As he grabbed shot after shot, Gabriel’s frustration grew. He didn’t want to preserve with the click of the button. He wanted to capture through creation. He wanted to see if his fingers could copy the curves of her body, the expression on her face, the duality of light, and the angle of descent. Setting the camera down on the bed, he went into his closet, yanking boxes out of his way and tearing into a case he had shoved to the back. It held a brand-new, never used sketchbook. With one single pencil, sharpened and ready to use. Bought in a moment of weakness, of longing for the feel of the slender pencil between his fingers, stroking and sliding across paper, generating thought and emotion on the page.

The materials felt good in his hands, and he flipped not to the first page, but to the middle of the book. At the window, he only needed a minute to shift from photographer to artist, and then his lines appeared, swift and sure, outlining Sara’s body, the scratch of pencil to paper urging him on. As he worked, glancing up and down, manic in his need to emulate her juxtaposition of tension and relaxation, she shifted in her chair, and released her skirt from its prison under her legs.

She must have been getting hot in the sun, because she took the hem from where it hit at her knees and shook it up and down to fan her legs. Then, still reading, she hitched the skirt up toward her thighs and dropped her knees apart, one foot moving off the chair to the ground.

Gabriel’s mouth went dry.

It was sexual, but unintentionally so. She was concentrating on the papers in her hand, the relaxing of her legs a signal of her absorption. But that was part of what was so sexy, knowing she wasn’t trying to seduce. She just was.

Flipping to a clean page, Gabriel started over, wanting this new frame captured, this sense of abandonment from Sara. Her sensuality. The length of her neck, her slender legs. It was stunning, and he raced to draw her, wanting it down before she moved, before she became aware of him, before the sun shifted. His fingers remembered, even though it had been a hundred and fifty years, and he embraced the memory, the moment, the gift he had been given.