I push my hair back from my face and squint at the clock. It’s three in the fucking morning. So much for closing my eyes for a second. I haven’t slept this long in ages.

I look over at my bed partner. He’s lying on his side facing me, and the moonlight plays on his face, highlighting those high, broad cheekbones.

Asleep, he looks younger, the sharp lines of his face softened and lacking the vitality that usually infuses his expression. His hair has fallen over his forehead, and my fingers twitch with the urge to push it back. That impulse towards tenderness is utterly alien to me.

It’s an enjoyable novelty to be able to observe him without his face becoming amused and smug as if he’s caught me out in some weakness. I catalogue the lines of his body and the beauty of the hand outstretched towards me, looking somewhat innocent.

My fingers tingle, and the customary urge to draw swamps me. Over the last several months, this need has been magnified times a billion. The old, sweet, familiar lure of my art has now become a desperate compulsion.

I’m not going to sleep anymore, so I ease carefully out of bed, feeling a lovely twinge in my arse. Mags stirs, and I freeze for a second, but then he smacks his lips and turns to his other side. I let out a slow breath and creep out to the lounge, where I stoop to pick up my clothes that are strewn all over the room, evidence of the desperation that had seized us earlier.

I dress quickly and then let myself out. I pause for a second with my hand on the front door, seized with the contradictory desire to go back to his room, take off my clothes and slide into bed again. I could wake him up with his cock in my mouth and hear that breathy grunt he gives when he comes. I could let sex sweep me under to a place where I can’t think anymore.

I won’t do it, though, and, when I quietly shut the door, the click of the lock sounds somehow final. I make my way back to my flat, telling myself sternly to get over it. “It was just sex,” I whisper into the quiet hush. “Letting off steam. Put him out of your bloody head.”

But even as I grab my sketchbook and pencil, he’s front and centre in my mind. I exhale slowly and start to draw. My pencil moves quickly, and I lose myself in the quiet joy of drawing. It’s a familiar lifelong happiness made especially poignant at this moment in my life. When I’ve finished, I sit back and frown. On the cream-coloured paper, Mags lies stretched out naked amongst his messy sheets and lit by moonlight.

“Shit,” I say with feeling.

Chapter Twelve

Mags