“Pillows and blankets galore,” he said. “You won’t freeze to death tonight, at least.”
Lucy was peering at him as if he had something on his face.
“What?” he demanded.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Lucy said, “but you look so bizarre without your glasses.”
He’d forgotten he’d taken them off in the bathroom when he’d brushed his teeth by flashlight. “Sorry. I’ll go and fetch them. I’m fully aware that my face looks best when covered.”
She pursed her lips and glared at him. “I meant you look good bizarre. Like really young.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “I knew I should have gone for the contact lenses instead.”
She picked up the sketchbook he’d left on the floor by the fireplace.
“Were you working tonight when I interrupted you with my, you know, crazy?”
“You weren’t crazy, you were upset. And no, just noodling,” he said.
“Noodling?”
“That’s a Davey word. Noodling instead of doodling. And my drawings were noodles. He was a funny kid.” It felt good to talk about Davey, just talk about him with someone who didn’t flinch or shy away when he mentioned him like so many other people did, as if grief were catching.
“He sounds like an amazing kid. Can I see your noodles?” she asked, grinning innocently.
He waved his hand to saybe my guest.
Lucy brushed her hands off on her shirt, which he found painfully endearing because she didn’t want to get so much as a smudge on his drawings. She opened the book to the first page. He’d drawn the full moon, craters and all. The circle of it took up the entire page. A pirate ship flying the Jolly Roger floated in the ocean in front of the moon, a corgi at the helm.
“Is there a pirate ship in Jack’s new book?”
“No idea,” Hugo said as he sat back on the pillow and propped his feet in front of the fire. “But I felt like drawing a pirate ship captained by a corgi floating in front of the full moon, so I did. And to think I once thought I was going to be a serious artist.”
“Thank God you didn’t,” she said. “I don’t know a single kid on the planet who has, I don’t know, Rembrandts on their walls, but I know a whole lot of kids who have your art hanging in their bedrooms.”
“Really?”
She pointed at herself without making eye contact. “The Princess of Clock Islandposter that came with the book? It hung over my bed for years.”
He groaned dramatically. “Thank you. Now I feel ancient.”
“You should be flattered.”
“Fine. Thank you. I’m very flattered.” And hewasflattered. Old, but flattered.
Lucy kept flipping through the book. “Very nice,” she said, eyeing an old drawing of a charcoal raven wearing a watercolor red hat.
“That’s Thurl, except with a hat.”
“It suits him,” she said. The next page was a pencil drawing of a clown holding his head on a balloon string. She turned another page, and her eyebrows shot straight up. She turned the sketchbook around and showed the drawing to Hugo. “Ahem.”
“I told you I’d draw you a picture of a Jack and Danny,” he said, grinning. Hugo knew he ought to be embarrassed, but sometimes an orchid was just an orchid. Then again, sometimes an orchid was—
“It looks like a vulva,” Lucy said.
“That’s an orchid from Jack’s greenhouse. Second, blame Georgia O’Keeffe, not me. She started it.”
She merely shook her head as she turned page after page. “These are amazing,” she said. Hugo’s chest tightened. Like any artist, he was a sucker for flattery, but it was more than that. Lucy seemed so happy losing herself in his sketchbook, smiling or laughing at every page. He’d forgotten how good it felt to be the reason behind the smile on a pretty girl’s face.
