Drawing

It's later in the evening, and Elise's forgotten she's still wearing Aiden's sweatshirt until now. Realizing she should probably go return it to him, she takes it off and walks across the hallway to Aiden's room.

The door is hinged open. Judging from the sounds of running and gargling water in the bathroom down the hall, Aiden seems to be brushing his teeth.

She places the sweatshirt on his chair, neatly folded this time, and is about to leave the room when she notices the sheets scattered around the desk. They're sketches. Aiden's definitely more of a musician than a visual artist, but she does recall him mentioning enjoying the drawing elective he was taking at school.

Curious, Elise leans forward to get a closer look at the drawings. She knows next to nothing about any form of art, but from what she can tell these look pretty good for rough sketches. She leafs through the jumble of pages: mostly scenery, pretty landscapes of mountains and lakes, then…a person.

It's a portrait of the back of a girl, long locks messily tumbling over her shoulders. Elise doesn't know who it is, but probably…someone important to him. Important enough that he'd spend careful detail crafting the drawing, the lines more solid, more defined than the other rough sketches. Maybe someone from his boarding school?

Her heart shouldn't sink. There is absolutely, definitively no reason this should impact her at all. If there's someone that he cares about, whatever girl who attends that music school, that's wonderful. Absolutely fantastic. She's happy for him.

So she ignores how something inside her chest wrenches; instead, she closes her eyes and breathes in for a long minute. And so she misses the letters delicately penciled in at the bottom of the sheet, the letters that form a name.

After that, she quietly exits the room, leaving the door half-jarred as she found it.

It's probably better like this, anyway.