stars || Joe Sugg

23.) burn

ruby

The best thing about not having a job but having a boyfriend is afternoon naps at around four that last hours, which will ultimately cause me to stay up later at night, but it's okay because it just means that my nightmares will be delayed, or completely passed tonight.

I sit up next to Joe, who rolled away from me sometime in the past two hours. The sheet rests right at his hips, showing his bare back as it moves with every breath he takes.

Stretching out my limbs, I kick my phone somewhere at the bottom of the bed. I find it about to fall and kick it upward. I have texts from Regina and Caspar, but I just poke my phone under the pillow and sink down in bed, hoping to fall back asleep.

I lay there for what feels like hours, but it's actually only five minutes. Realizing that I'm never going to be able to go back to sleep, I reach over and grab my sketchbook from the beside table.

The sketchbook is filling up quickly. I have pages and pages of doodles of Joe. I still haven't told him about it, and as far as I know, he hasn't found it. I try not to leave it open, hoping that he won't see them. It's completely different to draw Alfie or Conor from a picture on the internet than drawing Joe in reality. It's so strange. I don't know how I feel about it. It is a whole lot easier to draw from a picture than a moving person because he definitely moves a lot.

I pass the pastel of Zoe, stopping for a short moment to critique myself on it. I tried to make it too realistic, and I almost hate it. Her eyes don't look right, and neither does her hair color. I turn the page over, being careful to not smudge it until I can get an overcoat on it.

As I turn to the next page, I grab the small case of pencils off the table. For my birthday, Zoe had bought me just hard and soft pastels, but after telling her how much I loved them, she bought me a set of pastel pencils. Everyone needs a Zoe in their life. She's the sweetest person I've met over here, and even though our relationship was kind of iffy for awhile, it evened out. We're not nearly as close as Regina and I, but I would definitely be up to spending the day with her now.

I started my current work about two days ago. It's been a very slow process, but I try to get as much as I can done whenever. Most of it has been drawn from memory because I spend a lot of my time - probably more than I should - studying every inch of my boyfriend. The drawing in the book is a pastel of Joe how I see him the only time I can actually draw him; right now. So far I've got the back of his head and the top of his back, like where his shoulder blades are.

Almost twenty minutes into it, Joe begins moving around. When he turns over on to his back, I sigh, trying to find the tissue paper that I keep between my pastels and the page before them, to reduce smudging. Unable to find it, I lay the sketchbook down on the bed and put my pastels away. I make my way out of the his - our - room.

Once I'm upstairs, I pull aside all the jackets on the dining table, trying to find the bag of tissue paper I got just for this purpose. I finally find it buried under Joe's Sugg Life hoodie. Making the quick decision that it's cold enough in the apartment to wear a hoodie, I slip it over my head. I look down and see that it just barely leaves Joe's boxer shorts visible. It's an unbreakable habit for me to steal his clothes. I only steal his boxers because he leaves them in the most unconventional places. I found the ones I'm wearing now at the bottom of the stairs. If I find them, I keep them. Pretty soon, he's going to run out of boxers.

When I reach the base of his stairs, I catch my mistake of thinking that Joe was not going to wake up in the two minutes I was upstairs. What were the actual odds of that happening? Obviously, they were very high because as I reenter the room, I see him sitting up on the bed, looking over the sketchbook. He hears my bare feet on the floor and looks up at me.