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Chapter Three
Ian
In classical Greek tragedy—a frequent dinner table conversation during my childhood, courtesy of my fiercely proud and eggheaded father—the hero always had a tragic flaw, a colossal shortcoming that led to his ultimate destruction. The most famous of these flaws was hubris, an excess of pride or defiance of the will of the gods that could only end in disaster.
I suffer from hubris, I thought as I eyed the endless piles of yarn and scanned, for the umpteenth fucking time, the roughly nine thousand different sizes and types of knitting needles.
“How hard could knitting be, you asked yourself,” I muttered under my breath. “Plenty goddamn hard, it turns out.”
Did I want the enormous skein of barf-yellow yarn? Seemed like a pretty good buy. Or perhaps I should pick the much smaller ball of fuzzy black yarn? I had no idea, and the supply list was frustratingly opaque. The yarn of your choosing and appropriately sized needles.
Not helpful. Not helpful at all, and I was tempted to scrap the whole thing and walk away. But still, I remembered Edith’s clacking needles and the lightning strike right to my brain. Even standing right there in the craft store, the Itch percolated in my prefrontal cortex. Clearly, I was already in for this ride.
“You look confused.”
A sweet female voice behind me, a mellow alto, interrupted my silent brooding. I wheeled around to find the speaker and—holy shit.
A freckle-faced blonde stood behind me, blinking expectantly at me with a knockout pair of emerald-green eyes as she awaited my reply. My mouth went dry as sand, and I realized that she might be waiting for a while.
Jesus, she was so beautiful. Short, with generous curves that her red cardigan sweater and form-fitting blue jeans lovingly caressed, the kind of body that I would sell my soul to explore. To enjoy. She’d gathered those silky blonde strands into a messy knot atop her head, exposing the graceful line of her pale neck, the gentle curve of her shoulders and collarbone.
“Do you need any help?” she prodded gently. She gave me a look, and I didn’t miss the way her eyes swept over me, either.
As if she liked what she saw.
Interesting.
“Yeah,” I said as my tongue finally came unstuck from the roof of my mouth. “Do you know anything about knitting?”
She smiled at me then, and I could have sworn that my heart sped up. “I do, actually.”
“I need yarn,” I said. You sound like a total fucking idiot, my brain screamed, but I blazed forward. “And needles. But I don’t know how to pick them out.”
But this…this goddess didn’t even blink, or roll her eyes and look at me like I was a total moron. No, her smile stayed firmly fixed in place without a hint of condescension as she asked, “Do you have any knitting experience?”
I shook my head. “No. I want to learn.”
She nodded, and my eyes were helplessly drawn to a few stray loose strands that brushed across her shoulders with every slight movement of that gorgeous head. I wasn’t sure whether to kiss her stupid right there or fall to the floor in hysterics. Of all the places to meet the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen—the craft store. Honestly.
Fortunately for me and my lifelong no-restraining-order hot streak, I didn’t kiss her or have a total meltdown. I settled for just—well, just accepting the things I couldn’t change (again) and standing there, silent, looking like an absolute tool, for as long as she was willing to put up with me.
“Well,” she said, turning to the wall of yarn. “What’s your favorite color? What do you want to knit with?”
“Red,” I said absently, staring at the way her cardigan accentuated the curves of her breasts.
She pulled a hefty skein of bright red yarn off the shelf and handed it to me. “This is a good one for beginners. Lots of yarn for you to mess up with and a good weight that won’t get fuzzy and hard to work with.”
Next, she stepped over to the needles, bending down to pluck a package off the rack. The slight angle gave me a heart-stopping view of her perfect ass, and I prayed to God, to Zeus, to the watchful spirit of my disapproving childhood Sunday school teacher—whoever was listening—that my dick wouldn’t join the party next.
Down, boy,I thought feverishly. I would not get an erection in the yarn aisle of a craft store.
“And these are the right size needles,” she said, reaching over to point to the label on the skein of yarn with one short, unpainted fingernail. “See those numbers? They correspond to this.” She tapped the packaging for the knitting needles. “The yarn label will usually tell you what kind of needles work best, unless you’re buying some kind of specialty yarn. But you don’t need to worry about that if you’re a beginner.”
“This is so helpful,” I said, wondering how creepy it would be to ask this stunning woman on a date. “Thank you so much—"
“Shit,” she suddenly said, glancing at her watch. “I gotta go.” She turned and darted down the aisle, but paused to spare me one last glance and a quick smile. “Good luck. You’ll do just fine, it’s not so hard.”
And then she was gone—whoever she was.
