Chapter Eleven
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG to show Caroline how to buff out the light scratch on the tank that she said she accidentally did with the zip of her jacket. I loved watching her learn something new like this, because her focus was so intense, and direct, that she forgot all of the fears and anxieties that usually plagued her, and just worked on the problem. She had a pretty fierce analytical mind, and having something to busy her brain seemed to relax her.
“So you design websites and stuff?” I asked idly as she was polishing over the now pristine paint. She nodded, keeping her eyes on the task.
“Yep. It’s fun, and keeps people away. I like that part. Architecture meant meetings and site visits, and that was too much for me.” She was an architect?
“You design buildings?”
Her head lifted, and those highly intelligent brown eyes fixed on mine.
“I was learning. I guess… I really enjoyed the design side, and the visual side of it, because I can’t picture things in my head, but I had to keep being around people and that was… difficult.”
“You can’t picture things?” I wasn’t sure what she meant by that, because surely a job like that was literally about picturing what she wanted to design.
“Not like an image in my head no. I can know what I want to design, and how it should be laid out and put together, and I can draw it, but I can’t actuallyseeit in my mind. It’s just black.”
I scratched my jaw as she carefully folded my polishing rag and passed it to me.
“Most people see more than that?”
“If you read a book, can you see the characters in your head? Can you see the scenes playing out?”
“Yeah, kinda. I guess. Like if it’s a blonde woman in a red dress, yeah, I could picture that.”
“I can’t,” she said simply, standing up and tucking her hands in her jeans pockets.
Huh. I guess it’d never occurred to me that everyone couldn’t do that. I don’t think I’d really thought about it at all. I could do it, so I assumed we all could. But wasn’t that true about so many things in life, and how we just blithely overlooked that they were only easy for us?
“Do you regret that you can’t do it?” I asked, as I carried the polishing kit back to the cupboard and packed it neatly away.
“I regret a lot of things,” she said quietly, “like the fact that right now is so easy, but if you put me in a situation like a simple coffee shop, suddenly I’m like a child out of her depth.”
I closed the cabinet, and joined her beside her ride again.
“I definitely don’t see you as a child, and I don’t think you’re out of your depth. I think you’re just treading new waters. Actually, that doesn’t make sense. I was trying to go for a swimming metaphor, but… I guess I mean that-”
“No, actually it kind of does. I think… I want to be braver, I just don’t know how.”
I reached out and took her hands, pointedly nodding my head at them.
“You don’t mind me touching you, and that seems like a pretty big deal to me.”
Her fingers twitched in mine, and I lifted my head to see her staring at them instead.
“It feels easy, but if you said let’s hold hands, I’d probably get in my head about it. I should go. I’ve taken up so much of your time today.” Her head lifted, but her eyes were still on her fingers.
“That’s not how I see it,” I said matter-of-factly. I led her back into the shop and pointed at the bathroom, noting that Rocket was staying firmly behind his counter this time.
“You wanna wash up before you go?”
Caroline nodded, and disappeared in there, the door pushed halfway closed, as I popped over to nose around at Rocket’s area.
He had some pictures out on the counter, presumably of the custom job he was working on, which was something for himself, since he didn’t have any jobs booked in yet. His work was fucking amazing. Detailed, but flawlessly elegant, and flowing like it was real. There were flames, and among the flames were faces, but I didn’t know if those were based on people he knew or not.
“Like it?” He asked, as he stepped out from his covered area and lifted his mask off.
“It’s incredible. This is for you?”
