Visual Interest
A little bit of Dex/Lardo that I wrote for DexRarepairWeek but never posted. Enjoy!
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“There’s no way you need that color.”
Dex looks pointedly at the olive-green oil paint Lardo is currently squeezing onto her palette, standing out among the white, orange, and brown she’s been using so far.
“Excuse me?” Lardo caps off the tube of green and makes eye contact with him, raising one perfectly formed eyebrow. “When did you become an artist?”
“I don’t need to be an artist to know that I don’t have any green on my body right now,” Dex says, gesturing from the top of his head to his waist. “Black shirt, red hair, pale skin… Non-green eyes.”
“They’re amber, if you need a word,” Lardo says, dipping her paintbrush into a cup of water. “I’m using the green for shadows. I have an aesthetic for this series I have to keep up.”
Dex opens his mouth to argue but stops short when he sees Lardo scrutinizing his face. “What?”
“You moved, Dex,” she says, standing up and stretching her arms. “Turn to where you were looking before.”
He does so as she gently steps around the supplies scattered about, settling his eyes on the poster by the hallway door. It’s an O’Keeffe painting, he remembers Lardo telling him.
“Your freckles are gonna be hell.” She grips Dex’s chin with a small, firm hand and brings her nose inches from his cheek, exhaling gently. “I might actually need some black. They’re darker than I thought.”
Dex feels his cheeks warm as Lardo circles around to the opposite side of his face, staying just as close as before as she moves. “Yeah, I’ll need black.”
She finally steps back and Dex wills his skin to cool down before she notices how red his cheeks and ears are. He doesn’t take his eyes from the poster.
“I’ll need some pink too if you don’t calm down, Dex,” Lardo says, settling back into the hole she carved for herself among tubes of oil paint and a small canvas propped against a couple of empty wine bottles.
Dex spares a glance to see her smirk at him, picking up her paintbrush once more. She looks back up at him and her smile gets wider. Dex’s lips curl upwards and his cheeks heat up even more.
“Then again,” she muses, mixing some of the olive-green paint into the orange. “A blush is always good for visual interest.”
She winks and Dex looks back at the poster, cheeks burning.