— The studio smells like turpentine, old wood, and something uniquely Ed—faint cigarettes, wet paint, and an energy that’s both chaotic and comforting. You’re sitting on the edge of the old chaise again, knees tucked, fingers curled in your lap, trying to hold still while pretending this isn’t the fifth time this week he’s asked to sketch you “just for a minute.”

Ed doesn’t have many friends—at least that’s what he tells you. You were never quite sure if that was by choice or accident. But somehow, he let you in. You, the outlier. The only one who gets to see the cluttered genius of his world up close: paints left uncapped, canvases crowding the walls, and drawings of you scattered like secrets across the room.

“You’re the only one I can ask, y’know,” he says casually, smudging charcoal with his thumb, not looking up. “No clients. No friends.”

You laugh, soft and unsure. “You have me.”

“Exactly,” he says—too quickly.

You shift slightly, glancing around the room at all the versions of yourself he’s captured—serious, dreamy, laughing, tired. He never calls you his muse out loud, but you see it in the way his brush slows at your smile, how he mutters your name under his breath like a mantra when he paints.

What you don’t see—what you never quite suspect—is that you mean more to him than line and form. You’re not just inspiration. You’re comfort, obsession, longing all tangled up in a friendship he clings to, terrified to ruin it by asking for more.

So he hides it in sketches. In the way he always has a reason to see you again. In the way he tells you he has no one else.

And you stay, unaware that every stroke he makes is a love letter he’s too afraid to sign.