Page 45 of The Fate Factor

He looks over, eyes soft, and for a moment so quick I almost miss it, they settle on my mouth. That thing I saw between us, I think maybe we’re both thinking about it after all.

He sets his hand over mine, squeezing affectionately in response, and there’s a flip in my stomach that was a lot easier to ignore yesterday. Yesterday, I was afraid of that touch. Now I find myself imagining what would happen if I didn’t let go.

He does let go, though, becauseobviously. He wraps his fingers around the gear shifter, leaving my skin too cool and my brain conjuring the vision of that hand sweeping over my shoulder and down beneath the sheet. Big palms. Clean, short fingernails. Just like I remember.

Except… There’s something new. I lean forward for a closer look. It’s a crescent moon shaped scar below his knuckles. It’s purply-red against his fair skin, and spans the whole back of his hand. Impossible to miss.

“How did you get this scar?” I ask, pointing.

He glances at it as he pulls away from the farm. “Cut it on a broken pint glass.”

“When?”

“The day I opened.” He gives me a little smile. “Bled everywhere. Made for a rough time behind the bar. Good thing it took me a bit to get this popular.”

I tilt my head, look at it again. So he got it after we met on the roof, and at the place he said he wouldn’t have if not for that vision. But it wasn’t there in the vision of us. I don’t pretend to know how telling the future works, but that seems strange to me.

I decide that kind of detail is above my paygrade and cast my eyes out toward the windshield. We pull onto the main road, passing a sugar maple turning yellow, the color slowly seeping into it too.

“Jamie?”

“Hmm?”

I suck in a breath for bravery and remember the safety net of knowing the future. “Do you want to hang out again tomorrow?”

He looks at me with that full smile, and it’s like a rogue wave engulfing me. I’m completely sunk. “Yeah,” he says. “I do.”

Thank you, universe.

fourteen

Noel

Themorningafterthefarm, I wake like a Disney princess—eyes bright, cheeks flushed, snoring cat curled on my belly.

I displace Pixie, despite her best attempts to cling to my tank top, and push open the curtains in the loft. Even the sun seems game to be part of my fairytale morning. I gather my tea cup from the nightstand and pad down the stairs in bare feet to greet the mess I left on the counter last night.

As soon as Jamie dropped me off, I rushed inside and searched the cupboards for one of Nana’s Mason jars for my little hops bouquet. Nana went through a purge phase after she was diagnosed with kidney disease, the condition that eventuallyled to her stroke. She donated boxes and boxes of things, then inexplicably adopted a kitten.

“I don’t need stuff,” she said, holding Pix like an infant and spoiling her forever. “I need life.”

“Sure, Nana,” I replied. It was the last day of my visit that year, and I’d been searching closets for her fall coat before I left, only to discover it had apparently not made the cut. “But you might need some of the stuff.”

The jars, sadly, must have also not made the cut. So instead, I rummaged through the cabinets until I found a mug that read The Cards Say Coffee with a picture of a tarot deck, and stuck the stems in that. It was unexpectedly perfect, Jamie’s odd little flowers in Nana’s silly mug.

Now, here they sit surrounded by my pencils and loose leaf sketching paper.

The pinecones had opened up a bit by the time I got them home and into the water. Their huge heads tipping over the side of the cup, like fish jumping out of a pond. I placed them in the center of the breakfast bar, inspecting the petals, looking for the ones that stood out the way Nana taught me.

I’d been so eager to paint the flowers that I quickly changed into pajama pants, threw together a ham and cheese sandwich for dinner, and started sketching in between bites. I did one rendering in charcoal and one in pencil, each from different angles. Then I took my sketchbook to the couch, snuggled up with one of Nana’s quilts on my lap, and played around with some other flowers. Blooms I can sketch from memory because I’ve been going back to them since I was a child. Pansies, peonies, beach roses.

I started sketching when I was eight, and it became a nightly routine all the way through to adulthood. The way some people read before bed, I’d pick a flower and draw it. If I was tired, it would be no more than a doodle, a cartoonish sunflower or acarnation with an oversized head. If I had more energy, I might end up with something that I’d save. Something I could digitize and play around with to make a pattern or a greeting card. Those late night sketches are where most of my inventory came from when I built that Etsy shop.

Last night I was afraid picking up my pencil again would feel the way it has for months, like bleeding a stone, but instead it just flowed out of me. And it lit something deep inside of my chest, a spark I’ve been trying to make catch. It caught so hard that I stayed up past midnight for the first time in years just drawing for fun. Cultivating a garden of charcoal blooms.

But that’s not what I wanted Jamie’s flowers for. I wanted them for the color. The unique green that I really want to master, and that’s what I plan to do today.

I haven’t even unpacked my paints yet. They’re sitting in a small plastic tote in the mudroom, beneath a duffle bag stuffed with shoes, and I lug the box into the kitchen, unwrapping the paint pots one by one on the little two-top table. I’ll have to find a way to shield them from the morning sun so they don’t dry out, but they look like a flock of colorful birds all lined up there, and it makes me deliriously happy.

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