🔥 The First Sketch 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Wet Canvas

Thank You for Reading! 💜
You made it to the bonus content — which means you’ve survived the gravel drive, the dropped robe, the spiral brush technique, the stolen paintbrush, the gold, the fight, the gallery, and the rooftop meteor shower. Thank you for giving Vivian and Ellie your time.

← Back to Wet Canvas

The First Sketch

Vivian — the night after Ellie arrives

She waited until the loft went quiet.

Forty-seven minutes. Vivian counted every one of them — sitting on the edge of her bed in the dark with a glass of gin she hadn’t touched and the sound of Ellie Pryce settling into the loft above her head like a grenade rolling across a floor. The creak of the mattress. The rustle of sheets. A sigh that dropped through the floorboards and landed in the center of Vivian’s chest with the precision of a palette knife.

Then silence. The deep, rhythmic silence of sleep.

Vivian stood. Picked up her sketchpad and her charcoal case. Climbed the stairs to the studio in bare feet, moving with the specific stealth of a woman who did not want to explain to anyone — least of all herself — what she was about to do.

The studio was silver. Moonlight through the skylights, pooling on the concrete floor, turning the mason jars to mercury and the stacked canvases to pale ghosts. No lamp. She didn’t need one. She’d drawn in worse light than this, and what she was drawing didn’t require accuracy. It required the particular honesty that only the dark could provide.

She sat in the armchair. Opened the sketchpad to a fresh page. Picked up the charcoal.

And drew Ellie Pryce from memory.

The face came first. It always came first — the face was what the brain retained, the feature set that the visual cortex prioritized for recognition and recall. But Vivian’s brain was not a normal brain. It was a painter’s brain, trained over three decades to see and retain with a specificity that bordered on pathological. She didn’t just remember Ellie’s face. She remembered the exact angle of light on her left cheekbone during dinner on the dock. The specific shade of the blush that had climbed her neck when Vivian held her hands. The almost imperceptible asymmetry of her lips — the lower one fuller on the right side, creating a perpetual suggestion of a smirk that Ellie probably didn’t know she had and that Vivian was going to spend the next eight weeks trying not to stare at.

She drew the cheekbones. The jaw. The wide eyes — closed now, in the sketch, because Vivian was drawing Ellie asleep, the version she’d glimpsed through the loft floor while standing in the kitchen telling herself she was checking the ventilation.

The ventilation was fine. The ventilation had always been fine. She’d been looking at the girl.

The charcoal moved to the neck. The collarbones — God, the collarbones. Vivian had held a thousand figure-drawing sessions. She’d sketched anatomy that would make a surgeon weep. But something about Ellie’s collarbones — the specific architecture of them, the hollows and ridges, the way the skin stretched translucent across the bone and showed the shadow of the structure beneath — made Vivian’s hand shake. Actually shake. The charcoal wobbled and she pressed harder and the line that emerged was rough and imprecise and more alive than anything she’d drawn in a year.

Below the collarbones: the suggestion of a body beneath a tank top. Vivian hadn’t seen it — not properly, not in the full clinical assessment of a studio session. She’d seen the girl in a sundress on the dock. In a tank top and shorts climbing the loft ladder. In the morning, descending for coffee, the oversized shirt brushing mid-thigh and riding up as she reached for the coffee pot.

She’d seen the nipples through the tank top. She was not going to pretend she hadn’t seen the nipples through the tank top.

Vivian drew them. Small, peaked — from the morning cold, she told herself, from the cabin’s temperature, not from anything to do with the way Vivian had been looking at her, which was professionally, rigorously, the way any mentor would look at a new resident.

She looked at the drawing. The sleeping face, the collarbones, the barely-there suggestion of breasts beneath fabric. An innocent sketch. A mentor’s assessment. A forty-seven-year-old woman’s perfectly normal midnight charcoal study of a twenty-two-year-old she’d met six hours ago.

“Liar,” she said to the empty studio.

She kept drawing. The waist — narrow, the kind of waist that made Vivian’s hands itch to span it. The hips. The legs — Ellie’s legs, which were the sort of legs that made you believe God was a painter, long and pale and so perfectly proportioned that Vivian wanted to weep and also wanted to part them and those two desires were so completely entangled that separating them would require surgery.

The rose tattoo. She’d seen it at dinner — a flash of ink above Ellie’s hip when she’d shifted on the dock chair and her shorts had ridden up. A small rebellion inked in the precise location where a lover’s thumb would rest during sex. Vivian had looked at it for two seconds and thought about it for the remaining four hours of the evening.

She drew it. Placed it on the sketch with the anatomical precision of someone who’d memorized its exact coordinates relative to the hip bone and the waistband and the soft, pale skin that surrounded it like negative space around a figure.

The sketch was finished. Vivian held it at arm’s length in the moonlight.

It was beautiful. It was a confession. It was the most dangerous thing she’d drawn since the self-portraits, because the self-portraits had only implicated her, and this implicated someone else — someone sleeping one floor below with her mouth slightly open and her hair on the pillow and the absolute, devastating trust of a girl who’d driven seven hours because a one-line letter had made her feel seen.

Vivian set the sketchpad on the floor. Leaned back in the armchair. Closed her eyes.

The hunger was there. It had been there since the Honda pulled up the gravel drive and a pair of legs emerged and the evening light turned strawberry-blonde hair into something that belonged in a Botticelli. It had been there through dinner, through the dock, through the s’mores and the gin and the conversation about painting and damage and the way Ellie’s eyes had gone liquid when Vivian told her she’d never doubt herself again.

It was there now. Low and heavy and insistent, a heat between her legs that had nothing to do with the gin and everything to do with the girl and the sketch and the silence and the moonlight and the absolute, catastrophic certainty that Vivian Harlow was in very, very deep trouble.

She opened her eyes. Looked at the sketch on the floor. The sleeping face.

“Don’t,” she said aloud.

Her hand moved anyway.

Not to the sketchpad. To herself. The kaftan was loose — it was always loose, she hadn’t worn anything restrictive since 1997 — and her hand slid beneath the linen and found the heat of her own skin and Vivian made a sound in the dark studio that she would deny until her last breath. A whimper. Low, involuntary, the sound of a woman whose body had decided to override her ethics.

She touched herself the way she painted — slowly. Deliberately. With an attention to detail that was, under the circumstances, either admirable or deranged.

Her fingers found the waistband of her underwear and slipped beneath it and the first contact — her own fingers against her own clit, slick and swollen and aching — pulled a gasp from her throat that the studio’s cathedral ceiling caught and amplified. She was wet. Not slightly. Not plausibly. She was drenched, the kind of wet that meant the body had been preparing for hours without the mind’s permission, the autonomic system running its own campaign while the conscious brain maintained the fiction of professionalism.

She circled her clit with two fingers. The spiral. The pattern she’d been using on canvases for thirty years — wide orbit first, then tighter, closing in — and the familiarity of the motion was almost funny, except nothing about this was funny. She was sitting in a moonlit studio touching herself to a charcoal sketch of a sleeping woman she’d known for six hours and the only thing preventing her from going downstairs and waking that woman up was the last shredded remnant of the decency she’d spent a lifetime cultivating.

Her mind supplied what her hands couldn’t reach. Ellie’s face at dinner — the way she’d bitten her lip when Vivian called her work extraordinary. The neck flush. The way she’d leaned into the space between their dock chairs as if gravity itself was pulling her toward Vivian. The sound of her name in Ellie’s mouth: Vivian. Three syllables. The second one stressed. A name she’d heard a thousand times that this girl had somehow made new.

Vivian’s fingers pressed harder. The spiral tightened. She slid one finger inside herself — then two, the angle awkward in the armchair, her hips shifting to accommodate, the kaftan bunched around her waist. She was fucking herself in the dark and imagining — she couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop the projector — Ellie’s face between her legs. That mouth. That architecturally perfect mouth with its asymmetric lower lip and its tentative smile, pressed against Vivian’s cunt, learning, tasting, the wide blue eyes looking up at her with the same devastating want they’d shown on the dock.

Good girl. Just like that. Hold there for me.

The words in her head — the ones she’d use in the studio, the commands she’d give a model, the language of direction and praise that was her native tongue — recontextualized for a scene that was never, ever going to happen. She imagined saying them. Imagined Ellie’s response — the whimper, the blush, the way her body would go liquid under praise the way it had gone liquid under Vivian’s gaze at dinner.

You’re extraordinary. You know that? The way you hold still for me. The way your skin flushes. The way you—

Vivian’s hips bucked. Her fingers curled inside herself and her thumb found her clit and the dual sensation — internal pressure, external friction — sent a wave of heat through her center that made her bite down on her own lower lip hard enough to taste copper. She was close. She’d been close since the dock, since the strawberry-blonde hair in the sunset, since the moment she’d recognized in Ellie Pryce’s portfolio the same hungry, desperate, consume-me quality that she’d spent her career seeking in subjects and lovers and had never, until a manila envelope arrived in January, found in someone who could also hold a brush.

She came with the sketch on the floor in front of her.

The orgasm was sharp and private and devastating — a full-body clench that arched her spine against the armchair, her thighs clamping, her fingers buried deep, the sound she made swallowed into the back of her own hand because the acoustics in this cabin were — as she’d warned Ellie — interesting, and if that sound traveled through the floorboards and down to the loft she would never recover.

She pulsed around her own fingers. Slow, rolling contractions that lasted longer than they should have, each one pulling another tremor from her core, each one accompanied by a flash of Ellie’s face — the collarbones, the rose tattoo, the bitten lip, the blue eyes — until the images blurred and there was nothing but sensation and moonlight and the smell of turpentine and her own arousal mixing in the studio air.

Then stillness. The aftermath. The particular, weighted silence that follows an orgasm achieved in secret, full of relief and shame and the already-building certainty that it won’t be enough. That one won’t be enough. That the hunger will return tomorrow when Ellie descends the ladder in a tank top and the summer will become a war between Vivian’s hands and Vivian’s honor and the girl standing naked in her studio will be the battlefield.

Vivian withdrew her hand. Wiped it on the kaftan. Picked up the sketch.

The sleeping face looked back at her. Innocent. Trusting. Completely unaware of what the woman holding the drawing had just done in its presence.

Vivian turned it face-down on the armchair. Went to the sink. Washed her hands with turpentine — the studio’s soap, the painter’s baptism. The chemical sting was clarifying. A punishment she’d chosen and deserved.

She went downstairs. Poured the untouched gin down the sink. Filled a glass of water instead and drank it standing at the kitchen counter, and through the gap in the loft floor above her, she could see the edge of Ellie’s mattress, the fall of hair over the pillow, the rise and fall of sleeping breath.

She did not look for more than three seconds. She counted.

In bed, she lay on her back and stared at the ceiling and listened to the cabin hold two women in its old wooden frame — one sleeping in the light of a skylight she’d never asked for, one awake in the dark of a bedroom she’d never shared, both of them breathing, both of them waiting for a morning that would begin the longest, sweetest, most devastating artistic collaboration of Vivian Harlow’s life.

The sketch stayed face-down in the studio. Vivian left it there.

In the morning she would turn it over and look at it and decide — calmly, professionally, rigorously — that it was merely an assessment of a new subject’s facial architecture. Nothing more. A diagnostic. A tool.

She would almost believe herself.

Almost.

Thank you for reading the bonus chapter!

← Back to Wet Canvas

Never Miss a Release

Get new release alerts, exclusive bonus content, and reader-only giveaways.