It’s that hour of the morning for which she insists on perfect silence. She sits on the cramped balcony sketching on a large pad propped on her knee. The door is open and down in the street there are car horns and sirens, but if he stays in the apartment at drawing time she has asked him to remain quiet.

Hair the color of wet sand flows unbrushed to the middle of her spine. She’s wearing the same, white T shirt she slept in and nothing else, one leg crossed over the other to make a desk for the pad. He moves to the kitchen and pours coffee into a mug with a word in German on it he doesn’t understand and hasn’t asked about.

He sets the mug on the small table beside her. She seems older concentrating on her work. He looks down between her thick thighs. Her pussy is exposed as the outer leg lifts the hem of her shirt. Her sensuality is raw and careless as her lack of concern for exposing herself on the balcony. She doesn’t understand his awkwardness over this any more than he understands her wish for his silence at drawing time when the street is nothing but a helpless exercise in chaos.

He moves back inside and considers going to the coffee shop where he goes to read and wait for her. But today he stays. Her wide, thick shoulders barely move as she draws. She picks up the mug and sips. Sips again. Puts it down. Then she picks up the cigarette burning in the ash tray and drags smoke into her body.

Then she’s drawing again while he tiptoes around the kitchen table. There’s a stack of sketch pads on it out of which he has only seen the work she chooses to show. She would disapprove of his opening one to look at the work she hasn’t let him see, but his curiosity is stronger than his decency.

He opens the pad carefully. There’s a hasty yet skillful sketch of the grassy slope by the duck pond in the park, a spot he showed her not long after they met. He recognizes the two of them in the drawing. She sits cross-legged on the grass while he lies with his head on her lap. His eyes are closed while the fingers of her right hand lace into his hair. She’s looking down and smiling in a way he’s never seen. It’s a moment that never happened and he understands why she doesn’t want him to see this. It’s too sweet and pastoral. It’s not the her she wants him to see.

He looks at her back, which is turned to the inside of the apartment. Her hips are wider than the small, metal folding chair she sits on every morning. He turns back to the drawing and tries to look at the image like something he remembers from not long ago.

After a while he quietly flips the page and finds another drawing of them together. There’s no scene in this one. Only the figure study of a naked couple. Her thighs are open, her heels folded back against his buttocks. Seen from a raised perspective, his erect cock is halfway embedded in her pussy. She’s biting the tip of her finger and there’s something girlish and fearful, angry and loving in her face all at once. His spine is arched and he’s wincing as if he’s cumming inside her just then but there are also tears pouring down the side of his face.

This is a moment he does remember, except for the outward strain in them both. It was after a gallery opening they went to weeks ago where they’d argued about the art. Then they’d come back here where the argument erupted into a burst of spontaneous kissing.

He looks back at her and wonders how they could fight with so much conviction and then slip inside each other and move together like fluid. He remembers lunging into her and the way her damp thighs mashed into his hip bones.

The next page is a self-portrait in which her eyes are closed and she is smiling the same smile as in the park drawing while she cradles the swollen length of his cock against her face. It’s another recent memory. Something he woke up to, but when she caught him looking at her she took his cock into her mouth and started sucking him loudly, staring at him with steel in her eyes.

The next image is seen from above. She is on her hands and knees, spine arched while he clutches her hips and his cock is submerged in her ass. This one is a memory that never materialized. He remembers the night they lay together talking about it, but he finally decided she was afraid of the pain.

He closes the book, afraid of the pain. He fills the mug that says I Heart Austin and sits at the table. Waiting for her to finish. Or maybe he’s waiting for her to begin. Down on the street a driver blows their horn at another driver.

She finally gets up from her seat and comes to stand in the doorway. Her sketchbook is closed and tucked under one arm. He stands and goes close to her.

“Did you finish your picture?”

“Zey are not pictures. Zey are drawings,” she says, but this time she’s smiling because she knows he only says this every morning to make her angry in the way a woman can only be angry with someone who matters.

He touches her face. “I thought we could go to the park,” he says.

“Iff you like.” She leans into the f like it’s stuck between her teeth.

He kisses her. Lightly but for a long time. He understands now why she insists on the silence. Car horns and sirens are easy enough to ignore, but he is a another kind of problem.