“Theo, I’m asking you to let me show off for you.”
He quieted, and his blush deepened. “Oh. Well, okay then. I’d love to see your art.”
“Thank you.” She took a sip of her coffee. “What do you do, anyway? Areyouan artist? Professionally, I mean.” She’d been dying to know for a few months now.
He tilted his head from side to side. “Yeah, normally I’m kind of an artist.”
“ ‘Kind of an artist’?” She raised an eyebrow. “You seem like you’re verydefinitelyan artist to me. Your work’s beautiful.”
He huffed. “Well, you haven’t actually seen it—not the real stuff. You’ve only seen scribbles, and not even the good ones at that. But thank you all the same.” Theo rubbed the back of his neck. She could see that it too had gone red from the front. His throat bobbed as he swallowed. “And okay, yes. I am—Iwas—an artist and a designer. Professionally. But I’m not sure I am anymore.”
“Why not?”
He raised his right hand. It shook as he held it in the air, and even resting his elbow on the table didn’t seem to help with the trembling. “Nerve and muscle damage.”
Oh.
That wasn’t from shyness like she’d thought, then.
He closed his eye and sighed before making a fist and hiding his hand in his lap, and she felt his despair sour in the pit of her own stomach. From what she could tell, he seemed devastated. “Sketching is mostly fine, watercolors are fine,” he murmured. “You don’t need to be precise for either of those. But my usual medium? It’s a no-go. It’d be really dangerous to try if my hands shook like they do right now.”
“What’s your usual medium?”
“Glass.”
They both grew quiet.
Audrey hadn’t expected that. Everything she knew aboutblowing glass did seem like it would be far too dangerous to do if you were recovering from the type of injuries Theo must have sustained. “Wow. Glass? So what are you—”
“I do physical therapy and my doctors’ appointments on Mondays, and—and the other kind of therapy on Wednesdays. It’s getting better, but…” He trailed off and shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m not really working right now. Mostly I’m just trying to piece myself back together, I guess. It’s—” Theo shook his head again. “No, never mind. I don’t really want to talk about it right now, if that’s all right. I’m sick of talking about it. It’s all I ever do.”
He withdrew. Audrey saw it happen in real time when he folded in on himself, quieted, hunched his shoulders. He tried to make himself smaller, less conspicuous, less noticeable.
That wouldn’t do at all.
“It’s okay with me if you want to talk about something else.” She reached out and rested her hand on the top of his left one like she’d done the day before, only now Theo seemed far less shocked about the contact. Though the way he eyed her hand suggested he still didn’t entirely trust any of this to be real.
“I’m really enjoying sitting here with you, Audrey.” He dipped his head apologetically and lowered his voice. “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you stuff like this, it’s just that I don’t—well, I want tokeepenjoying this. I’d rather just be with you here right now and not think about everything else.”
“I get it, don’t worry,” she whispered. “Just be with me, then.”
His gaze softened as he looked at her, and he drew in a slow, deep breath while he searched her face.
Audrey didn’t say anything. She only watched.
Everything about Theo was a puzzle: fragmented, scattered, broken, but just waiting to be pieced together. She wanted to lay him out on a table, all the scraps of him separate, and work out how best to make the picture of him whole. She wanted to know what theimage of him amounted to, all of him, every disparate, quiet bit of him as a fraction of an entirety.
But he was clearly broken into so many pieces. It would take so much time.
Good thing she loved puzzles.
She waited. And the longer she sat with him quietly, not saying anything, not demanding anything of him, the more he calmed. Theo stilled and he raised his trembling right hand again, turning his left one over and picking hers up, softly cradling it between both of his. His palms were truly massive; they dwarfed her own, drowning her hand in warmth, and that same warmth rose slowly up through her arm and spread all the way up into her neck, finally landing in her cheeks when he drew a calloused thumb across her life line.
The more he explored what was written there, tracing the lines of her palm like the grid on a globe, looking at her as though he were searching for how he might find who she was through where she’d been, the longer he held her and the longer he seemed to concentrate, the more the trembling subsided—at least slightly.
After a while, he blinked and drew in another slow breath. “Thank you,” he whispered. “I’m sorry if I’m a weirdo.”
She hummed and smiled softly. “I don’t mind weird. Josh calls me Audball for a reason, you know.”
