“My clothes smell like you now. The scent is the same—roses.” He moved my wrist to his mouth, placing a soft, warm kiss on my radial artery, over the frantic pulse there.
“This one smells like you,” I said, inhaling without thought.
“My intention. I want you to smell like me, Ballerina Girl.”
We fell silent to our own thoughts for some time, the sound of birds chirping and our shoes crunching against fallen leaves the only noises. I had noticed as we ventured around the property that he had a good sense of where we were.
“You’ve been here before?” I pulled him in a different direction, a direction that led to a path, which led us to another special place I loved to go.
“Yeah. With Elliott, your father, and your grandfather.”
I stopped, but he tugged me forward and we continued on.
“You knew my grandfather?”
He gave me a sideways glance, the look on his face indiscernible. “I’ve been around for some time. Longer than you.” He grinned at that.
“Did you hunt when you came?”
“No, we fished the lake.”
“Good,” I said with more passion than I had intended.
“Good?” He copied the word but not the tone. He just sounded curious.
“I don’t condone the killing of deer.” I held my free hand up. “Before you start, I know,I know, we have to kill to eat.God gave us those animals to nourish us.It’s not a sin if we only kill what we need and eat all of it afterwards.But I’m partial to deer. They have especially beautiful eyes.”
“Fish eyes. How do those register on a scale from no to all right?”
I shrugged, and then grinned when I realized we were swinging our hands back and forth. “I’m not partial to those. A bit buggy, in my opinion.”
“Good. I like to fish.”
Call me a fish then.
“Elliott used to call me Seven. A lucky number, he used to say, just like me. If fish exist, they’ll come to me.”
He said this without a hint of humor, and his serious tone made me laugh. The sound of it in such a vast space seemed to echo. I had always been told that, for a quiet person, I had a loud laugh. I was inclined to agree in that moment.
All of a sudden he grinned.
“What?” I asked, bumping him slightly. “You’re not the type of person to grin for no reason. Tell me.”
He nodded, the grin still in place. “You have no remorse for fish because you eat a lot of fish.”
My mouth opened and closed. How the hell did he know that?
“When it comes to mine,” he said, seeming to read my mind, “—that means you—I know.”
“It seems you do,” I said, my voice as tender as the sigh that came afterwards. “Did you have fun? When you came here with Elliott?”
“Yeah. No matter what we did, we had fun. But we mostly stayed around the cabins. We didn’t venture this far in. Actually. Those glasses you had on when I picked you up from school. Elliott’s? Yeah. I bought them for him, before we came here. I bought myself a pair too. We thought we were cool men, fishing with our Ray-Bans on. You were meant to have them.”
“I love them.” My voice came out in a hushed tone.
We continued forward in silence again. It was easy to do here. My thoughts were on him and just how much time he had spent with Elliott—times that I had missed.
Occasionally, his eyes would find my face. I could feel the warmth of them when they did, but for some reason I didn’t want to meet his stare. I didn’t like when he thought too much about me, or me and him together. His heart seemed committed to whatever this was between us. His mind, not so much. It felt too much like a tug of war.
