“Yeah…” She didn’t move.
Neither of them moved.
“…yeah, I should go.”
“It was great running into you,” he said in a rush. “I’m glad you are feeling better.”
“It was nice running into you, too, Dr.—”
“Lee,” he interjected.
She bit her lip and smiled. “Lee,” she said with a nod. “It was so nice, Lee.”
It was selfish. He’d made her say his name and, again, as he knew he would, he felt a stirring — like fingers running down his sternum. He’d never liked the sound of his name so much.
“Wren,” he said with a nod, liking the feel of her name on his tongue even more.
“Goodnight.” She turned and left him.
Lee stood in front of the fish counter at Albertsons and let himself watch her walk away.
CHAPTER NINE
“YOU SEEM PERFECT.”
Wren couldn’t stop hearing his voice. And those words? No one had ever said anything like them. Not to her.
“You seem perfect — I mean… you are unique.”
Even with the qualifier, even if he didn’t mean she was actually perfect (And who could? No one on earth could be less perfect), he’d said she was unique. And it didn’t sound like he thought it was a bad thing.
Her whole life, people had told Wren she was strange. Weird. A freak. For years — in grade school — she’d tried to blend in. Mimic the other kids. Dress like they did. Talk like they did. About the things they did. Not about Laurie. Not about having no daddy. Not about the police coming at night.
It hadn’t worked. By the time she was in seventh grade — long after Laurie was gone — she’d given up. If the other kids were going to leave her out and whisper lies behind her back — or worse, whisper the truth — she could at least dress the part. Black lipstick. Black eyeliner. Black hair.
Her Goth uniform had served as a shield. A giantFuck Yousign to the rest of the world. How could they reject her if she wanted nothing to do with them? At recess, she’d hidden in the bathroom and touched up her makeup, and at lunch, she’d gone to the art room. No one had ever been in there but Mrs. Bernard, and she’d been able to eat her tuna sandwich and sketch for half an hour.
In high school, she’d bonded with a few other kids who were art-room refugees, and the more she’d learned about color and texture and shading and technique, the less she’d wanted to hide behind all black.
But that didn’t mean she ever really fit in, not until she dropped out of art school at UL and got into ink. The day she got her first tattoo, it was like being reborn.
Still, even in the life she’d built for herself at the studio, even with friends she loved and what remained of her family, even when she let someone into her bed, she had never heard those words.
And his eyes?
They were indigo blue. The color of the darkest swirls in Van Gogh’sStarry Night.The color of escape.
She might have been able to dismiss them if they hadn’t looked so intense when he mentioned his mom. Wren didn’t talk about Laurie, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t give half her organs to have her back. Laurie had been a shitty mom, but she was still her mom. And Wren had a handful of memories that were strong enough to choke her when she let them.
Like the night Laurie taught Wren how to paint her toenails. She’d sat with Laurie on the edge of the tub, her right foot propped on Laurie’s knee. Her mother had shown her how to swipe the tip of the brush on the inside of the bottle to keep from using too much, and then she’d taught her how to start by the cuticle of each toe and let the brush fan out just a little.
When Wren tried on her own, polish had smeared off to the side. Laurie just dabbed it up, saying,“I make mistakes all the time. The only thing I got right on the first try was you.”
So when she’d mentioned Mamaw’s peach pies, Lee didn’t have to come out and say he’d lost his mom. Wren could tell just by the look of longing in those eyes.
She wondered when it had happened. How it had happened. She hoped it had been nothing like the way she’d lost Laurie. Nothing that Lee felt was his fault.
In spite of herself, Wren thought about his words and his eyes for three days straight. On Monday, she gave up. That afternoon, Wren got out the butter, the flour, and the frying pan. She’d made fried peach pies only about a thousand times with Mamaw, so she knew the recipe by heart, and when her grandmother had stayed with her after the surgery, she’d left a jumbo bag of Sunsweet dried peaches behind.
