Page 43 of Ladybirds

She hovers over her camera bag, rifling around for her case of lens filters. “I’ll take your word for it.”

Seth chuckles, hands disappearing into his pockets. “Honestly, it wouldn’t be half as terrible as you make it out to be if you’d take a moment to stop griping about it.”

Rolling her eyes, she pulls out the desired filter, perched between her thumb and forefinger, and carefully places the case away. “Look. Just because boring old books are your happy place doesn’t make them mine. I’m never going to like it.”

“Well, not with that attitude, you won’t.”

Sara could argue, remind him that she’d hate literature even if she was all sunshine and rainbows, but she screws the filter onto her lens with a quiet shake of her head. The last thing she wants to do is taint the peaceful atmosphere with his literature obsession.

She expects him to fill the silence (he always does) but his hands are tucked in his pockets, his posture so relaxed he’d almost be slouching if he didn’t somehow manage to still look elegant doing it. His face is turned toward the horizon, the evening light casting a glow on his pale skin and the shadows highlighting the cut of his jaw.

For a second—only a second—she thinks it’s a shame he can’t be captured on film.

Swiftly, before he can catch her, she turns away. Finds reasons to fiddle with the shutter speed and aperture even though she knows it’s fine. She holds her breath, presses the release, listens to the sound of the shutter closing, and pulls up the preview to inspect it. It’s good, but not perfect. A little bit longer on the exposure and—

“You must love it.”

Her head snaps up. “What?”

Seth must be gesturing to her camera, but somehow she feels like she’s included in that fluid flick of his hand. His head tilts. “You have this terribly odd look on your face when you’re clicking away.”

Sara frowns. “Gee, thanks.”

He makes a disgruntled sound in the back of his throat, as if he has the nerve to be irritated with her. “You’re at peace, doing this. Open. Vulnerable.” His brow furrows, chin raising as he regards her. “As if everything else just… disappears.”

Sara stares, her heart twisting in her chest. Seth turns back to the horizon. She can hear the strain in his voice when he admits, “I envy that look.”

Releasing a shaky breath, she forces herself to stop searching for answers in his face and turn her attention back to her camera—gaze caressing the familiar curve of the lens, the fading labels on the body.

“Every time I release the shutter I feel...” she trails off, searching for the words in the shifting colors painting the horizon, fingers twiddling with the camera strap. “It’s like I’m taking a single moment in time and I’m… I’m immortalizing it. Making it stay.” She smiles, a sad and wistful tilt of the lips. Photography lets her take a beautiful moment and make it last forever. She lowers her face to the viewfinder, adjusting her settings.

Seth scoffs, but the sound is more sad than cruel. “Immortality isn’t half so romantic as it sounds.” He drinks in the view, head tilting. “But I understand your meaning. Moments are fleeting. Particularly the beautiful ones.”

She thinks of the day she brought home the doves; of carefully chewing around BBs while she ate with her parents on the back porch. Sara remembers her father laughing, amused by her expression when she found one. Pulling away from the viewfinder, she swallows—willing the tightness in her throat to ease. “When I was little, I used to wish I could make the days last longer. Sometimes, I thought if I wished hard enough I could keep the sun up for just that much longer.”

The corner of Seth’s lips curl into a minuscule smile, one she may have missed had she not been looking for it. His eyes, which had always looked black to her, are transformed to a warm chocolate by the sun’s lingering touch. “Even you can’t stop the sun, Princess.”

For once, she sees no trace of his usual taunting. There’s a fondness in the curve of his mouth; a softness in his gaze. Both terrify her. She hides behind the viewfinder, heart fluttering anxiously in her chest. The light—it has to be the light. Nothing more.

Silence hangs between them, broken only by the occasional click of the lens, until the world turns more silver than gold. Packing up her equipment, Sara chances a glance at her forced companion. Only a quick look, but enough to convince herself that he belongs in this landscape. His eyes are meant to look black, and his smiles are supposed to be cold, because there is nothing warm about him. Nothing at all.

She heaves the camera bag over her shoulder and grabs the tripod with her free hand. There’s foxtails sticking to her socks, pricking at her skin, but she’s too eager to leave to think about pausing to remove them. Sara only makes it a few yards before his voice stops her.

“Might I ask why you never come for the sunrise?”

For a moment she is perfectly still, a statue in a landscape of tall, swaying grass. The sun was the closing of the day—an ending to a chapter. The sunrise was the opening scene for something new. New and entirely unknown, when all Sara ever wanted was to remain in the comfortable embrace of the familiar. She licks her lips, tries to ignore the pressure on her chest.

“It’s too early,” she murmurs, hating that it’s only a fraction of the truth.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Sara swears the weather was beautiful when she walked to class.

Crisp on the side of cool, but not enough for her breath to fog. Now though, there are gray clouds darkening the horizon that hint at the possibility of rain. Sara knows they only have a couple more weeks (at best) before the frost, then the snow, settles in. Some of the trees have already started to change, red haloing the edges of their leaves. Thanksgiving will be here before she knows it—Christmas after that. The thought makes her chest ache.

She can’t imagine either without Oma.

There will be no homemade gravy. No lovingly iced sugar cookies. The mugs of hot chocolate won’t warm her the way Oma’s did; imbued with happy memories and laced with a magic that was all her own. Her father’s version of celebrating is to splurge on a fancy bottle of whiskey—Sara can’t remember the last time he bothered to put up a tree. It never really bothered her that much before. She had Oma and, in the last few years, David’s family to celebrate with. Now, both of those options are gone.

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