by Linda Kage
A little pocket of warmth grew inside me at her words. She knew I was by no means a carpenter in any sense of the word, but she still let her brother believe I could actually make these shelves with no trouble. The urge to touch her—just a simple touch, maybe on the arm, to show my gratitude—mounted.
Ah, shit. Yep, I was definitely into her, as into her as a guy could get. This was bad. This was so bad.
Fortunately, she pointed to the wall, tearing my attention from my doomed fate. “How close to the window are you going to make the shelves?”
I glanced over, taking in the space before answering, “As close as you want me to get.”
She beamed, not a full smile, but something warm and pleased enough to slice through me with greediness, wanting more of it, craving her pleasure like a plant thirsty for water and sunshine.
“Not too close,” she said. “I don’t want to block out any more light than necessary. It’s already dark enough in here as it is.”
“Actually…” I lifted a finger, glad she’d mentioned the lighting. “I was thinking we could maybe lighten the walls and add some drop-down lamps or something to help with that.”
Isobel glanced around the room, her eyes wide as she considered my idea. After a moment, she nodded. “Yeah,” she said slowly. “Yes, I think that will work well.”
Again, I glowed from the inside, soaking in her good mood.
“Sounds like you two are going to overhaul the entire room,” Ezra put in.
“Well, it needs it,” Isobel told him.
I nodded. “Libraries should be bright, wonderful spaces since they hold so many bright, wonderful worlds and adventures.”
After a startled blink, Isobel sent me a soft smile. “Exactly.”
And yep, I blossomed under her radiant stare. My chest expanded with air, making me feel like a helium balloon, and I swear I would’ve floated right off the floor if my feet hadn’t been tethering me down.
“Hmm,” her brother murmured, glancing speculatively between the two of us. “Well, I best get to my meeting with Dad.” He clasped his hands together and took a step in reverse as if he felt like three of us were too many for the moment and he was the odd man out.
Isobel swung to him, flushing as if she’d been caught doing something wrong. “Is your coworker still giving you trouble?”
Ezra shuddered, and an expression of absolute disgust cloaked his face. “You mean the wicked witch?” His tone turning snide and stiff, he rolled his eyes insolently. “That woman lives to make my life a living hell. I swear she tries to nix every goddamn thing I suggest. I have to fight tooth and nail to get anything. It’s completely ridiculous. And uncalled for.”
Isobel sent me a cringe as if she regretted asking before saying to her brother, “I’ll take that as a yes.”
“And yet yes is so mild an answer for the indigestion that woman gives me.” His face started to turn red as if merely mentioning her made his blood pressure rise unnaturally.
“Maybe you should talk to Dad about it,” Isobel suggested. “I bet he’ll have some good suggestions on how to deal with her.”
“If it’s not how to hide a body, then it’s not going to be a good enough suggestion,” Ezra mumbled moodily even as he bent to press a kiss to the good side of Isobel’s cheek. But his lips barely grazed her skin before he straightened in surprise. “Hey.” His gaze shot to me, then returned to her. “You have your hair pulled up.”
Isobel flushed and sent me a quick, guilty glance before tucking a stray piece that had come undone from her ponytail behind her ear. Then she shifted to the side, hiding her scars from us. “Yeah. So?”
“So…” Ezra drawled. “You always keep it down and covering your…your face.”
The urge to step in and defend her was strong. Except her brother had done nothing whatsoever to attack. He’d just made her uncomfortable by so boldly pointing out she wasn’t hiding her scars. And I didn’t like her being uncomfortable.
“He’s just staff,” she muttered defensively, making me feel less than human, as if being part of the staff made me a nobody. Staff didn’t have thoughts or feelings or a brain. Staff didn’t count.
Ezra glanced toward me as if he could smell the insult oozing off me. With a small clearing of his throat, he announced, “All right then. I’m going to go talk to Dad now,” and he booked it out of there.
Isobel remained frozen, purposely avoiding looking in my direction. So I turned away to set up the ladder by the wall. Then I found the tape measure on the table and grabbed it before climbing. Once I reached the ceiling, I blindly lifted the tape measure toward the wall, not recording a damn inch.
“So, that was your brother, huh?”
“Yes.” She sounded distant and stiff as if she’d been the one who’d just been insulted. Or maybe she felt guilty for hurting my feelings and didn’t know how to apologize. I had no idea.
I nodded, grinding my teeth. “He seemed nice.”
“He is.”
Okay, I guess the one and two word answers meant she didn’t feel like talking to the staff. Message received.
But then she said, “He just got a job in the fashion industry this last year.”
I turned to her, surprised she’d voluntarily offered information to me. “Oh yeah?” I asked, more interested in the fact she was finally talking to me, opening up—about her brother, but still…opening up.
She nodded, rigidly, as if this talking rationally stuff was all too new and foreign to her. “Yeah. My dad did this merger with a clothing company that was struggling and instead of selling it off again, he decided to put Ezra in charge of the half he’d bought to, you know, give him some life experience on how to administrate and run a real company.”
“And he’s doing okay with it?” I asked, eager to hear more of her voice in that tone. When she wasn’t mad, or condescending, or bitter, she sounded softer. Feminine. Sweet.
Captivated, I watched her face as she shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. Dad seems pleased anyway. I mean, he—Ezra—struggles a lot to get along with the co-CEO of the original half of the company. I guess she’s a real witch. But I can still tell he gets a thrill out of the rest of his job. He likes it, and I think it suits him.”
I smiled. “Well, good. That’s pretty cool.” Then a thought struck me. “Did you ever want to be a CEO or run a multimillion-dollar company?”
“Me?” Her lips parted and lashes fluttered for a second before she jerked her head back and forth. “N-no. Not at all. That was never my dream.”
“What was your dream then?”
Shadows and ghosts filled her eyes, haunting her. Panicking because I’d put them there, I revised my question. “When you were five,” I blurted. “What did you want to be when you were five?” Then I grinned and laughed at myself. “I wanted to be a mailman. Nothing gave me a bigger thrill than mail time. Mom always let me open the junk mail advertisements, and I’d pretend all day they were important documents that needed to be archived and organized.”
Isobel gazed at me a moment before saying, “I was pretty typical for a five-year-old, I think. I wanted to be a princess.”
I grinned at the idea of her running around in a dress full of tulle, a tiara and maybe a magic wand. She was probably the cutest little five-year-old princess ever.
“And when you were fifteen?” I asked.
“Fifteen?” she asked, lifting her eyebrows before drawing in a breath and thinking. Then she said, “I wanted to be a professional reader.”
That one made me laugh, before nodding my approval. “I like it.” Then a thought struck. “Do you now? Write reviews for all the books you read, I mean?”
She shrugged. “Not really. Nothing in a professional capacity, anyway.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know why that depressed me. It just…it was sad that none of her dreams had come true, and on top of that, she’d been hit with the fire, and her mom’s death. How many other things had she missed out on doing? How many things was she avoiding
because of her insecurities?
“How old were you when your mom died?”
Holy shit, where the hell had that question vomited from? I hadn’t even really been thinking about it. It had seriously just popped out without any kind of prompting from my rational brain.
Isobel froze for a second before slowly saying, “I was seventeen.”
A knot formed in my throat. What an awful age for a girl to lose her mother. About to finish high school and move on to adulthood. Everything in her life was already changing; she probably needed her mother most then, to help guide and advise her.
“So, you’re twenty-five now?”
That question seemed to throw her. It boggled my mind too. I had no idea why I’d asked it, probably to help drag sad memories away. But she nodded.
I nodded too before mumbling, “I’m twenty-eight.”
“Oh,” she said.
She didn’t seem to know what to do with that information, and I had no idea why I’d offered it. Feeling like a moron, I rushed to add, “I was three when my dad died.”
She blinked. “Oh, I…” Her hand slowly moved to the base of her throat. “I didn’t know.”
I shrugged. “It was a car accident on his way home from work. His fault, so we had to help the insurance company pay a bunch of others who were injured that day. I guess we weren’t that bad off—financially, anyway—until then. Not that I remember. I don’t remember what our life was like before that…or anything about my dad.”
“What do you think is worse,” she murmured, watching me thoughtfully. “Having gotten to know your parent and missing her terribly after she’s gone, or never remembering him at all, and always feeling like this huge hole of nothing is stuck in the middle of you?”
I stared at her, shocked. She’d just nailed what I’d always felt. I’d never mourned for my father properly because I hadn’t remembered him the way my older siblings had. They’d always told me how lucky I’d been, that I didn’t have to hurt as much as they did, but I’d still felt something. An ache I couldn’t describe.
But the way she just said huge hole of nothing had labeled it perfectly. I had suffered, just as my siblings had, except in a different way.
“I don’t know,” I murmured. “They both kind of suck.”
“Yeah,” she agreed slowly. “They do.”
Silence fell between us, but a good silence, a bonding kind of silence where for once we seemed to understand another soul and that other soul understood us in return.
“I usually start running at five every morning,” Isobel said.
I jerked my attention to her. My heart began to hammer. “Five?”
She gave a single, abrupt nod, refusing to look my way.
Hope—hope like I’d never felt before—exploded inside me. “I’ll be here.”
chapter
NINE
It was early. It was way too fucking early for me.
I’d left the house at three thirty to get here by five, and I felt dead on my feet. After spending most of the weekend taking care of my mom, who’d caught the flu, reading up on carpentry, and finishing Brisingr, I’d already gotten to bed late on both Saturday and Sunday nights, but waking up at three in the fucking morning was what was going to lay me flat.
When I reached the gate at the end of the drive, I almost wept, ready to curl up on the ground and sleep for a couple decades. Except I’d told Isobel I’d run with her this morning.
Run.
Right.
I could barely make my feet keep walking.
Since about my third trip to Porter Hall, I’d stopped ringing the intercom at the gate to ask for permission to enter. There wasn’t a fence around the property; it seemed bothersome and time-consuming to call someone to open the gate when I could just walk around it. And since I was beginning to feel as if I was actually welcome here, I walked around it now and trudged up the long lane.
I wore sweats and running shoes instead of my usual blue jeans and work boots, but I’d tucked my work clothes away in the book bag I carried as well as a change of T-shirts.
The sun hadn’t risen yet, but it was thinking about it. Shapes and shadows were beginning to become distinct. When I reached the end of the drive, I could make out someone there, stretching and pulling her leg back so far that her toe was nearly touching the center of her spine.
“Isobel?” I asked, just to make certain it was her.
She yelped and dropped her foot, before gasping. “Oh. You’re here.” Then she glanced around me. “Wait, did you walk?”
“Yeah.” I approached her, suddenly not so tired anymore. “Have you been waiting long? I’m not late, am I?”
“No…no. You’re five minutes early, actually.” I swear I heard embarrassment in her voice before she cleared her throat. “I decided to meet you out here in case you didn’t know how to get to the running trail.”
“Oh,” I said before laughing. “You’re right. I would’ve had no idea how to get back there.”
She nodded. “Then follow me.”
I did. We walked behind the house and under a couple large trees, past a few outbuildings and onto a narrow gravel path lined with trees. But she continued to walk, so I figured we hadn’t reached the “trail” yet. I hadn’t seen the lake she’d mentioned either.
Crickets chirped around us, an owl hooted overhead, and gravel crunched under our feet. For as warm as the days were, it was still chilly this early in the day. I swiped my hands up and down my arms, wishing for about the fiftieth time in the past hour and a half since I left home that I’d brought a jacket with me. Isobel was smart; she wore a long-sleeved running hoodie.
“How far do you walk to get here every day?” she asked, breaking the silence.
I shrugged. “Oh…not that far.”
“Couldn’t be that close,” she argued. “Most of the houses out here, for a good five-mile stretch, belong to the…”
Rich, she didn’t finish.
“I live near Pestle.” Pestle had been the name of the shoe factory I’d worked at that had gone out of business. But it had been well-known enough for people to still call that part of town Pestle.
She made an audible gasp. “But that’s in the middle of town. God almighty, Shaw, you must walk over an hour just to get here every day.”
“Barely over an hour,” I said, as my body clanged out of control over the fact she’d used my first name for the first time. I liked how she said Shaw. It sounded good on her tongue, coming from her mouth. Sweet. Genuine. Intimate.
Isobel stopped walking and turned to face me. “Why in the world would you want to run after walking over an hour to get here?”
I faltered, not sure how to answer that without lying or giving away the truth. “I just…yeah. I don’t know.”
A spot started to itch directly behind my ear. I ripped off my hat to scratch it, then slammed the hat back on, feeling even more exposed by Isobel’s penetrating stare. So I cleared my throat and started walking up the path without her.
“I checked out all these books from the library this weekend about building bookcases, but the most useful tips I found were actually on Pinterest. And what do you think of this…a hidden passage bookshelf door?”
When she didn’t answer soon enough, I rushed to argue my point, because seriously, nothing on earth could be cooler than a hidden passage bookshelf door. Right? “I don’t know where that doorway on the south wall in the library leads, but that would be an awesome place to put a bookshelf door. Don’t you think?”
“I…” Catching up to me, Isobel shook her head. “Yeah. Sure. That would be okay.”
My abrupt change in subject might’ve thrown her or she just wasn’t as enthused about the idea as I was, but her indifferent answer made me rush to add, “Of course, we don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”
“No, I do. The idea sounds fun.”
“But…?” I pressed, my stomach churning with unease. It was pathetic how much I wanted her to love all
my ideas.
She merely shook her head. “No buts. I like the idea. I’m just worried about how difficult it’s going to be for you to make.”
“Ugh. That’s the last thing you should even think about. The how is for me to worry about, and besides,” I threw her what I hoped was a contagious grin, “the bigger the challenge the better the adventure, right?”
I shrugged off my backpack and dropped it to the ground, then flipped my ball cap around so I was wearing it backward, before I started to jog. We’d just reached the edge of the lake, and this looked like the point where I had to guess she began her morning run.
“Hey,” she called after me, cupping her hands around her mouth. “You’re going counterclockwise. I always run clockwise around the lake.”
I laughed and turned to run backwards so I could face her while I kept going. “Adjust to change, Isobel. Adjust to change.”
She grumbled something I couldn’t hear, then she hurried to catch up with me. Grinning, I turned to watch where I was going, though it was still too dark to see all that much. The sky was beginning to change colors. Orange, yellow and pinks peeked over the horizon and reflected off the surface of the calm water. A bird called in the distance. I breathed deeply, taking in the scent of damp earth and pine from the evergreen trees.
“God, this is breathtaking. No wonder you run every morning.”
“It feels strange going this way,” she muttered.
I laughed. “Like running it for the first time?”
She shot me an odd glance before gazing around her as if, yeah, she were seeing the scenery for the first time. Lips parting, she turned her attention back to me. “Kind of. Yeah.”
With a wink, I offered, “Tomorrow we can run it clockwise and then toggle back and forth each day. Sound okay to you?”
“But…” I had a feeling she was worried about me hiking out here on foot every morning from three thirty to five, until she realized I didn’t care. So she murmured, “Yeah. Okay.”
It was the most satisfying feeling in the world whenever she stopped fighting and bickering with me to acquiesce or soften her tone. More rewarding than anything I could ever remember experiencing.