CHARCOAL

Our days were slipping away faster and faster but we made time for us as well as making time for the painting. Today we'd skipped out, played hooky. Jubes calls it chucking a sickie. In this case, I'd packed a picnic lunch and brought along an old quilt. I'd promised Logan a blackberry pie made from the berries that grew wild in the foothills above my home.

I'd intended to go up alone but Logan wouldn't hear of it. He said there were too many freaks in the world today. He wasn't the sort to spend an afternoon picking berries with me, but he'd make damn sure I was safe while I was doing it. That he wanted to protect the girl with the poison skin, even after all the water that had flowed under that bridge, moved me profoundly.

After too long in civilization, Logan was appreciative of the overgrown gravel logging road we took up into the foothills. He definitely appreciated the view when we got there. Early autumn. My favorite season. You could see the mountains in the distance and all around us was a riot of vibrant fall colors. Though it was cool in the evenings, the late afternoon sun was warm and golden. We ate a simple lunch on the old quilt and he dozed in the sun while I picked enough berries to make a pie for him and another for Jubes when she breezed back through.

Late August. The berries were ripe and sweet. It didn't take long to fill the large bowl I'd brought along. Logan was resting on the quilt. He'd gotten hot, taken off his shirt to use as a pillow, and had his arm slung over his eyes to ward off the sun. Lord, he's a beautiful man. I thought that at seventeen and I still do today at twenty-five. Popping a berry into my mouth and licking at the stinging scratches the sharp thorns had left on my hands, I rooted around in the picnic basket for the sketchbook and the small case of charcoal pencils I'd tucked in there earlier.

Not long after, I was deeply engrossed, adding shading to my current sketch and blending the heavy black color with my fingers when I felt Logan shift and a moment later, he was snatching the sketchbook and charcoal pencils from my fingers. They looked ridiculously fragile in his large hands.

"Thought we said no workin' today." He was flipping through the pages, chuffing a little when he ran across one he thought was particularly good, frowning at others. It was the first time he'd ever really looked in it before. I wondered what he thought of the images I'd captured. Physical intimacy. Emotional intimacy. His eyes flicked to mine when he got to one of the more intimate series of sketches. He stopped paging. I didn't even have to look to know what had brought his leafing to an abrupt halt. He grunted. "When'd you do these?"

I blushed. "This morning."

His eyebrows went up. The tip of the charcoal pencil in his fingers beat a scratchy tattoo on the page as he appraised me with hooded eyes. Tap. Tap. Tap. "Jesus. I don't want anyone seein' this stuff, darlin'." He made a move to tear the pages out.

"Logan... wait!" I stayed his hand with mine. His eyes were immediately drawn to the bloody scratch on the back of my hand and he soothed it with the rough pad of his thumb. "Please don't tear them up. I won't let anyone see these, I swear. I did them for me." They weren't lewd by any stretch of the imagination... but they were very, very private. Intimate. And very beautiful. Not my work, but the essence of what had been caught in it.

I'd drawn them for me. Only for me. As a memory of this time that couldn't be captured any other way. A long moment passed. It felt like an eternity before he finally nodded at me, saying nothing as he turned the pages loose. I released a breath I hadn't even been aware I'd been holding.

Trust.

What an incredibly precious gift to be granted from this most guarded man. He was also a man of mercurial moods and he turned on a dime.

"Maybe I'll draw you then... see how you like it, kid." Amusement and challenge sparkled in his eyes. He flipped to a blank page and poised the charcoal over it. He gave me his best 'serious artist' look. I smothered a giggle... until he reached out and gently tugged on the hem of my blouse. "Unbutton this for me. I wanna see you." My mouth went dry and he fixed me with an impatient stare. "I've done it often enough for you... besides, there's nobody around for miles. I woulda smelled 'em."

"Um..."

He grinned that smirking little grin he does. "Nobody here but you, me and the chipmunks... and they ain't gonna say shit." My laughter rang out in the warm afternoon sunshine and he nodded absently in encouragement as my hands went to the first button of my blouse. "That's right... let me see you, Monet."

I smiled at his teasing endearment. "Monet painted water lilies not breasts, Logan." He grunted something that sounded an awful lot like 'fuckin' dumbass'. "He was also nearly blind."

"Yeah?" Logan raised his head but never took his eyes off my hands as they moved from button to button, undoing them as I went. "Well, I can't fuckin' draw so I guess we're even then."

A dragonfly circled around me and landed on my bare arm. I smiled at it, despite the charged moment between Logan and I.

"So you charm dragonflies as well as men, huh?"

I laughed and it zipped away as quickly as it had arrived. His words left me feeling warm and giddy. Had I charmed him? Really? I dropped my hands after slipping the last button through its hole and felt Logan's warm fingers slipping inside to skate over my stomach before he opened my top to bare my naked breasts to his gaze. He caressed one gently, leaving a small smudge of charcoal behind before he settled back and frowned at the blank page.

Where he'd been cocky only moments before, he was now unsure... hesitant to try something for the first time and fail before someone whose opinion mattered to him. I'd felt the same way performing in the Danger Room under his scrutiny.

"Don't look." His order was low and husky and I did as he asked, letting my gaze wander to the horizon and back to his face but never to the page open before him. He was concentrating, tongue on his lip, brow furrowed. A minute later he grunted and crumpled the page in his large fist. Another little grunt from him as he tossed it aside. A sigh. I heard the familiar scratch, scratch of the charcoal and a little while later, he lifted his head and tossed the sketchbook back to me.

I laughed aloud when I saw what he'd drawn. A simple stick figure with a circle for a head, a single straight line for the arms and an upside down 'V' for the legs. It was smudged, and there were fingerprints all over it. Charcoal is a difficult and messy medium to master, but that wasn't what made me laugh. It was the two circles he'd made for breasts just below the stick arms.

To be honest, it looked amazingly like some cave paintings I'd seen. Why is it that primitive man so often depicts women in this way? Crudely drawn little figures with breasts as the defining feature. Appropriate for Logan, which made me laugh, but it also made me think about men and what breasts mean to them. Sexuality. Fertility. Comfort. Eroticism. Nurturing.

I giggled and tossed his words back at him. "Doesn't look a thing like me." He laughed at himself and scribbled in two nipples and the smudge he'd left on my breast earlier. He also succeeded in smearing the original image further and getting the rich black color all over his hands in the process.

"There you go." He smirked. "Better than some of that crazy shit they got hangin' in those ritzy art galleries these days... Jackson fuckin' Pollock, my ass." He shook his head in bemusement, cursing again when he saw the state of his hands.

We sat there a moment, laughing together in the warm autumn sunshine and then we were suddenly sinking down together on the sun-warmed quilt with its old frayed edges, kissing and touching. This time, neither of us hesitated. Black fingerprints everywhere. His throat. My breasts. Smudges along his arms and my sides... we made slow sweet love in the sunshine.

And this time, when we got home, we shared the shower and the pleasant chore of washing off the lingering marks that showed where we'd touched and how we'd loved.

Up next: Watercolor. The final touch of pigment to paper. A conversation that is beyond words and a night that neither of them will ever forget.