“This is my library?” said Sylvie. “This is for me?”
The bed of a couch, the books, and Simon kissing her again…It felt as if her new world were a great sun, bright but too hot. Simon: his warmth, his smell of woodsmoke and soap. She wanted all of this—so much—but she felt herself leaving.
“Sylvie?” said Simon.
He knew, of course he knew. From above her body, she watched her body and thought,That person is very lucky.
“Sylvie?” asked Simon.
“I need to sleep.”
Simon took her by the hand and led her into a sunny bedroom that did not look unlike the Escape Room in her mind. She got into the bed and he lay beside her, curled around her, in the cool space.
So this was love.
PART FIVE
WHAT I DID FOR LOVE
1
Cleo
The sun over the Eskdale Valley painted the fells in lemony light. In front of Cleo, a magnificent goshawk was perched on the glove of a ruddy-faced man named Angus. The bird was enormous and terrifying, able to tear apart its prey with its razor-sharp feet and beak, according to Angus. “She loves hare and grouse,” Angus explained, “but she’ll eat anything she can get in her mouth, really. She could eat my face if she wanted to.”
There was an uncomfortable murmur amongst the attendees who had risen early to attend the lecture titled “Large Birds of Prey: Meet Barbara the Goshawk.” After flaky and delectable black currant scones in the barnyard coffee shop, Cleo’s sisters had headed back to their rooms, but Cleo didn’t want to deal with Danny. Instead, she headed to the aviary to learn about birds.
Isaac would be impressed. He loved wandering around Central Park with his ridiculously dorky binoculars trying to spot an owl or a falcon, but happy to see a chickadee. Cleo met Isaac in the park with bagels sometimes but departed when he went on and on about avian topics. Now, she tried to pay attention.
“Right now, Barbara’s all dressed up. As you can see, she’s gotleather anklets with jesses, which are like tiny leashes,” explained Angus, pointing to the bird’s talons. Angus was cute, thought Cleo, with his long mullet hairdo and tight-fitting jeans. Danny had originally had the same outdoorsy appeal as Angus, but then he had stopped…spending time outdoors.
“Babs’s got her bells on. When she flies off, her job is to take a pheasant down, and if she does so, we’ll need to find her. Hence, Babs’s bells.” He looked at his audience, smirking at his joke. The three other attendees to his lecture seemed extremely serious, nodding intently. Cleo laughed, finding Angus’s clear love of his bird enchanting.
“I’ve got my gauntlet here—that’s my glove so she doesn’t tear up my arm—and Babs is wearing her leather chaps, so animals like pesky squirrels don’t tear her up. I’ll remove her tail guard, but we’ll keep her cloth hood on.”
“Is that hood cinched around her neck?” said a woman with an American accent. “Seems cruel to me!”
“Yes, we keep it on so Babs won’t get overstimulated. The nerve pathways from her eyes and ears go to the motor neurons that control her muscles with much less rational thinking than we have. Babs here reacts so fast, she can’t consider whether she’s making the right move. She needs a break from herself, hence the hood.”
The American woman seemed somewhat appeased. Cleo thought about sensory deprivation tanks that she had read about onElite Daily. Maybe that was what she needed in her life: a hood once in a while, a break from herself.
“So I’ll remove her hood—it’s about time to let her find some breakfast,” said Angus.
Cleo felt a quickening in her chest, excited to see the powerful bird in action. “Wait a minute,” said the American woman, furrowing her brow. “What if she doesn’t come back?”
“Babs loves him,” said a boy at her side. “She’ll come back!”
“Has nothing to do with love,” said Angus. “Might seem thatway, but that’s wrong. I feed and protect her. Keep her hungry so she’ll return to eat. We weigh her every day. If she’s too fat and happy, we don’t let her fly. Wait til she’s hungry again.”
Cleo sighed, realizing that her relationship with Danny was about two hungry people returning to each other for meager sustenance. Who could Danny be if he felt satiated? And for that matter, what would Cleo dream of if she didn’t have to think of Danny and his problems? If she had a partner who took care of himself, had his own interests and work that had nothing to do with her?
Someone like…Isaac.
“Let a hawk fly when she was above weight,” said Angus. “Only once.”
“What happened?” asked Cleo.
“What do you think?” said Angus. “That bird never came back.”
