Chapter 16: The Colors of Us
The sun was different in his room. It was thick and languid, a pale gold syrup poured over the dust dancing above his bed. It pooled on the worn floorboards, highlighting scuff marks and a single, stray thread from one of his discarded volleyball socks. Jennie lay on her stomach on the narrow mattress, a heavyweight psychology textbook – “The Dynamics of the Unconscious” – propped open before her. The words blurred. Her awareness was a physical weight, pressing her downward into the scent of him imbedded in the sheets: clean sweat, cheap cedar cologne, the faint, ever-present ghost of cigarette smoke in his clothes.
She watched him.
Leonid sat cross-legged on a frayed patch of carpet, a thick, spiral-bound coloring book splayed open before him. He was shirtless. The late afternoon light caught the hard angle of his shoulder, the defined ridge of muscle along his spine as he hunched forward. The dark trail of hair, starting just below his navel, disappeared into the low-slung waistband of his faded gray sweatpants. In his large, deft hand, he held not a brush or a pen, but a simple colored pencil. A deep crimson.
His brow was furrowed, his tongue caught between his lips in a childlike knot of concentration. He was shading the scales of a dragon, a magnificent, coiled beast covering two full pages. He’d started days ago, he’d told her, a way to turn his brain off after practice. It was shockingly detailed. The scales on its underbelly were a soft, vulnerable peach, graduating to forest greens and teals along its spine, now deepening to this rich, bloody crimson at the crest of its arched back. He worked with a meticulous, almost reverent patience, his knuckles white as he applied pressure for the darker shadows.
The only sound was the lazy hiss-crackle of the old vinyl record player on his desk. A slow trumpet mourned over a walking bassline. The needle was stuck in a gentle loop, the same smoky chorus repeating, the sound a perfect analogue to the stillness in the room.
Her phone, face-down on the pillow, was a flat, cold slab. She’d silenced it after three more messages from Kai. His words were polite, concerned. ‘Looking forward to Friday.’ ‘I hope the pearls were to your taste.’ ‘Your father mentioned you seemed tired. Hope you’re resting.’ Each notification had felt like a pinprick of ice against her skin. She’d buried it here, in the warm den of Leonid’s chaos, trying to let the rhythm of his breathing, the scratch of his pencil, drown out the noise of the life waiting for her.
He reached for a new pencil from the open tin beside him.Gold. He began to edge the dragon’s wing membranes, tracing the delicate filigree with a precision that seemed at odds with his size, with the powerful hands that spiked volleyballs and could, she knew, make her feel utterly weightless. He used the side of the lead, shading in broad, smooth strokes. The lamplight caught the prominent veins on his forearm, mapping a river of blue under his pale skin.
She must have made a sound, a soft intake of breath at the quiet beauty of the gesture, because he stilled.
His eyes lifted from the page and found hers, reflected in the small, grimy mirror above his dresser. For a moment, he just looked, his gaze holding her in the dusty sunlight. Then, a slow, knowing smile spread across his face. It wasn’t his usual lopsided grin. It was softer, private. A smile meant only for the space between them on this carpet.
He held up the gold pencil. “You’re staring, Kim. It’s creepy.”
“I’m observing,” she corrected, her voice sleepier than she intended. “It’s a scientific study in concentration.”
“Uh-huh.” His smile widened. He patted the worn carpet space beside him. “Observation’s boring. You wanna help?”
Her heart did a slow, heavy roll in her chest. The textbook, her father’s gravely voice discussing boundaries, the cold pearl sitting in its velvet box at home—they all receded, muffled by the jazz and the golden light. She slid off the bed, her bare knees sinking into the rough pile of the carpet. She settled next to him, the warmth from his body radiating against her side.
He handed her a pencil—a burnt orange. “Wings need some sunset,” he said, his fingers brushing hers. A simple point of contact that sent a current up her arm.
She looked at the intricate line drawing, suddenly intimidated. “What if I go outside the lines?”
Leonid shrugged, already returning to his crimson scales. “Then it’s our dragon. Not the book’s.”
Our dragon. The words bloomed inside her, warm and dangerous. She started at the very edge, where the membrane met the sky of the page, coloring lightly. The scratch of her pencil joined his, a duet under the trumpet’s lament. Her shoulder pressed against his. She could feel the solid reality of him, the heat, the slight dampness of his skin from the sun’s patch on the floor. The slow, steady beat of his heart thumped against her arm through his thin ribcage.
They worked in silence for a long time. The room grew warmer. The record looped again. He smelled of soap and the graphite from the pencils. Jennie found herself falling into the rhythm of it, the simple, physical act of filling a blank space with color. It was mindless. It was everything she never allowed herself. A messy, pointless, beautiful creation.
His leg shifted, his knee nudging hers. “You’re good at this,” he murmured, not looking up from a particularly complex cluster of scales.
“It’s just coloring.”
“Nothing’s just anything with you,” he said, his voice low. “You do everything like it matters.”
She didn’t know how to answer that. She focused on a delicate vein in the wing, following its path with the orange. He leaned over to reach for a mossy green pencil, his movement bringing his chest across her line of sight. His lips grazed her temple. It wasn’t a kiss, not really. It was the faintest possible brush, a whisper of contact as accidental as it was deliberate. A ghost of a touch that made every nerve in her body sing.
She stopped breathing. The pencil trembled in her hand.
He didn’t pull back immediately. He hovered there, his breath warm on her ear. “Sorry,” he whispered, though he didn’t sound sorry at all. “Reaching.”
He settled back, but the space between them was gone. The air was now charged, thick as the sunlight. She tried to return to the wing, but the lines had lost all meaning. All she could feel was the spot on her temple where his lips had been, burning like a brand.
He continued to color, but his movements were slower, more deliberate. His free hand came to rest on the carpet, palm up, an inch from her thigh. An invitation.
The world outside—the dinner on Friday, her father’s probing eyes, the perfect pearl—seemed to exist on the other side of a thick, warped glass. Here, there was only the crackle of vinyl, the dust motes, the dragon coming to life under their shared, silent effort, and the magnetic inch between his hand and her skin.
She watched his profile as he shaded. A small scar cut through his eyebrow, a relic of a childhood fall he’d told her about years ago. A drop of sweat traced a path down the side of his neck, disappearing into the collar of his t-shirt which was discarded beside him. She had the absurd, consuming urge to follow its path with her fingertip.
“I have to go soon,” she said, the words tearing themselves from a place of duty, not desire.
“I know.” He didn’t look up. He selected a black pencil and began to deepen the shadows in the dragon’s maw. “Big dinner tomorrow. Prepping with Kai.”
The way he said the name—flat, factual—was worse than any sarcasm. He knew.Of course he knew. They never spoke of it directly, but it lived in the silences, the third presence in the room alongside the dust and the jazz.
He put the black pencil down with a soft click. He turned his head, finally looking at her fully. His dark brown eyes were unreadable in the low light. “Color one more scale.”
It wasn’t a request. It was a postponement. A tiny, stolen defiance against the clock ticking in her veins. She nodded, unable to speak. He pointed to a single, central scale on the dragon’s chest, directly over where its heart would be. “That one. Make it… I dunno. Something that isn’t in the book.”
Her breath hitched. She scanned the tin of pencils. She bypassed the blues, the greens, the earthy tones. Her fingers closed around a single, vibrant violet. A color of twilight, of bruises, of royalty and decadence. A color that belonged nowhere near a dragon from a myth. A color that was entirely, utterly hers.
She began to fill the heart-scale. The violet was waxy and rich, covering the paper with a lush, impossible hue. As she worked, pressing hard, his hand shifted. His pinky finger linked loosely with hers where it rested on the carpet. A connection so small, so fragile, it shattered her completely.
When the scale was filled, a violent purple jewel amidst the crimson and gold, she put the pencil down. The sun had moved. The patch of gold was now on the wall, climbing towards the framed photo of her—a candid shot he’d taken last autumn, she was laughing, looking away from the camera, completely unaware. She had one foot in that sunlit memory and another here, on this carpet, her finger tangled with his.
He looked at the violet scale, then at her. Something raw flickered in his eyes, stripping away the usual layer of joked-annoyance. For a second, he was just a boy in a small, messy room, holding onto something he wasn’t supposed to have.
“Perfect,” he said, his voice rough.
The word hung in the air. He didn’t mean the dragon.
The trumpet on the record hit a long, wavering note and faded. The needle reached the end of the groove and lifted with a soft thunk, returning to its rest. The sudden silence was a physical shock, loud and absolute.The spell broke.
Jennie untwined her finger from his, the separation a small, sharp pain. She pushed herself up, her knees protesting. The real world came flooding back in with the silence, cold and insistent. She had to change, to prepare, to become Jennie Kim again.
He didn’t try to stop her. He stayed on the floor, looking at their dragon, at the single violet heart-scale glowing rebelliously on the page. He picked up the black pencil again, his jaw tight.
She gathered her textbook, her phone. She smoothed her silk blouse, a garment that felt alien in this room. At the door, she paused, her hand on the cool metal knob.
“Leo,” she said softly.
He glanced up, his expression now carefully neutral, a mask slipped back into place. “Yeah?”
She had no words. ‘I love you’ was too vast, too dangerous. ‘I don’t want to go’ was a pathetic truth. ‘Thank you’ felt insufficient. So she just looked at him, sitting shirtless on the floor amidst his crayons and his chaos, and let him see everything—the fear, the obsession, the terrifying depth of her want.
He held her gaze for a long moment, then gave a single, almost imperceptible nod. A silent understanding. A shared burden.
“See you, Jen,” he said, turning back to the page, his shoulders a tense line. He began to add deep, final shadows around their violet scale, as if fortifying it, protecting it from the surrounding, predetermined colors.
She slipped out, closing the door softly behind her. The hallway was dim and cool. She leaned against the wall, listening. From inside, after a minute, came the soft, familiar scratch of pencil on paper.He was still coloring. He was staying in their sunlit, violet-hued world, even as she walked back into the grey.