“Right.”
She shifted next to him, and her arm brushed against his. Pretty soon, he wouldn’t be able to see her expression—nor she his—and that might be a good thing.
“I’m guessing you were thinking about your ex. What was her name?”
“Marcie. With ani-e.” He suspected she’d appreciate that detail, being a writer and all. Unless she was the type of writer who couldn’t spell.
“With ani-e.” She sounded pleased with that information for some reason. “For a short time, I was Teddy with just ani. I never tried thei-eversion, because I figured the singulariwas enough to make my point. My parents had messed up my life by giving me a boy’s name, so I rebelled by trying to make it more feminine. I even put a little heart for the dot of theiwhen I was in middle school—I’ll bet your Marcie did that. Most girly-girls did, and I’m guessing your Marcie is a girly-girl.”
Oscar blinked. He tried to keep up with her—he really did—but there was just so much there…and yet her speech was entertaining, in a strange popcorn-like way. “A girly-girl? What makes you say that?”
She made a noise that sounded like a giggle-scoff. “You seem like the type to go for a girly-girl, that’s all. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—I know lots of girly-girls, and some of them are my closest friends. I don’t really consider myself one because…well, because I hardly ever do my hair or put on makeup because I rarely see people with my job. I live in yoga pants and tanks, with heavy sweaters in the winter. And I definitely don’t get my nails done—can’t type worth crap with long fingernails.” She let her head tip back against the wall. He suspected the mention of typing made her think about her unfinished book.
However, Oscar had managed to pull one bit of information from that long thread. “Your real name is Teddy, not Theodora or anything like that?”
“It sure is. I considered changing my legal name to Theodora at one point, but in the end, it didn’t really matter. I would always be Teddy. With ay.” She rolled her head along the glass wall to look at him.
It was still light enough for him to see her smile, and to make out the shape of her eyes in the shadows, and the way her brows rose to emphasize her words.
“You don’t need makeup or fingernails,” he heard himself say.What the hell?“I mean, you look fine. I mean, pretty. More than just fine.”Oh, bloody hell. Shut up, Oscar.
“Why, thank you,” she said, her smile growing bigger. And warmer. He swallowed hard. “That’s very sweet. So, since we’re stuck up here for the foreseeable future, why don’t you tell me about Marcie? Since you were giving such a hopeless sigh about her only a few minutes ago. I’m guessing a hopeless sigh means you’re still in love with her and harboring the thought that something might actually happen so she doesn’t get married, and instead comes running back to you.”
Uh.Wow.
Oscar blinked again, but before he could figure out how to respond, she was talking again, “I’m a storyteller, Dr. London—I’m always filling in the details of backstory and subtext. Yours is pretty obvious, though.”
“Right.” Good Lord, was he really going to be stuck up here all night with her?
At least the sky was cloudless. If a lightning storm threatened, they’d be cooked geese.
But even with clear skies, he didn’t want to stay up here. They needed to figure out a way down. And he still didn’t understand how that door had blown closed—and gotten stuck. It just didn’t make any sense.
He drew in a breath to say so, but then, to his shock, he began to talk. About Marcie.
“She’s a fourth-grade teacher back in a little town near Princeton,” he said, lifting the field glasses as he spoke. There was a white forty-footer out there, with green and blue accents. It was trundling along kind of slowly. Maybe they could get the attention of whoever was on it. He pulled to his feet. “Let’s try and wave at that boat—it looks like it’s stopping out there.”
Teddy rose and began to wave her arms, shouting. Unfortunately, she was bellowing into the wind coming off the lake, and it just tossed the noise back onto them. Oscar kept the glasses trained on the boat, which had stopped and seemed to have thrown down an anchor.
“How far away do you think they are? Can you see anyone on it?” Teddy asked, apparently realizing that shouting wasn’t going to help.
“No more than a half-mile. If they look over here, they might see us. Kind of late to be fishing, though…”
“Well, why wouldn’t they look over here? It’s a lighthouse! Who doesn’t want to look at a lighthouse?”
“But even if they see us, they’ll probably just think we’re waving to them.” He was just about to lower the glasses when something caught his attention. “There are two people on the deck… What’s that? They’re—”
“What? Did they see us?”
“No,” he replied, still watching the activity on the boat. “Looks like they’re tossing something overboard.”
“What?” Teddy’s shriek was a little too close to his ear. “What is it? Ohmigod, I bet it’s abody!”
Before he could react, she was grabbing at the binoculars. He didn’t have the chance to disengage from the neck strap before she was holding them up to her face. In an effort to avoid being strangled, he moved closer. This placed her back against him, and for a minute he was distracted from whatever was going on out on the lake. Her hair smelled really good, and the back of her calf brushed against his. It was warm and smooth, and made the hairs on his leg prickle with awareness.
“It’s not a body,” he said, and snatched back the binoculars in a moment of self-defense—against strangulation, her proximity, and her crazy writer ideas. “It wasn’t big enough to be a body.”
“Well, how big was it? Maybe the body was cut up into pieces and they’re dropping parts of it all over—”
