Page 75 of Keepsake
“Sure.” Griff shoved a cookie in his mouth and picked up the platter. “Because they knew you’d bail me out.” He offered the plate to me.
I took a cookie. And then I made the coffee.
20
Lark
Ispentthe rest of the day with my parents. I got into the back seat of their car—feeling just like a little kid—and accompanied them to the Simon Pearce glassblowing factory, where we watched a handful of guys about my age make eighty-dollar wine goblets from blobs of glass so molten they glowed orange.
“That looks like fun,” I said aloud. The young men had a bevy of unusual tools at their disposal. And I hadn’t realized that glassblowing was a team sport. The hipsters passed each glass back and forth on the end of a six-foot-long metal tube. I wanted to climb over the little barrier and ask for lessons. It was a familiar itch I hadn’t felt in a long time—the urge to drop everything and try something new.
“Let’s have a cocktail at the bar,” my father said.
With a longing glance at the glassblowers, I followed him upstairs.
Ididn’t get backto the Shipley Farm until the hour when everyone in the bunkhouse would be getting ready for bed. Walking through the door of that stone building filled me with relief. This place was my refuge. Nobody asked me tough questions or gave me ultimatums.
Someone was in the shower, so I passed the bathroom and poked my head into the rear bunkroom. Zach was lying in bed already, reading a thick book with the help of a little book light clipped to its cover. “Hi,” I whispered.
He looked up and smiled at me. “Hi yourself.”
“Hi, Lark!” Kyle said from one of the upper bunks. “Did you come to give me a kiss goodnight?”
“Dream on, Shipley,” I said, crossing the room to Zach. I took the book out of his hands. “Come and visit with me. I haven’t seen you all day.”
“Is that what we’re calling it now?” Kyle asked.
I flipped him off on my way out.
The book I’d carried for Zach was the seventh and final Harry Potter novel. And he was almost finished with it. “Have you read this before?” I asked as I set it on my bed.
“Nope,” he said, perching on the edge. “I know it’s a kids’ book. I read other things, too.”
I gave him a smile as I kicked my door shut. “I know you do. And who cares?” I stripped my T-shirt over my head and then took off my bra. “Harry Potter is for everyone. Not just kids.” I grabbed the oversized BU shirt I liked to sleep in and dropped it over my head. “I have the first book on my phone, and it’s what I pull out when I don’t have anything else to read.”
“Is that right?” Zach followed my every movement with his eyes. So I gave him a peek at my thong as I stripped off my shorts. His cheeks pinked up, but he didn’t say a word.
I picked up the book again and handed it to him. “Make yourself comfortable. I’m going to brush my teeth.”
But he slung an arm around my waist and pulled me closer to him. “I missed you today.”
I kissed the top of his head. “Back at you, cutie.” Then I wiggled out of his embrace.
After I got my turn in the bathroom, I found Zach propped up against the headboard, his nose in his book. I walked around and got into bed. There was no lamp on my side, so reading beside him wasn’t going to work. But I was tired and didn’t care.
When I settled in next to him, he closed the book, letting it rest against his chest. “I don’t want the series to end.”
“Hear you.” I snuggled up, putting a hand on his chest. “Nobody ever does.”
“I read the first two at school when I was a kid. My fifth-grade teacher kept it on a shelf for me, because she knew I couldn’t take it home.”
“No?”
He shook his head. “We didn’t have books, except for the bible. And there was a book about the founder of our, um, church. But the rest were forbidden. Harry Potter would never have been allowed, because witchcraft is the work of the devil.”
“Yikes. Really?”
He nodded, his eyes dancing. “In fact, the Harry Potter craze was one of the things that made the elders decide to pull us all from the school district. Kids came home on the bus asking for all kinds of things they disapproved of. So after sixth grade I was homeschooled.” He used air quotes around the word. “That just meant free labor for the ranch after a couple hours of bible study in the morning. So it was eight or nine years before I could pick up the series again. J.K. Rowling was kind enough to finish writing it in the meantime.”
