The room is quiet.
His thumb moves against my shoulder. Once. Then again. I feel him taking it in—the way he takes true things, carefully, not trusting them too fast.
Then:
“I wonder sometimes,” he says, “if I was born loving you.”
I go still.
“You are so easy to love, Honey.” His voice is quiet. Not performing anything. Just saying a true thing in the dark. “I don’t think you know that. I think you’ve believed the opposite for a long time. But from the first visit, there has been nothing difficult about this. Nothing. You are the easiest thing.”
I don’t say anything.
I can’t say anything.
For ten years I’ve assumed there was a reason people left.
He just called me easy to love.
I tuck my face into his chest.
His arm tightens around me.
Neither of us says anything else. The curtains move. The creek runs. The summer night does what it does outside the windows of my grandmother’s house, where four generations of women stayed. And now I’m here with a male who was born on another world.
Twenty-three miles down a Missouri two-lane, he found me anyway.
Twice on the drive home, he pulled over just to look at something I’d made.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Honey
The morning comes in through the curtains the way it always does—slow and golden: the light finding the lace first and then the floor and then everything else in the room. I lie still for a moment and listen to Kragen breathe.
He’s completely out. Seven feet of orc in my grandmother’s bed, one arm still loosely around me even in sleep. I gaze at him for a moment in the morning light—his face slack and unguarded, the dark hair against my pillow—and feel something settle in my chest that I think is going to be there for a very long time.
Then I slip out from under his arm and go to the workshop.
I have something to make.
The fence line catches my eye on the way across the yard. The coneflowers and black-eyed Susans that have been crowding the path all summer are cut back cleanly, the right height, not hacked at. Someone who knew what they were doing and wasn’t making a production of it.
Grulk.
I don’t know how he knew. With Grulk, I’ve stopped asking that question. I wasn’t holding a grudge. Still, this sands out the rough spot.
I go to the workshop.
The workshop in the early morning is its own kind of world: the smell of it, the quality of the light through the single west window, the familiar quiet before the crow up the hill starts making his opinions known. I know every inch of this space. My grandfather built it, and my grandmother let it go to seed, and I cleaned it out nine years ago and made it mine. It has been mine every morning since.
This morning I’m making something for someone else to put in it.
Not in it. In the house. In the living room, on the wall, where I can see it from the kitchen doorway, next to my grandmother’s dulcimer where it belongs.
I find the scrap wood first—a piece of good walnut left from a commission, wider than I need, but that’s fine; it’ll be sturdier. Then the hooks. I keep a supply of them for hanging tools, plainiron, the kind that will hold weight without complaint. I find two that match and set them on the bench.
I know what I’m doing. No point examining it too closely. It’s perfectly clear. He has a guitar. He has a dulcimer. They live in his car because he has nowhere to put them in an apartment he’s been living in like someone who moved in recently and hasn’t gotten around to the rest of it. And I have a wall.
