The Color of Want

*This one was born from a thought about birthdays and what it means to let someone see you fresh, even when they already know your history. Thank you for reading with your whole attention.*

I turned sixty-two on a Tuesday. I've trained other women's bodies for thirty years, and I woke up that morning thinking about my own. Not in a sad way. In a hungry way.

So I did something slightly insane. I opened my laptop before coffee and emailed Aaron Hanson.

We hadn't been in a room together in almost two years. We'd been lovers once, when I was forty-three and he was forty-eight. Eighteen months. It ended badly because he wanted Providence and I wanted my gym and my town and my own name on my own door. He called me a coward. I called him worse. Then time did its thing and wore the sharp edges off, and now we send each other birthday cards like polite strangers who know too much.

The email was one line. I typed it fast before I could delete it.

Paint me. Fingers only. One hour. My body, your palette. No talking.

I hit send, made coffee, and did a plank until my arms shook. That's my version of biting my nails.

His reply came at noon. I read it standing in my kitchen with wet hair, and I had to sit down after.

His terms. Of course he had terms. Aaron never took a gift without wrapping it in conditions. He said yes to the fingers, yes to the hour, yes to the silence. But I would lie on his drop cloth, the whole hour, and I would not close my eyes. Not once. He wanted my eyes open the entire time, looking at him or at the ceiling, my choice, but open.

He signed it: Your canvas waits.

God. The man could still turn six words into a hand on the back of my neck.

I read it four times. Then I ate lunch, trained two clients, cancelled my evening, and stood in front of my closet for a stupidly long time. It's not like he hadn't seen everything. Nineteen years ago he'd seen all of it, painted half of it in studies he never showed anyone. But bodies change. Mine had changed. I lift four days a week and I'm still strong, still straight-backed, but there's softness now where there wasn't, and lines I didn't order.

I decided I didn't care. The entire purpose of the dare, my dare, was that. I spent decades being the one everybody looked at for what to do. Sixty-two felt like a good year to be looked at for no reason at all.

* * *

The studio is above the old bakery on Marsh Street, the one that closed when the Hartleys retired. Aaron's rented it three winters now. You climb the outside stairs and the tide is loud under the floorboards, this slow breathing sound, and the window on the north side is salt-fogged so the light comes in soft and gray like the whole room is under water.

I knocked once and let myself in. That was our old arrangement anyway. No knocking twice, no waiting.

He was at the far wall with his back to me, and he didn't turn around. Gray in his hair now, more of it, and his shoulders had settled a little, but he still stood like someone who owned the ground he was on. Drop cloths everywhere. Jars of brushes. That turpentine-and-linseed smell I've never found anywhere else, and the second it hit me I was forty-three again and furious about how much I remembered.

"No talking," he said, without turning. "Your rule. I'm just confirming it out loud so you can't accuse me later."

I set my bag down by the door. Then I took off my coat, my sweater, my jeans, and folded them on a chair, until I was standing in my bra and panties in a cold studio in October, sixty-two years old, watching the back of a man's head.

He turned around then.

I want to tell you he said something. He didn't. That was the punishment and the mercy of the no-talking rule. He just looked, the way he always looked at things he was going to paint, slow, top to bottom, like he had all the time in the world and intended to use it.

My face got hot. I let it.

He crossed the room and picked up a clean jar and a rag, and then he started walking around me in a slow circle. Full circle. Then another. Checking the light on me, on my skin, from every side. I kept my eyes forward and felt my pulse in my throat.

Then he went to the table and squeezed cobalt blue onto a palette, body paint, the skin-safe kind, a row of new tubes he'd clearly bought for this, and worked it with a palette knife, and mixed in something white until he had a blue like the water off the jetty in late afternoon. He held up two fingers, both painted to the second knuckle.

He pointed at the drop cloth in the center of the floor.

I lay down on it. The canvas was cold under my back and I could hear the tide through the boards, that slow in-and-out, and above me the ceiling beam with its old hooks. He knelt beside me, and I kept my eyes open because that was the deal, and his face was very close and very concentrated, and then his fingers touched my collarbone.

Cold paint. Cold fingers. My whole body flinched and he stopped, waited, one eyebrow up. I nodded. He went on.

He painted one stripe. Collarbone to navel, dead center, slow as pouring honey. He wasn't touching skin, exactly. Just laying the color down with two fingertips, the pressure light, deliberate, the way he does everything. My lungs went shallow without asking me first.

He sat back and looked at the stripe like it had told him something.

Then he reached for the vermilion.

He didn't mix it with anything. Straight from the tube, warmed between his fingers, and he started at the outer curve of my left breast and drew the outline of it