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“Yup.” She laughed quietly. “I’m probably reading too much into it.”
Somehow, impossibly, I answered with an even voice. “You’re probably not. A man asks a woman out to dinner when he wants her.”
Her eyes snapped to mine, her chest heaving on a deep breath.
It took every shred of self-discipline I possessed, but I turned my eyes back to the lamp and kept my hands gentle while I studied it.
Harlow reached out, and I handed it over to her. She turned it over, studying the curved lines of the bottom with a slow shake of her head.
“You come up with all these designs yourself?” she asked.
Right. No belaboring the possibility with the tall guy with the wimpy fucking handshake and questionable listening skills. I let out a steadying breath.
“Sometimes I don’t even know what I’m making until the shape appears on the machine. I just … pick a tool and start.”
“Amazing,” she murmured.
My cheeks felt warm, and I took it back, setting it down where she’d leaned her hip against the edge of the table. “Gotta do something with my hands, or I’ll lose it.”
“I know. You used to fidget in school all the time. Couldn’t ever sit still unless you were messing with something.”
As I tugged my safety glasses off, my mouth hooked into a smile. “I didn’t even notice until you pointed it out.”
She ran a fingertip along the top edge of a stack of crown molding left on the table. “Remember when I gave you those paper clips? I felt like the smartest person in the world, like I’d single-handedly fixed it.”
I didn’t answer. I simply kept my eyes on her face.
We were in third grade, maybe. And she’d saved up her chore money to buy sparkly pens for school and found these matching paper clips that she said made her feel like a grown-up.
When our teacher repeatedly chastised me for shredding paper, spinning pencils on the desk, or whatever I found to keep my hands busy, Harlow started handing me her paper clips, one at a time. I’d fold them into shapes and work them with my hands under the desk, and I stopped getting into trouble.
They were pink plastic, and I’d been teased relentlessly by the other dipshit boys in our class for carrying them around in my pocket. I guess I was lost in the memory too, because I blinked, and she had noticed my silence. Her eyes locked with mine for a moment, then she edged herself onto the table, a safe distance from where I was working, her legs swinging forward slowly.
I reached for the next chunk of wood to be done, much smaller than the last one because of the simpler design, and handed her an extra set of glasses, which she dutifully set onto her face. A few stray pieces of hair fell around her cheeks, and I tore my eyes away.
The machinery sound filled the space again, and she sat perfectly still while I used the spindle gouge to cut the edge of the wood piece into a concave curve. I held the tool lightly, turning it in my hand as wood shavings covered my fingers and the front of my apron. Any closer and Harlow might have wood shavings on her clothes, but it didn’t seem to bother her, because she stayed right where she was as I finished.
As the lathe slowed and silence filled the shop again, Harlow was still staring at the surface of the table, and I had to fight the strangest impulse to dig into her thoughts. Pry through the things that brought her over here, because there had to be something bothering her with the way she sat so thoughtfully.
“Did you achieve the thing you set out to when you moved away?” she asked. “Or do you still feel like you’re working on it?”
The direction had me sucking in a slightly surprised breath, and I didn’t answer right away, giving her question proper weight. With careful hands, I picked up the two pieces I’d just cut and moved them to their proper spot on the shelves along the wall.
“We talking business or personal?” I asked.
“Either, I suppose.”
It felt too precarious to talk to Harlow about any of the things I still wished for in my personal life. How they’d changed quite rapidly in the past month. How the loss of my father and her reappearance in my life had priorities shifting far quicker than I could have anticipated. The things I pictured about that future when my filter was gone. And why all of it scared the absolute shit out of me for reasons that I refused to dig into.
Verbalizing even the smallest part of that felt like walking out onto a frozen lake, despite knowing there was a slight crack somewhere in the surface. One wrong step, and everything would splinter. But take the right steps, and on the other side was safety.
And right now, the right steps felt like staying far, far away from the personal side of that question. Away from sex and love and intimacy and the future. Away from thoughts of marriage and children someday. Of a partner who felt like home.
When I turned back around, there was an expectant look on her face, those dark eyes of hers thoughtful and a little sad. The recognition of that sadness had me breathing through the urge to fix that too. Wipe it away by any means necessary. Hadn’t that always been my issue with her? I couldn’t be around her and not want to make everything better, even if I should let her do it herself.
I set my hands on the table and stared at it for another minute.
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “When I applied for the job in London, I don’t think I was going there for any big life purpose. It was different. And it was … space from what I’d always known. If I’m being truthful, both of those things were the goal.”
