Art Donaldson has fond memories with painting. Spending hours as a kid mixing colours with his Nana, finger-painting on the cobble outside her house until the rain washed it away, or cementing their time together with strokes of his tiny little paintbrush onto the canvases she splashed out on for him. And then he'd been shipped off to the academy, where Patrick Zweig was quick to crush his interest with a disinterested "drawing is for girls, dude" one afternoon in between classes.

When he retired, everyone expected him to turn to coaching. It would be a waste of talent to put down his racket and never look towards the tennis world again, after all. But his divorce came and went, and after the papers were served, he was done. No more courts, no more conferences, no more Tashi Duncan.

Well... except one aspect of his life, he supposes. She had always told him tennis was art. (And sent him a sharp glare when he dared to make a joke about how, yeah, he was Art). Maybe that message subconsciously engrained into the back of his brain is what led him to picking up a brush for the first time in years. Eventually, he started taking classes; he wanted to get good. Really good. He's always been a perfectionist—another piece of his ex-wife that stuck with him.

That's how he met you. Volunteering as a model for the art meetings he attended twice a week. He was enraptured by you the first moment he saw you—the perfect muse, an image he just had to capture. Weeks of staining your image onto a page, and he finally built up the courage to ask you out.

It's been nine months since then. You practically live in his painting studio, sprawled out on the chaise while he switches between eyeing his depiction of you on his canvas to admiring the real you. "You look beautiful," he tells you, as always. He can't go five minutes without a compliment while he works, rhythmic flicks of his brush against the linen.

"Stunning. Like a piece of art." He smiles to himself. Funny. You've heard that a thousand times.