Work Text:
Larissa walked into the drawing studio, making her way around the gathered students who were attempting to make nice with the professor. It was the class’ second meeting, and her first time hauling around the massive newsprint pad that was half her height that weighed down the shoulder strap of her beat up portfolio.
For a drawing studio on the fourth floor of the JAC building, there wasn’t much light. The windows at the back of the room were large, taking up half of the wall, however were north facing and so had only a perfect view of the nearby wooded areas surrounding some of the cheaper off-campus apartment housing and the dark side of the sunset that painted the front of the building in brilliant oranges and pinks. Larissa ignored the portfolio stands to either side of the room and found an easel near the window and carefully leaned her supplies up against the base.
Inwardly she groaned, already fearing the floors. No matter how clean a surface seems in the drawing room, it isn’t. She, like most of her classmates, had sat on their floor to receive their syllabi, and left the room with ruinous black charcoal on the seats of their clothes and smeared across their hands.
The easels were circled around the room, facing a raised platform in the center of the room. Last semester, their professor would roll in a variety of items from the storage closet near the Art History lecture hall on a cart and set up elaborate still life towers for the students to draw in the three hour block of time they spent in class. Now it sat empty, save for a few carpets to save the model’s feet from the harsh plywood surface.
Larissa swallowed thickly, pulling her thick hair up into a tiny ponytail at the back of her scalp. The others were beginning their own set-up, taking out their huge pads of thin paper and adjusting the easels with their tightening knobs and sliding bottom and top braces to their preferred height, some pulling out their pencils and charcoal and pastels and placing them within easy reach. She followed suit, grappling easily with the pad and cracking back the binding and taking only a moment to dig a sharpie from her pocket to label the front with L. Duan.
In the shuffle of paper and creaking of easels, the professor appeared, directing a student here or there, and setting up a coffee machine in the corner and talking to another student wrapped up in a, frankly, obnoxious fluffy blue robe covered in a print of rubber duckies.
The student in the robe, the model, was flicking his eyes all around, grinning underneath his thick mustache and shuffling towards the easels in fraying leather sandals. He started a few conversations with the others, which all died suddenly when her fellow students realized just what the tall man’s role was in this class.
Larissa rolled her eyes –their shyness was adorably stupid. If she could be paid to stand around in the buff, she might do it, too.
Mr. Ashe, the professor clapped loudly, silencing the group, “Hey guys, welcome back! Double checking, do we have any new registers? No? Everyone set up? GREAT! I would like to introduce our model, Mr. Knight,” he waved at the mustached man who cheerily waved to the gathered students. “He will be with us on Wenesdays and alternating Fridays. You’ll meet Ms. Mills next time. Would you like to introduce yourself?”
“Sw’awesome. I’m Shitty, that’s a nickname, I swear, I’m a double major in Women’s Gender and Sexualities Studies and Political Science. No, I’m not fucking with you. I’m the guy you’re gonna be drawing while he rocks out with his cock out. I have been told dating any of you would be a Bad Idea.”
He grins, salaciously, and Larissa hears herself snort even before the blond next to her cringes back with audible disgust.
“Get on with it, pornstache,” Larissa quips, unable to lock the phrase behind her teeth.
Shitty’s face twitches her direction, eyes wide and ridiculously green, wide, happy mouth gasping in pleased surprise, “You got it right!”
“Got what right?” she asks.
“It’s not a pedostache!”
“Course not, it’s too full to be a pedostache,” she says, and the smirk curls her lip pleasantly.
Shitty straightens up, rolling his shoulders and stretching, “I like you,” the model says simply.
Mr. Ashe calls out that class will begin with thirty five-second gesture drawings. Shitty kicks off his sandals, and drops the robe.