A/N: Redrafted due to factual inaccuracies, hideous reliance on over-used clichés and too much ambiguity in my descriptions. Not changed greatly, but hopefully improved.

A single pizza box lies in the middle of the floor, a tube of paint curled on top of it. The sticky smudge of dense colour welling from the lid is almost dry. The soft metal has stayed curled in the thumb prints he's pressed it into over the weeks that he's had it – squeezing the pigment out when it's needed, smearing it elsewhere to give life to his conceptions. The light is off now. The canvas isn't visible anymore.

I slip his foot side-on into the gap between my big toe and the toe next to it and squeeze a little. Our legs are tangled and his feet are cold. So are mine. He flinches and kicks me so that I laugh a little. I wish we'd just had sex, or were just about to, but we haven't. We won't. The gap between us at the pillow end is quite large enough, though if I wanted to I could curl my fingers down his chest, let my palm rest against his stomach, clawing through the hair descending from his navel. But that would be claiming him and I don't have the right.

I'm his model – on call for those spurts of creative genius he gets unfailingly after midnight, because I was his flatmate long before my body ever ended up being picked apart and reconstructed by his tired hazel eyes. My room is next door, but I hardly seem to stay there.

"If this was the Renaissance, Paddy," he says as he rolls over, sounding half asleep. "I'd probably fuck you everyday."

So I tell him "Don't call me Paddy," because he's not American now is he, he's bloody English - so am I - and he knows my name is Patrick; because, actually, that's what I want, but he's only joking so I know I can't react. Then I wonder, would he really do the fucking, or would it be me? Would it just be a writhing mess of limbs - no one really coming out on top - chaos everywhere - frantic and tangled, looking like that hackneyed Jackson Pollock in the Southbank Tate as we break for air. Then I stop thinking. What does it matter, anyway?

From here, when I turn my head just slightly I can see a picture of his girlfriend, illuminated by the crack of light coming in from the hall. He's bad with a camera. The focus is blurred, probably because the auto settings jammed on him and he got impatient enough to try manual. Cameras separate the world too much from him. He doesn't paint her. He never has. Every example of her face is careful and precise – delicate, but very different from his usual, uninhibited style. She is someone who he tries to get right and factual rather than interpreted on too much coffee, not enough sleep; she has that kind of crisp, cold beauty that wouldn't take to earthy smudges and loose broad strokes. That's what settles bitterness into my stomach. Even though he shuffles closer, following the blankets I've pulled around myself, his heart, his mind, his dick, are elsewhere – already claimed by someone who doesn't understand him.

But understanding is too great an assumption to be made by someone he only paints at night. I'm artificial, like the orange-tinted beam from the angle-poise lamp he positions to intensify the shadow. "I only paint in daylight," he tells her almost pompously; only I know that isn't true. His insomniac doesn't care. Artificial light is good enough when he moves my hand just there, angles my head, ruffles my hair and drinks in the colour of my skin so frequently he should have learnt how to drown by now.

Often, he doesn't paint at night, but stands there smudging colour from chalk or wax pastels - thumbs and fingers pushing at the colour, blurring the edges – soft-focus abutting knife-edge contours – pulling eyes exactly where he wants them. He'll swipe a streak of chalky red across his stubbled face, skewing his glasses, and I'll long to clean it off. When he does paint, he's just as messy, though the thin plastic gloves and careful handling seem to make it more precise, but he'll map an ochre line down his pale jumper by mistake, regardless. I will cringe, because it's the third he's ruined. But it comes off, he says, because it's raw wool; the lanolin stops it soaking through. A bit of white spirit and it was never there at all.

Just like that, even though his hot breath is making my neck damp, I know my place. I do not soak in to his fabric. I am easily removed.

I am the friend. I am the body he worships for abstract forms I wish he'd connect into a human being. But he doesn't. I am the sexless foot-warmer he battles for duvet and bed space, because he paints me sprawled on his mattress, almost sleeping, though I watch him work, more fascinated with his expressions and movements than he could ever know. But I am no more than that.

I am a paint streak - a mistake of the moment - easy to clear up after the event - a mark that never mattered, one that wasn't meant to happen. The artist, like God, chooses what happens – who stays, who goes. All it would take is a wet rag and some turpentine, and I would vanish. She is his masterpiece; I am his practice. Even as he curls against my side, I know beyond doubt that I will be painted over; I will be rubbed out.