“You ready?” I ask.
He nods. “When you are.”
I reach him and stop, stretching up on my tiptoes to lay a kiss on his chin. “I’m always ready to be with you.”
His breath catches. “You make a man hope,” he mutters. “You dangerous thing.”
“It’s only fair,” I counter. “Since you make a woman hope, too.”
We stand there together, hoping, until a car rattles past and Fox shifts. “Let’s go home,” he murmurs, opening the door for me to climb across. I do, settling into the middle seat so that he can wrap his arm around me for the short drive.
Under his arm, cozy against his side, and full of hope for a life where I’m wanted so badly that three minutes away is too far a distance, I beam.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
?
To live is to… love?
Fox
A man’s bedroom is a sacred space. A haven where he can be fully himself, free from the threat of judgment or scorn. He should be allowed his pale pink walls, his lemon-yellow comforter, and his mossy green rug without wondering what others might think of them. He should likewise be unconcerned about the several dozen pictures lining the walls depicting family and friends in frames of varying shapes, sizes, and colors. He shouldnothave to worry about what it looks like to others or the chances that it would be perceived negatively by the love of his life on a warm summer’s eve.
Nerves skitter across my skin, and I clasp my hands together tightly behind my back in an attempt at reining them in. Iwill notpick Poem up, drop her in the hallway, and close the door in her face. I will be a big boy and let her do her snooping without interference, as promised, even if it does make me want to hide, throw up, flee the country, and offer to change literally every single detail about not only the room but also myself in order to better appeal to her. In any order.
She digs through my dresser, humming a merry tune while I stand perfectly still on my mossy rug. She might as well be digging through my heart.
“I’m stealing this,” she informs me, lifting a Blackwood Brew shirt so old it still boasts the original logo from forty years agoinstead of the modern one my parents switched to when Wolfe and I turned twenty-one.
“It has some holes that are hard to see when it’s not on,” I manage to tell her with my throat closed up and my skin on fire. “If you care about that.”
“I don’t,” she replies happily, hugging the shirt to her chest. “It’s soft, and it smells like the you that’s beneath all of your shampoo scents. Laundry soap and something else. Man, the books would call it.” She nods. “And they’d be right. Much man.Very, even.”
My hands loosen their death grip on each other. She has seen my pink walls, and she has called meveryman despite them.
She abandons her perusal of my dresser, carrying the shirt with her as she moves on to other heart-pounding areas of my room.
“Your bed isn’t as big as I expected it to be,” she notes, bending to examine a stuffed crow named Erie tucked amongst my pillows. She glances at my arms, then back to Erie. “Are your feathers crow feathers?”
I nod, swallowing the lump in my throat. “Crows represent transformation,” I reply. “And wisdom. I saw a flock of them—a murder—in a crappy motel parking lot right before I made the decision to come home. When I’d packed up to leave, they flew with me for the initial leg of my ride.” I tip my chin to Erie. “Then I found her at the first gas station I stopped at. The crows had been with me up until then, guiding me into the next part of my life, but when I walked out with her, they were gone. I got back and pretty much immediately talked to Wolfe about my wings.”
Her gaze lingers on my biceps.
“Have you seen them recently?” I ask. “We only have a few more feathers to shade, then they’ll be done.”
“I’ve noticed the shading,” she replies as I bring my hands to my front, reminding myself that freeing up my grip doesnotmean that I can use it to shove her out of my space to avoid further judgment, whether good or bad.
I twist my arm, giving us both a better view of the wing coming down it. “He’s done even better than I could have imagined. I couldn’t believe the level of detail in the first feather he completed. I probably stared at it for hours after he was done.” I definitely stared at it for hours. My brother is a genius with ink.
“Can I look?” she asks, taking a hesitant step forward.
In answer, I reach behind my head to pull my shirt off, then turn so that my back is to her. “Look as much as you like,” I reply, fisting my shirt in my hand. If she’s looking at me, she’s not looking at my room, and I already know she likes what she sees when she looks atme. Nevermind that my face warms when she not only takes me up on my offer to peruse my body, but decides totouchas well.
Her fingers glide over my shoulder blade, then down, grazing my bicep and forearm. My heart stutters when she lays a kiss over a feather on my arm.
“I’ve heard that transformation was needed,” she says, nosing another feather. “But I find it hard to believe the stories I’ve heard about younger you. I just can’t picture you being that wild.”
I puff. “I wouldn’t say I was that wild, really. I rode my bike around the country, which sounds adventurous, but it was mostly me on the road, stopping occasionally to convince some bar or other to let me pick up a shift so I could afford gas and a place to sleep that night. The reality is that most of my days were spent alone and on the move, running from things I didn’t need to run from.” I roll my eyes. “Oh no, poor Fox, he has the perfect parents and the perfect siblings and a job all lined up for him if he wants it. How sad. How tragic. Of course he’d need to spendyearsof his life abandoning his family and missing out onimportant events so that he could ruminate on the terrors of his fate while going eighty miles-per-hour down the interstate on a death machine.”
