lived with my mom at that time. She was so pissed."
“You should bring him over sometime,” Jesse suggests. “Set him up with the paints in the backyard and let him go nuts.”
Andrea puts the blue paint back in the box, picks up his sketchpad. “What’s this?”
“Just some drawings I made."
“Can I see?"
“Yeah, go ahead.” She removes it fully from the box at his permission. “There aren’t too many in there, though.”
That isn’t the same sketchpad he’d shown Jane what feels like an eternity ago, the one with all the superheroes and shit he’d drawn when he was younger. That one brings back too many memories of Jane, too many feelings he doesn’t quite know how to deal with. So he keeps it hidden deep inside one of the drawers of his nightstand. Sometimes he thinks about taking a look or throwing it away, but he can never bring himself to do either.
Jesse can’t help but tense as Andrea opens the sketchpad, trying to focus on the mandala instead of her reaction to his drawings. Whille this sketchpad does not bring up painful memories of Jane, the drawings inside it are way more personal than the cartoonish superheroes he used to draw. Those are the things he’d drawn ever since he got out of rehab. The idea of Andrea seeing those doesn’t sound too good right now, but it’s too late to stop her. He’s not sure if he actually wants to. He doesn’t usually share too much about his life with Andrea, and it feels good to let her in, in one way or another. Scary, but good.
He stops his work on her back to peek over her shoulder at the sketchpad, watching as she goes through the drawings. The pretty flowers he used to plant at rehab. The silhouette of a man wearing a pork pie hat. A bright green box cutter. And the most recent one; a figure wearing a hazmat suit and a gas mask, their hands and suit red with blood. Andrea stares at each drawing as if she knows there’s a meaning behind them, but can’t figure it out.
“Those are–” Andrea looks speechless for a moment. “Holy shit, you’re so talented.”
Jesse feels a warm rush in his gut at the compliment. “You think so? Most people never really paid attention it. Like my folks, they used to say it was good, but I should focus on ‘actual important things.’”
“Well, your parents are idiots. No offence.” That brings a smile to Jesse’s face. “How come you’ve never told me you draw?”
He shrugs slightly. “Never came up, I guess.”
He can’t see her face really well, but he can bet she looks pensative as she keeps examining the drawings. Finally, after a few minutes of silence, she asks, “What do they mean?”
The idea of telling her everything has crossed his mind multiple times. He doesn’t like hiding things from her – he feels like that drives a wedge between them. She already pretty much knows he’s a drug dealer, right? He’s never told her, but Andrea is not stupid; after all, he’d tried to sell her meth the first day they met. If she already knows and has stayed with him, why can’t he tell her?
But Jesse knows, deep down, that that’s a fantasy that will never become reality. Andrea doesn’t know everything. If she knew all the dangerous shit he’s been through, all the things he’s done, if she knew about Gale – Jesse really doubts she would stay.
And he can’t afford to lose her and Brock. It’s selfish, but right now, they’re his only light in what feels like a dark, endless tunnel.
“I don’t know. Most of the time, I just draw or paint whatever the hell comes to mind. Without payin’ much attention to what I’m doing, you know?”
“But you gotta take inspiration from somewhere, right? Like, this one,” She shows him the drawing of the man with the pork pie hat. He’s gazing out of what looks a bit like a church window, only a dark silhouette visible. “The window looks like the one in your living room.”
“Yeah. Some stuff makes me inspired, and I just go from there. Places, objects, sometimes stuff from movies and shit…” He pauses his work on her back to stare at the drawing she’s holding up for a moment. “But still, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what it means. I’ve got no clue.”
Andrea nods. “Not everything needs to mean something. But… it’s still good."
Jesse smiles softly as he resumes his work. “Thanks,” he says. “What about you, you any good at drawing?”
“Hell no. I can’t even draw stick figures. I think Brock has more artistic skills than me.”
“Hey, that drawing he brought home from school was pretty dope.” Jesse adds more details to the mandala as he recalls the memory. The teacher had asked them to draw their favorite things, and Brock had returned home with a colorful crayon drawing of himself and Andrea playing in the park. Even after Andrea had moved out to the new house, she’d glued the drawing back on the refrigerator. “I’m sure you’re not that bad."
Andrea chuckles. “I’ve got other hidden talents. But drawing is just not one of them."
“What kind of hidden talents?"
She looks at him over her shoulder, giving him a small smile and eyebrow raise. “I guess you’ll have to find out.”
He can’t resist giving her a quick kiss in the lips.
Jesse quickly adds some finishing touches before dipping the brush into the glass of water. “There you go. Done.”
Andrea stands up slowly, careful to not brush against Jesse on accident and smear the paint. There’s a small mirror by his wardrobe – the whole room is a mess of random items and objects thrown around –, and he picks it up, leading Andrea into the bathroom. She stands in front of the mirror by the sink, and he adjusts the smaller mirror in his hands so she can see the painting.
Andrea’s eyes widen a bit, and she seems even more speechless than when she’d seen his sketchpad. Jesse would say it’s nothing special, that it isn’t perfectly symmetrical as a mandala ahould be and a few of the shapes look weird, but Andrea’s staring at it like it’s the fucking Mona Lisa.
When she turns around, he’s not expecting her to grab the back of his neck and pull him in for a kiss, making him nearly drop the mirror he’s carrying.
He wishes his hands were free so he could put them on Andrea’s hips and pull her closer, but Andrea makes up for the lack of physical contact by kissing him so deeply and passionately. When she pulls away, they’ve both got a smile on their lips.
“I take that as you liked it?” says Jesse.
“I loved it,” she replies, giving him one more kiss, shorter than the previous one. “Why a mandala, though?"
Jesse sets the mirror in his hands aside so he can cup Andrea’s face. “I wanted to paint something unique and beautiful. Like you.”
Andrea smiles and presses her lips against his again. Jesse returns the kiss with the same amount of effort and passion as Andrea puts into it, pulling her closer with an arm around her waist until their bodies are pressed together. He wants nothing more than to walk into the shower and kiss and caress every inch of Andrea’s skin that he can reach, but a different thought crosses his mind. He pulls her away gently with his hands on her shoulders.
“It’s my turn now, right?”
Andrea blinks up at him, then gets what he meant. “You want me to…?” she asks. “I don’t… I don’t know how to paint.”
“Come on, just try it. I don’t care if it doesn’t look like fucking Van Gogh painted it.”
“But… you made me beautiful, and mine would just be…” She looks down, waves her hand around in a vague gesture. “You know. Shitty.”
Jesse rubs her shoulders softly. “Hey, I’m sure I’ll love it. For me, it won’t be shitty. Besides, a lot of modern art looks shitty as fuck, but people still make millions off ‘em. It’s all about the meaning, yo.”
That makes her smile, even though she still seems self-conscious. “Alright, fine. Go lay down, then.”
Smiling to himself, Jesse complies, walking back into his room and throwing himself on the bed. He lies on his back, instead of on his stomach like Andrea had done, because he wants to watch Andrea as she paints.
Andrea swirls the brush Jesse had been using around in the glass of water to clean it up. He watches her as she puts a little bit more of the black paint on the plate, then straddles his thighs. He waits, but she just sits there, her hand hovering over his chest. The hesitation and nervousness in her expression make Jesse furrow his brow in mild concern.
“Hey, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing, it’s just…” She sighs. “I don’t know what to paint.”
Jesse’s expression softens. “Try not to think too much about it. Just paint.” He realizes that must sound like a pretty shitty advice. Just winging it doesn’t work for everybody. “Paint what you feel.”
Andrea seems to relax a little bit. She thinks for a second, takes a deep breath. “Okay.” She hesitantly slides the brush across Jesse’s chest. His breath hitches for a moment at the feeling of the cold, wet brush against his skin.
He wants to stare down and see what Andrea is painting, but he figures it’s best to give her some space, since she’d seemed so nervous. Besides, the surprise kind of makes things more exciting. So he keeps his eyes on her instead, watching the way her features twist into a frown of concentration as she paints. A few moments later, Andrea reaches in the box for more paints, putting more colors on the plate along with the black.
“You ever painted before?” Jesse asks.
“Just with Brock.” The look on her eyes saddens a little bit. “And… and Tomás, when he was little.”
Tomás is still a sore subject for the both of them, so Jesse makes sure to quickly change it. “What’d you paint with Brock? That day he made a mess?"
“Dragons. He was obsessed with some dragon show or videogame his friends were talking about at school.”
Jesse chuckes. “Sick.”
“His turned out better than mine, though.” She cleans the brush in the glass of water, then dips it into the green paint on the plate.
He recognizes the brush strokes as a repeated pattern, almost as if Andrea is writing something on his chest. Jesse shuts his eyes, trying to concentrate. It does feel like letters; maybe a word or a sentence of some sort. No, definitely a word, written over and over again. The first letter feels like an H? He makes out an O right after, and the rest sort of fills itself in.
“Home?” he says with a small frown and smile at the same time.
The blush that colors Andrea’s cheeks is the prettiest color Jesse’s ever seen. She nods. “You told me to paint what I felt. Not exactly a feeling, but… I feel at home when I’m with you.”
She doesn’t meet his eyes, keeps on painting like what she just said doesn’t make Jesse feel so many things at once it’s almost overwhelming. But, somehow, it’s not a bad feeling. He brushes a strand of hair that had escaped from Andrea’s bun away from her face, tucking it behind her ear.
“You do?” he says with a smile – soft and slight, more so with his eyes than with his lips.
Andrea’s eyes meet his for a fraction of a second, and she doesn’t have to say anything – it’s all there, in the intensity of that look. Andrea would never say something like that lightly, or if she didn’t mean it. She’s always been honest about her emotions, whether they’re good or bad. It’s one of the things Jesse loves the most about her.
He hates that he doesn’t deserve somebody as good as Andrea, that, if she knew all the bad things he’s done, she wouldn’t feel that way about him. But it gets easier to ignore those thoughts as he lets that warm feeling crawling in his gut grow stronger and stronger. He doesn’t know if that’s selfish or not, but his urge to love and be loved speaks louder than his self-loathing.
“I feel the same about you,” Jesse confesses. “You just make me feel… at ease, you know? Good. Like I don’t have to worry about shit every second of my life. You and Brock… you guys are, like, my family."
When Andrea stills and the brush strokes on his chest cease, Jesse worried that perhaps he’s taken a step too far. But Andrea leans in to kiss him softly, lifting the worries off his chest. She cups his cheek with one hand, smearing even more paint on it.
Jesse stares down at his chest once they break the kiss. Home, written in many different colors, all over his chest. The image of that Georgia O’Keefe painting he’d seen at the museum in Santa Fe suddenly pops into his mind, the one where she’d painted a door over and over again.
To me, it’s about making that feeling last.
He thinks he gets it now.
He hooks an arm around Andrea’s waist and pulls her closer, crashing their lips together. Andrea squeaks a small sound of surprise, but she soon returns the kiss with the same amount of passion and intensity. Their naked chests press together, smearing the still fresh paints on Jesse’s chest. Jesse’s disappointed about ruining Andrea’s painting, but as he’d said, it’s all about the meaning. He’d told Andrea to paint what she felt. They don’t need a painting to keep that feeling alive.
“I take it as you liked it?” she echoes his words from earlier.
“It’s perfect,” Jesse replies.
They don’t stay apart for too long, soon leaning in until their lips would find each other once again. His hands run up and down her smooth back, accidentally smearing the mandala between her shoulder blades in the process. He grabs a stronger hold of her waist before flipping them over, so that he’s on top and Andrea is lying on her back.
“Jesse–!” she yelps, but he can hear a smile in her voice. “Your bed!”
The mandala had smeared into the sheets as Andrea’s back had presses against them. As she’d been flipped over, Andrea had let go of the brush she was holding as well, dropping it over the bed as well. Those sheets are probably goners, but Jesse can’t say he cares.
Kissing is a little bit hard when they’re both smiling this hard, but, somehow, they manage.
It takes them a full hour to finally get to the shower, sweaty and spent and covered head to toe in paint. They help each other get the all the paint off their bodies, take turns with the soap and under the spray of water, doodle silly things to each other in the fogged glass; and it all feels so normal, so domestic in a way Jesse hadn’t realized he’d been craving for in the past few weeks. And when Andrea presses herself against his back, wrapping her arms around his waist and kissing the back of his shoulder, he has to bite his lip to hold back an 'I love you’.