Chapter 1: New Objectivity Movement

Late late late late, chimed Ariadne's inner voice as the sound of her Chucks squealing on the linoleum announced her arrival to all in B Wing. Life drawing only happened once a week and she did not want to miss it a second time. This was just so typical—not even a month into the semester and she was already oversleeping. She burst into the studio just as Professor Fournier was explaining that they'd have a new model today. Ariadne's face burned as she adjusted her desk and clamped a sheet of paper down, pretending to be utterly fascinated by her little pack of broken conte sticks.

"As I was saying," Fournier's voice held a touch of exasperation. "Due to Josephine's illness, we have a new model today. Mr. Eames, when you're ready."

Ariadne was too busy rummaging to notice the tall, robed man striding out of the storage room.

"We will be starting with two one-minute poses, then moving to a five, a ten, and finally a thirty minute pose." Fournier's voice droned. Ariadne kept nodding as if paying attention until her eyes locked on the figure standing on the central platform. His broad back was turned but she felt her throat tighten as he let the worn robe slide off his shoulders so slowly that it should have been illegal. It didn't matter the angle, the sexual confidence rolling off him was volcanic. The room seemed to heat up in a matter of heartbeats, and Ariadne unzipped the massive hoodie that shrouded her body, trying to be as quiet as possible.

Eames rolled his head to loosen up and kicked the robe nonchalantly off the platform before settling in to a relaxed standing pose, one leg slightly bent, muscular arms akimbo. The skin behind Ariadne's ears felt like it was going to burn right off. She'd done life drawing all through high school, drawn hundreds of nudes, male, female, old, young, and attractive, but none had ever affected her like this. She swallowed and tried to chalk it up to her anxiety over being late, heightened stress hormones or whatever.

"Ten seconds," said Fournier, and she felt a flush of panic as she realized that she'd only drawn the outer curvature of one leg. She sped through the rest, marring the page with messy gesture lines and the smudges of her rushing hand until the figure was barely recognizable as human. She slid a new piece of paper on top to hide it and waited for the start command. She focused on her breathing, willing the burning air to cool as she pulled it into her body and squirming as she felt sweat begin to bead at her sides. Eames changed position, picking up a broom handle from the nearby prop box and hefting it above his head like a javelin. He turned his feet and shifted his weight onto his back leg and Ariadne watched his thighs flex, trying not to let her gaze naturally rise to the curve of his butt. He held that difficult pose without so much as a twitch. He was beautiful from behind; every line of his body taut and sound but fluid—like Expressionist architecture. This time, she started from the top down, rendering the corded muscle of his forearm with a few angular strokes before moving to the curve of his shoulder and the dramatic slant of his side.

"Five seconds,"

Ariadne bypassed the butt and let her hand trace the high curves of his thigh and calf before quickly scribbling the broad spread of his supporting foot as the clock hit zero.

After an hour and a half, Ariadne was beginning to get sick of drawing Eames's back and hurriedly scribbling his backside like an embarrassed schoolgirl. She sat in her desk as Fournier made the rounds, nodding and giving comments in his quiet, flat voice. He came to Ariadne's sketches and lifted his Prada glasses to peer at them for a long while before making a noise in his throat that could have denoted either approval or indifference. She felt her neck tense in frustration. Ariadne liked life drawing, but she got bored quickly, and needed to change it up. As Fournier announced the final, thirty-minute pose and she had finally gathered enough courage to request a seat change, Eames turned around and faced her square on. He can't have done it intentionally, since the platform was right across from Ariadne's spot, but she felt her entire body go hot as molten glass anyway. If Eames from the back had her quaking like a baby deer, Eames from the front made her want to sprint for the hills. A five-o'clock shadow graced his square jaw and framed the kind of lips that she didn't even know existed outside of those erotica novels—the really filthy ones she used to steal from her Aunt Celine's topmost shelf and devour in an afternoon. But Eames was no smooth-chested, brooding romance novel hero; even from a distance she could see lines mapping his face that could only have come from constant smiling, and there was a rakish unkemptness about him despite his slicked-down, meticulously parted hair. His heavy pectorals were dusted with blonde hair and inked on his right shoulder was something that looked like a shield—an old tattoo, gone fuzzy at the edges. She had always loved how tattoos degenerated, the ink fanning into the skin, comfortable as an old friend. Eames settled into a seated position with his chin on his fist and his other hand draped over on the pommel of a plastic sword, dwarfing it. Despite his neutral expression, he looked like a troubled gladiator, slumped as if he had just exited the ring. And as if this pose wasn't difficult enough anatomically, at the last minute he shifted his leg and gave Ariadne full view of his cock.

"Begin."

She felt a noise rising like a bubble in her chest and pretended to yawn in a desperate attempt to stifle it. Thirty minutes. I can do this, she thought, and began to draw.

The studio was silent save for the soft sound of conte on paper and the occasional stifled cough. Ariadne became painfully conscious of how loud her breathing was. She never looked at her entire drawing, only focused on it piece by piece—an arm, his jawline, the drape of his big hand over the sword. Her concentration began to push her discomfort aside—maybe she could do this. In a moment of confidence she glanced up and all semblance of ease went out the window as her gaze locked with Eames's. He was staring at her. Not at the wall behind her but right at her, the line of his beautiful brow serious as her hand stilled. She saw something like curiosity cross his face before she looked quickly back down at her work, crumpling herself in an attempt to hide behind the desk. She took a moment to collect what thoughts she had left, then, slowly, began to draw his eyes. She didn't have to look back up; she knew exactly what they looked like. She might never forget.

She didn't even notice when Fournier said "Time's up," and kept drawing until she looked up to find her subject had vanished. She looked around, eyes sore from gazing so long at the white paper and nearly rocketed out of her chair when she realized that Eames was standing next to her—actually, right in her personal space, though thankfully he was now clothed in dark jeans and a brown collared shirt right out of the 70's. He was staring at her drawing. The sound of his even breathing was like a train coming right at her, and she was tied to the tracks. She wanted so badly to grab her papers and flee, but some vicious curiosity kept her locked in place.

"You've an interesting style," he said. She didn't know what she had expected him to sound like, but it wasn't like that. His voice had bad news written all over it in big, red stencil letters; that sonorous London drawl with the slight smoker's rasp had her clenching her legs together all over again.

"Angular," he continued, "You're an architect." He spoke the name of her profession like an innuendo, drawing out the A like a moan and savoring the T's. How did he know? Ariadne drew a breath to speak, but what could she say after that? Eames lifted each piece carefully by the corners and studied it, nodding, until he came to the first, the one-minute pose. The smudges caused by her hurrying hand had given the drawing a dark, sinister cast, obscuring half of his body in grey shadows.

"Now this, is very interesting. Dark. Almost has a touch of Goya to it."

"Y...you know Goya?" She stammered. She hadn't expected someone so—well, rough-around-the-edges to be well versed in Spanish Romantic painters.

"Please, love, I'm not a total Philistine." He chuckled. "This one could use some work." He indicated the thirty-minute pose, the one she was most pleased with.

"What?"

"The figure is too stiff. I'm not a building, you know. And your proportions are off."

Ariadne felt the anger and embarrassment shudder through her gut. "Nobody asked you," she ground out, shoving her drawings into her worn portfolio. She felt Eames's eyes burning the back of her neck all the way back to her apartment. Grey. His eyes were grey.

Ariadne sat at the slanted desk that seemed to take up half her tiny studio flat, measuring the same lines over and over. The assignment was nothing, should have taken her a couple of hours at most; an elevation map for a two-storey neoclassical library. She'd been up nearly all night working, sometimes just sitting back staring at her protractor as if it were a weapon from an alien planet. Her eyes burned from the poor light of her Himalayan salt lamp—a gift from her new-agey friend Denise—and she rubbed them with the heels of her palms. Every time she pushed the tip of her drafting pencil into the paper she thought of Eames's comments—how could her proportions be off? She was an architect, goddamnit, proportions were her thing—or worse, the way his broad hands spread on the table, the way his eyes held her gaze all through that last, thirty-minute pose with his legs open and…"FUCK!" she shrieked, and kicked her wheely chair away from the desk. She slumped over to the fridge, flung it open with enough force to rattle the near-empty condiment bottles in the door and squatted, considering the lack of nutrition therein before deciding on beer for dinner. It was cheap stuff, some piss a friend had brought over for a movie night like a month ago, and it was flat. At least it was cold. She lay down on the bed and balanced the can on her forehead, sulking. Hopefully Josephine would be over her flu by the end of the week so she wouldn't have to spend another hour and forty drawing the infuriating Mr. Eames.

A/N: Guys I got bored so I wrote a thing. I pretty much subsist on tea and reviews so please take the time to write me a few words and let me know what you think! Merci~