Outdrawn

by Deanna Grey

My angsty, lesbian mermaids helped me afford to move out on my own for the first time since graduating.

Our time did more than overlap—it tangled. I held my tongue about the tangling, because it's too weird to explain how we had gotten close enough to draw in each other's sketchbooks but never exchanged phone numbers. It's too weird for even me to fully comprehend.

The conflicting emotion I got from seeing how soft she looked versus how hard she actually was would never cease to confuse me.

She looked at me now, those dark brown eyes confident. I didn’t know why they set a spark in my belly,

The softness of her outfits mirrored the feeling one would get from watercolor paintings.

"Lots of things happen when you look up from your comic panels." Seline shrugged. "Guess you finally found a reason to look up."

Lots of things made me happy: art, perfectly seasoned rice, bike rides downtown, and now, apparently, making Sage smile because of something silly.

I'd always had a good relationship with loneliness. Lonely had been my safe place. In silence, no one expected anything from me. That lack of expectation meant I could be myself. Of course, it got hard, but that was a trade-off I'd been willing to make. Or, at least, I thought it was.

She looked good angry but even better calm. I’d been going about this relationship all wrong. I should have been trying to get her to look like this from the get-go.

It was official—flirting with Noah was ten times more fun than arguing with her.

I’d give it everything I had, though, because whatever was happening between us felt good, better than art had in a while—and damn, did I hate even thinking that.

I always heard don’t be greedy, pick a side, but, I never thought of bisexuality as greediness. I thought it was inevitable to fall in love with so many kinds of people.”

I wanted her, wanted us. The realization was a soft, small wave that barely reached my ankles, and I was going to wade in further, be completely engulfed in whatever an us would look like.

I felt warm, surrounded by art in a dimly lit hallway with a woman who was more beautiful than anything captured on canvas.

“We’ve gone from glaring across a meeting room to dry humping in my living room,”

“Who’s dry humping?” “I assumed it’d be you in the next few seconds.” “Bold of you to assume it’d be me.”

“I want my fingers to be the ones fucking you. I want to be the one taking care of you.”

“I might have imagined you eating me out under my desk…once or twice.”

layer I’d never seen coming, and fuck, I wanted more. I wanted her kisses along with sorrows, body along with dreams. I wanted to share that pain in the voice she had over the phone, let her escape it for a moment with my mouth on her clit.

As long as she was willing to put up with my bullshit, every day was when we’d get another chance. I was hers…if she wanted me. She had to know that. I'd let her know that.

"This is a little song I like to call…Hot Crossed Buns," I said. "Sing along if you know it."

"Because I know I want to be with you," she said firmly. "I know I want to see your smile and hear your voice every day. I know I want to help you feel seen and heard. I know not a day goes by when I won't work hard to give you everything you deserve. I know that you want me to have everything I deserve. You're never going to make things easy. You'll never sugar coat things. I know when we're together, we are petty assholes, but we're also something beautiful, something far bigger than the art. I can't believe I'm saying this, but Noah, we can be bigger than the art. I know that."