Page 85 of Sterling Fight

Later, back at Judd’s, I take a shower and then search for him, finding him in the library seated at the antique writing desk. His large frame looks a little disproportionate behind the delicate furniture. Or it might be the image of a modern man wearing a white T-shirt and a backwards baseball cap sitting behind such an ornate desk.

As I enter, Judd glances up like he’d been concentrating hard on something. His large hand flattens over the paper on the desk.

“What’s that?” I ask, attempting to see around his spread fingers which cover most of the page underneath them. Several balls of paper are crumpled and dropped on the floor around the desk.

“Just a little something I’ve been toying with.” He shrugs but his voice betrays any innocence.

“Just a little something-something,” I tease. “Let me see.”

I reach forward, catching the tip of his fingers, attempting to pry them upward but Judd is stronger than me, even in his fingertips. His palm remains flat. His fingers don’t budge.

My curiosity doubles down.

“Judd,” I whine like a simpering child. “Let me see.”

With my lip pouting and my eyelids batting, Judd finally relents.

“Earlier, you spouted off a limerick about my mother, and I wanted to repay the favor. Did you know today is National Limerick Day?”

I’m surprised that he knows the occasion. Edward Lear is credited with popularizing the limerick poem and May twelfth is his birthday. Typically, the five-line poems are whimsical, and a bit raunchy, and sometimes even nonsense.

And Judd is writing one for me.

“Can I read it?” A touch of warmth fills me. Judd wrote me a poem.

“It’s not very good,” he defends, keeping his voice low and gaze downward.

“But it’s about me,” I flirt. “So, it must be great.”

My playful comment brings Judd’s head upward and his lips tip up in a hint of a smile. His eyes flash like the crackle before a summer shower. One welcome and refreshing and desperately needed after a long dry spell.

Judd will be my undoing.

Cautiously, he lifts one finger at a time, as if pulled upward by an invisible string, before removing his hand.

I snatch up the unicorn lined paper, smiling to myself.

He wrote me a poem and it’s on this special paper. I read the poem once, then a second time more slowly.

There once was a woman named Firefly.

Her spirit was bubbly and spry.

Her presence, shiny and bright,

She lit up my loneliest nights.

Now, I don’t want to say goodbye.

“I’m a bit rusty. I haven’t attempted a poem since I was eleven,” he says, reminding me of his past poem-writing experience.

Clutching the paper to my chest, I stare over the desk at him, sensing what this means for him while expressing my own sentiments.

“No one has ever written me a poem.”

No one has ever looked at me the way he does.

No one has ever made me feel the things I do when I’m around him.