Hey,
You don’t have anything to be embarrassed about. I’m grateful you let me stay in your room, putting yourself through a lot of trouble to do so. I know you’ve been sleeping at the manor for the last few days, but if you want you can have your room back and I’ll sleep on the couch. Also, I didn’t see many of your drawingswhen I was up there but what I saw was impressive. You don’t have to be embarrassed about those, either. I’m sorry again for snooping.
Anyway, I saw something you didn’t want me to see, so I’ll tell you about something that’s embarrassing for me, too. It’s only fair.
When I was fourteen, my mom and I stopped in at a diner in Lexington, Kentucky, right after she bought a lottery ticket. She put the ticket on the table between our plates, waiting until we were finished eating before scratching all the tiny Christmas trees off with a quarter. It was fun to pretend the ticket might land us a million dollars. We talked about what our dream home would look like. After we were done eating, she scratched the ticket and won six bucks, which she spent on two slices of apple pie.
We left the diner, never went back again, but for some reason I thought about it a lot. It cheered me up to remember sitting in that booth, hoping that the ticket to an amazing new life sat right in front of me, waiting to happen.
The first version of a café I’m always daydreaming about was based on that diner. I’ve remodeled it so many times since then, evolving the décor to suit whatever my tastes happen to be in the moment. I like to imagine all sorts of swoony romantic scenarios taking place there. The climax in every rom-com movie, basically, when the hero thinks he’s going to lose the girl and he professes his feelings with raw, desperate honesty. I daydream about fun banter, too, even mundane afternoons where all I’m doing is decorating donuts with colorful icing and sprinkles. But my favorite daydreams are those fast-paced ones where the stakes are high, when even I don’t know if the heroand heroine will get together because I get so carried away. Even though I’m the heroine in this fantasy, so I control it all.
This is something I’ve never told anybody, so now we’re even. But if you tell another soul about Maybell’s Coffee Shop AU, I will cut you.
—M
The front door closes right as I’m penning the last line. I glance at the window and there’s Wesley, taking to the woods. He skulks off into his self-made nature preserve every time the rain lets up, probably to escape all the fumes from our cleaning supplies. Or me. Probably me.
I could leave the note on the staircase for him to pick up when he returns, but my feet have other ideas. They decide they want to go on a walk, too.
Off I dash, waterlogged grass squelching under the oversized boots I saved from the dumpster. We’re teetering on the precipice of April, nearly ready to hop into May, the weather warming up. I lower the hood of my rain slicker, overhanging boughs catapulting raindrops from leaf to leaf.
He’s soundless, but the footprints give him away. They lead me to the trickle of water, a creek cutting through heavy green foliage. There are signs along the paths, wooden slabs nailed to tree trunks I was too distracted to notice the last time I was in the woods. Their edges are sharpened into pointing arrows, hand-painted with monikers likeI Spy Something Blue TrailandSay Goodbye to the Sky Lane.
The path he’s chosen,You Are Here, isn’t one I’ve explored before—my heightened fear of being mauled by bears hasprevented me from getting too adventurous—with an old stone bridge that I think used to be part of a road but is now overgrown with moss. I stop to remove my glasses, lenses steamed up with my breath from the exercise.
Wesley’s trail of footprints ends here.
I glance uneasily over the sides of the bridge. The water’s high from all the rain we’ve been getting, pouring swiftly between rocks, over dips, gurgling and eddying. He wouldn’t jump in, would he? The water’s too cold for swimming. Sunlight takes a while to reach the ground here, moist stones dappled with soft green, atmosphere cool and peaceful. Otherworldly. I peruse beds of fallen pine needles for a shoe-shaped disturbance but find nothing. It’s as if Wesley sauntered across this bridge and straight through an invisible portal. He’s in a medieval forest right now, taming a wild unicorn, and I’m standing here studying pine needles like they’re a Rorschach test.
A bird’s nearby trill jerks my head up. It’s a very helpful bird, giving away the location of another creature up in the branches, and if looks could kill it would be roasted on a plate with carrots and potatoes.
“Ahh. There you are.”
“No, I’m not.”
Wesley’s lounging in a white oak towering directly over me that’s got to be hundreds of years old, one of the thick, lichen-scaled boughs bending like a hammock to fit him perfectly. Its roots burrow into the bridge like clamping fingers, tendons, and bone. From my position on the ground he’s about eight feet up, watching me withOh, nowritten all over his face.
“There’s no escaping me,” I tell him. It comes out sounding disturbingly ominous.
He sighs. “I know. You’re inevitable.”
I don’t know quite what he means by that, but now that I’ve got him good and trapped I’m going to make him read my letter and restore the balance. “Here.” I wave the lilac paper. “This is for you.”
“What is it?”
“Oh, come on. It won’t bite.”
I reach up on tiptoe, he reaches down, and in that flicker of brief contact with both our hands on the paper, his eyes meet mine and something very like fear seizes them. But when he blinks, it’s gone.
The base of the tree has a springy cushion of moss around it, which I decide to plant myself down on while awaiting myI forgive you, you are thus absolved.
Suppressing the urge to stare at him with laser eyes while he reads is killing me, especially given that he’s reading about something private. My instinct is to distract him from this new information he’s likely going to use to make fun of me by chattering, lessening the impact, toning it down into nothing at all, just having a laugh. As if there are several levels at which one could process the letter, and if I can bring him down to the shallowest tier he’llknowit, but he’ll know itless. Which probably does not make sense.
I have to look.
He’s still reading, and wouldn’t you know it, he’s frowning. This isn’t one of his signature frowns, so I don’t know how to decipher it. I review my selection of modes, slamming the one that sayspanic.
Oh god! Why didn’t I share a less personal story? I’ve got loads of embarrassing stories in me, high-resolution reels that playbehind my eyes every time I lie down to sleep. I could have told him about the time I set off a firework upside down. Or the time I bought a hot dog at Chickamauga Lake and got attacked by a seagull. Or when I strangled myself with a dress that didn’t fit in a dressing room at Target and wore myself out trying to wrench myself free for close to an hour before another lady helped me pull the ripped dress over my head and, while doing so, commented that I wasn’t wearing the right underwear for that kind of dress.
