Courageous

CHAPTER ONE

It had been very weird at first because Carter didn't really like painting or drawing people. He loved landscapes, buildings or heck, even the sky but he hated drawing people.

However, that drawing changed everything!

It was then he realized how different outlining and shading a person was. And he loved every second of it. At first, he painted his eyes. Just the eyes. He had used a paper from his special notebook -where he only drew when he found something truly amazing and held a special place to his heart. In that notebook, he had painted his brother's guitar, his mom's favourite show's logo and his mama's briefcase. Those may seem pretty stupid to draw but they were things his family loved and when looking at them, he would always remember them and their love for him.

After three days of sketching, shadowing and colouring, Carter finally completed his drawing. The eyes covered most of the paper and the colours gave it a really realistic vibe. He had blurred the upper part and added tons of shadow underneath the eyes that almost looked like black circles. The green wasn't the exact shade as the boy's eyes but it was as close as he could get. He didn't tone his lashes or make them curly which gave off that the eyes were those of a man, not a woman.

Within a week of finishing that drawing in one of his classes where his teacher let them do whatever they wanted, Carter painted the boy. Like the whole boy. His torso, his legs and arms and his face. But this time, he painted the eyes closed. His teacher had been very impressed with that sudden change but had asked about the boy's eyes.

His answer had been: "He is just daydreaming, miss. Like I was when drawing him."

His answer hadn't been a complete lie since he had seen the boy while daydreaming in the streets around campus. He hadn't exactly looked for them but had accidentally seen them and couldn't get them out of his head. Every time he closed his eyes, he was there.

He didn't want to tell anyone yet that the boy's eyes were hidden in his special notebook. He thought they were so special that if he showed them to someone, they would lose their value. Plus, he was afraid of criticism. People would ask why had drawn a male pair of eyes and he wouldn't know what to tell them. Possibly because he didn't know himself.

Why had he drawn them?

Probably because the male's eyes shone so brightly that day that they had captured his attention. Carter was known to not pay attention to people around him unless they were speaking directly to him which is why he found it weird.

His roommate had asked quite a lot of times what he had been drawing but Carter would always tell him nothing in order to hide the picture. Noah, his roommate, hadn't pressed on the subject but he could see that something is bothering him. Luckily for him, he knows not to annoy Carter a lot as the male can get angry pretty quickly.

When his teacher had asked him to paint a pair of eyes for the male he had drawn, he had almost flipped. He didn't want to draw another pair of eyes; those green ones would be the last he would ever draw. He promised himself that.

And so, after hiding the pair of eyes he sketched, he didn't pay much attention to them. He kept them locked inside his notebook and used another one as a replacement. As much as he wanted to, he couldn't bring himself to throw the painting away. It already meant too much because, after three weeks of staring at them and thinking about that boy, Carter realized he may have a slight crush on him.

Something that didn't sit too well on him.

Not because he had a crush on a boy (could he call it a crush though?) but because he didn't know what to do or what to feel after realizing that.

After talking to his moms and brother about it -who were overjoyed to learn that he finally had a crush on someone other than an actor- he decided not to do anything. He thought that he would move on since he would probably never see him again.

But his thoughts changed when he saw those bright green eyes again.