Easy

ask him if he was pushing me away because he was the class tutor, or because of those scars on his wrists?
    “I wear contacts. But my eyes get tired of them by the end of the day.”
    Cue the mental picture of Lucas pulling his door open, the apprehension on his face, the glasses transforming him into someone official while the pajamas produced a contrary effect. I cleared my throat. “They look really good on you. The glasses. I mean, you could wear them all the time, if you wanted to.”
    “They’re kind of a pain with the motorcycle helmet. And taekwondo.”
    “Oh. Yeah, I can imagine.”
    We were quiet again, with forty minutes until his class and my rescheduled bass practice time. “I could sketch you now,” he said.
    For no good reason, my face flamed.
    Luckily, he was reaching into his backpack, withdrawing his sketchpad, and turning to a blank page. He took the pencil from behind his ear before looking across the table at me. If he noticed my heightened color, he didn’t mention it. Without a word, he leaned back in his chair, the pad on his knee, and started drawing, his pencil making the effortless, sweeping arches of someone who knows what he’s doing. His eyes moved from the pad to me and back, over and over, and I sat silently sipping, watching his face. Watching his hands.
    There was something intimate about modeling for someone. I’d volunteered as a model once in my junior year art class, for extra credit. Severely lacking in drawing skill, I’d jumped at the extra two points without stopping to consider that I would be sitting on top of a table for an entire class period. Giving a classroom of teenaged boys free rein to stare at me for an hour was a whole new sort of awkward. Especially when Jillian’s boyfriend, Zeke, started his portrait with my chest. He stared unabashedly, showing off his artistic efforts to his tablemates while I flushed and pretended I couldn’t hear his wisecracks about nips and cleavage and how he wished I’d just lose the shirt altogether—or at least unbutton it.
    “Most artists begin with the head,” Ms. Wachowski said as she looked over his shoulder. Zeke and the other boys at the table snorted with laughter while I burned with humiliation and the entire class looked on.
    “What are you thinking about?”
    I wasn’t relaying that story. “High school.”
    The hair falling over his forehead obscured the crease I knew was there, but his lips pressed tight.
    “What?” I asked, wondering at the change those two words brought.
    Surrounded by conversations, music and mechanical sounds, the scratch of the lead across the paper was inaudible in the coffee shop. I watched the pencil dance in his hand, wondering what part of me he was sketching, and what parts he might want to sketch. What was he like as a sixteen-year-old boy? Did he draw then? Hang out with other boys his age? Had he fallen in love? Had his heart broken by some callous girl?
    Had he already put those scars on his wrists, or was that yet to come?
    “You said you’d been with him for three years.” He spoke just loud enough for me to hear him, staring down at the pad as the pencil worked back and forth. There was no question in his voice. He assumed I was thinking about Kennedy.
    “I wasn’t thinking about him.”
    His jaw clenched, lips compressed again. Jealousy? Guilt crept in when I realized I wanted him to feel jealous.
    “What was high school like for you?” I asked and then wanted to take it back. His eyes flashed to mine and his hand stilled.
    “A lot different than it was for you, I imagine.” His eyes still roved over my face, but he was no longer drawing, and his expression was tense.
    “Oh? How?” I smiled, hoping to either bring us back from this ledge-clinging position, or shove us over the edge.
    He lifted his gaze to me then and stared. “For one, I never had a girlfriend.”
    I thought of the rose over his heart, and the poem inscribed on his left side. I didn’t want that love to be recent. “Really? Not one?”
    He shook his head. “I was… unsettled, you could say. I hooked up with girls. No relationships. Skipped class as much as I bothered to show up. Partied with the locals and the beach tourists. Got into fights often, in school and out. Got suspended or expelled so frequently I was never quite sure when I woke up in the morning whether I was supposed to go or not.”
    “What happened?”
    His face went blank. “What?”
    “I mean, how did you get