Page 40 of Alone With You
“I…I didn’t mean to pry,” she stuttered, lifting her cupped hands. “I’m sorry.”
Logan’s throat tightened. She held a carving of a Western Meadowlark. One of his earlier pieces, simpler than the bird carvings he was working on now, still lying about in raw wood upon the table, unpainted, awaiting his attention.
“The chairs were overturned on the grass,” she said, lowering her cupped hands to her lap. “The wind is kicking up, so I figured I’d put them away. So I dragged them in here and….”
He glimpsed a folded lounge chair leaning against the inside wall, and the plastic table upon which he’d set her burger earlier in the day. An accident, this intrusion. She hadn’t meant to pry. He should have padlocked the door if he wanted to keep secrets
“It’s late.” He banked his anger, knowing it was unreasonable. He hadn’t marked out this shed as off-limits, or forbidden her to enter, or said a word about what he was doing back here while she worked in the lab. Only twenty-four hours ago they were roommates trying to keep out of each other’s way. “I’ll close up,” he said, stepping away from the door to give her space to walk through. “You go ahead inside.”
“Did you really make this, Logan?”
His ribs tightened, dug deep. She didn’t budge from the chair. But he didn’t want to talk about this, especially not about the meadowlark in her hand. That had been among the first of his efforts. Polishing it had brought him hours of peaceful insensibility. His mentor, Curcio, would say that his focus and labors had imbued the wood with spirit, the kind that drew the attention of the attuned.
“Did you do all of these?” She gestured to the dozens of birds perched on the ledges that lined the shed. Bright yellow larks, tanagers perched for flight; a hawk stretched forward as if it eyed a mouse scurrying across the floor.
He crossed his arms. “Most.”
“They’re so full of life.” She ran a hand over the back of the meadowlark, petting the painted feathers. “This one looks like it might stand up in my hand and fly away.”
His palm itched to seize the carving and return it to its proper perch but he didn’t dare move. He felt more stripped bare than he had been all day.
“So this is why you take photos of birds.” She gestured to the prints hanging from a rope stretched across the back of the shed. “You catch them perched or in flight and then carve their likeness.”
“Sometimes.”
“You are a man of many talents, Logan.”
“It’s a hobby.”
He was being terse, but it was past time Jenny got the hint. She didn’t deserve his ire, but neither did he want to tell her why he spent hours carving feather-grooves in knots of wood, or sanding away the rough edges, or working with three-strand brushes to paint the feathers right. They were sex-buddies, right? They were supposed to spend every waking hour of the next week in a cycle of desire, sexual engagement, post-coital bliss, and sleep. Best to keep conversations light, and discover nothing deeper about one another than what physically roused them. Yet he knew his stubborn silence was speaking louder than words.
He picked his words like he was tweezing stitches out of a wound. “It’s an interest I picked up on my travels.”
“South America.”
“Brazil, specifically.”
She nodded. “For me it’s Sudoku. Crossword puzzles.”
“That’s for the mind. This—” he jerked his chin toward the shelves “—keeps my hands busy during down time.”
“More than that, I think.”
Don’t think, Jenny.But shewasthinking. He saw it in the way a little fan of lines deepened beside her left eye as she tilted her head. He’d seen that look before, caught it when he’d come down to her lab to find her contemplating the secrets of the universe, her gaze fixed on air. Her gaze wasn’t now fixed on air, or him, but he felt like the singular subject of her thinking anyway.
“As a kid,” she murmured, running a fingertip across the unpainted wing of a red-tailed hawk, “I took piano lessons for a while. I played music to—how did you put it?—to ‘keep my hands busy during down time.’ I was in boarding school at the time, and the work of my hands, and my mind, distracted me from other troubles. Like missing my grandmother. Or finding friends when my French was less than adequate.”
He shifted his stance, uneasy with the parallels.
“At the time, I was determined to be at least half as good as my father—he’d planned to be a concert pianist. But then I was born, so he turned to medicine.”
“Heck of a family you’ve got there.”
She dropped her head. “Unfortunately, I didn’t have my father’s talent.”
“You wouldn’t admit it, even if you did.”
“Probably not,” she conceded. “I could manage passable Tchaikovsky, but Beethoven became the bane of my young existence.” She gripped the edge of the stool between her legs, hunching her shoulders. “It was my first and most devastating failure.”
