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She leaned back, resting easily against me. “When did you start it again?”
“Few weeks ago. But Dad never wrote down his plans for things like this outside of math and quick-hand measurements. He just made it into whatever it was supposed to be, he said. I kinda hoped the answer would make itself known. I think that’s part of the reason I hadn’t had the courage to start it again. It took me a year after he died to even move it off the table.”
She didn’t prod, didn’t dig, just let us be silent for a moment to see if I’d say more. But I didn’t.
“What if …” she started, reaching out her hand to brush a patch of gloss on one of the rockers, “what if you made it a chair instead?”
I considered it, though I found myself frowning. “It wasn’t what he wanted to make with it.”
“True, but maybe it’s not meant to be his anymore. Can you see how to use the pieces for a bed?”
I couldn’t. “I was thinking maybe I could take the frame and inlay it into a headboard.”
She nodded. “That could work. But then these would go to waste.” Again she touched a rocker. A pencil and paper sat on the table a little out of reach. She leaned, looking back for permission, and when she got it, I shifted to stand at her side, watching her sketch. “You could take the head of the frame and make it the back of the chair, like this.” She drew it to perfect scale. “Use the spindles to connect it to the seat, except … oh. They’d be too short.”
“But I could make them longer, like this.” I took the pencil and drew a spindle with a hole in the bottom and another with a peg in the top.
“Yes,” she said, smiling. “Are the rockers long enough?”
On some quick math, I answered in the affirmative. “I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it. I’d been working on how to whittle the rockers into carved flowers.”
“You didn’t think of it because you were stuck,” she said simply, softly, the layers of meaning landing on each other like feathers.
“I’ve been stuck for a long time.”
She turned, resting her hip on the table. We were still close enough that I could feel the heat of her in the chill of the night. “Me too.”
Unable to bear the look in her eyes, I busied my gaze with the lines of her face, touching her cheek with the backs of my fingers. “Today feels like the first new day I’ve had in five years.”
Her head tilted. “How do you mean?”
My hands cupped her delicate jaw, my thumb stroking her cheek. “I’ve been living in a loop, if you could call it living, ruled by the past. Every day has been the same--it felt safe there. I don’t think I even knew it was happening, that I’d been lost. And now, with you and me …” I paused. “I don’t know how to do this, Daisy.”
“Neither do I. Can we figure it out together?”
I nodded, brought my forehead to hers, closed my eyes. The tip of my nose traced the bridge of hers, then her cheek as my lips sought hers and found them.
Long and slow was the kiss, with her face resting in my hands and her hair brushing my fingertips. I found the present again in the depths of her mouth, in the warmth of her skin. We parted long enough for me to pick her up, and I found right now in the sweet sound of her laughter, in her arms around my neck and legs around my waist.
My smiling lips came together to kiss hers. My grip on her was solid enough that she didn’t need to hold on, so her hands bracketed my face. I held her close enough that her face was a little above mine, and she kissed me deep, poured herself into me. A kiss of life.
The bedroom was very, very far away. Too far.
The moan she breathed into my mouth told me she’d had the same thought.
I walked her back to the counter and set her down without breaking the kiss, grateful for free hands. Those hands wanted to taste all of her, the long column of her neck, the dip above her collarbone. The curve of her shoulder as I hooked the strap of her dress, the swell of her breast as I lowered the loose neckline to expose her. My fingertips traced the curve, eliciting a mewl and a wave of gooseflesh, her dusky pink nipple tightening to a peak. It was a feather’s touch, a teasing edge both for her sake and mine as my fingers skated that curve, and when I could stand it no longer, I held the weight of her in my hand, my thumb brushing her nipple.
