Chapter 8
Celeste disappeared under the still surface of the pond, then shot up just as quickly, sputtering and gasping for breath.
“Holy shit! This is really fucking cold!” She swept her arms and swam farther into the pool, then swiveled to face John. “I can’t even touch the bottom here!” She smiled and moved in an easy breaststroke to the edge, where a small stream of water fell from above, then dipped her head under, letting water splash over her neck and shoulders as she peered at the rocks around her.
Her mouth was moving, but he couldn’t hear any sounds. John hadn’t known Celeste long, but it didn’t seem strange that she’d speak to rocks, or water, or whatever she’d found back near the waterfall. It was only strange that he wished he could hear what she was saying.
After a moment, she swam back to the edge and stood, her dripping body emerging into the sun inch by inch. When she reached up to squeeze the excess water from her ponytail, John watched goose bumps rise along the tight curve of her bicep. The wet fabric of her gray tank top clung to her body, holding tight to the outline of her sports bra and the curves of her small breasts. Her nipples were so tight and hard he’d be able to close his lips around one right through the fabric of her shirt and bra.
Oh, Christ.
John dropped his head into his hands, pressing hard against his closed eyes. Those were not thoughts he should be having about his birding partner. It was one thing to note how easily her muscled legs had conquered the trail all morning, but this was no place for errant fantasies about tracing his fingers along the contours of her rib cage or smoothing over those goose bumps with his tongue. Especially not when she was his first practice client, and they’d taken dating off the table.
Her voice came in a laugh from behind him. “Shit, that was cold. But well worth it. Fresh water has always had some kind of special resonance for me, like it helps me reset.”
John kept his eyes trained on his backpack as he pulled out his water bottle. He took a long drink, but his throat was still dry and tight.
When he turned back, Celeste was settling on the rocks in the sun, her damp hair wetting the stone in a halo around her head. “I’m just going to let myself dry off a little if that’s okay.”
“Of course.” He leaned back, the smooth white rocks warm from the sun, and removed his hat. Crossing his hands to pillow his head, John closed his eyes, letting the sun hit his face, lighting up his eyes from the inside with the colors of sunset.
He picked out strings of birdsong bouncing around the canyon, mentally checking off the ones they’d spotted already. He’d heard all the birds they’d seen that morning before spying them and could have added them to the count before ever showing them to Celeste. But being with her, going slower and drawing her into what he loved about birding, was a gift he hadn’t expected after the chaos of their original meetup. She did a certain amount of skipping along the trail, as he’d expected she would, but when she needed to be still, she was. She paid incredible attention to each bird, asked all the right questions, and seemed truly delighted to be spending the day outside.
He’d thought about guiding for a long time, but had never gone so far as to imagine what it would look and feel like. And if it could be like this—warm sun and smiles and birds everywhere—it might be worth giving it a go.
“They’re like time, you know?” Celeste’s voice drifted into his ear, dreamy and low. When he cracked his eyes open to peek at her, her hands were running along the rock beneath them, tracing the small, smooth curves that carried water when it rained. “The rocks, I mean. Whenever I’m somewhere like this, where you can just see how water has shaped everything, I feel like touching the rocks is the closest I’ll come to touching time itself.”
John ran his own fingers along the rock. “My brother, he’s always been obsessed with the stars and the vastness of space, but there’s so much vastness on Earth.”
“Is it just one? Brother?”
“No, I have two—both younger.” Still thinking about the rocks, he recalled the way Celeste had seemed to be talking to them by the waterfall. “Did you see something over there? When you were in the water?”
“Oh!” The exclamation drew his eyes open in time to see Celeste prop herself up on her elbows, smiling big. “There were these little frogs back there. Small and gray, and”—she pouted, furrowing her brow and hunching her shoulders before smiling and shaking off the pose—“they had that grumpy look about them, but they were so cute, too. Just lined up in a little crack of the rock, blending in perfectly. Do you know what they were?”
“An army of canyon tree frogs.” He raised up on his own elbows, his lips curving up. “It looked like you were talking to them.”
She laughed lightly. “Just bringing them greetings from humankind.” Celeste lay back down, stretching her arms long over her head.
John did the same, closing his eyes so he wouldn’t count the smooth lines of her ribs made visible by her stretch.
After a moment of silence, she spoke up again. “Why’d you call them an army?”
“A group of frogs,” he answered. “It’s called an army.”
She laughed. “Is stuff like that just squeezed into little pockets in your brain?”
His face was warm and relaxed, his body fusing into the stone. Talking about himself didn’t come naturally, but it felt easier today, speaking up into the blue. “When I was a kid, I went through a phase of obsessing about what different groups of animals are called. Some are just what you would expect—flocks and herds—but then there are some special ones. A flamboyance of flamingos, or a leap of leopards.”
Celeste hummed. “I wonder what a group of my students would be called.”
“Did you say it was middle school?”
“Yeah, seventh- and eighth-grade language arts. I bounced around ages for a while after getting my teaching degree, but this is where I like it most. On my best days, I’m energized by the role I can play in their lives, by all the possibilities there.”
“And on your worst days?”
“On my worst days, I’m standing at the front of the room just looking at this classroom of adolescents staring back at me like they wish they could be anywhere else.”
A silence settled between them for a moment as a western bluebird choo-choo’d from a tree nearby. It wasn’t on their list so far, because it had typically already migrated north by this time, but John didn’t want to interrupt the conversation with Celeste just yet. Hopefully it would stick around for a few more minutes and they could see it together.
“How about a potential?” he said after a moment. “A potential of middle schoolers.”
She curled on her side facing him, one arm under her as a pillow, smiling. “Oh, you’re good. I like that.” Before John could pull a response from his tightening chest, Celeste rolled onto her back again. “You’re sure about this Tuesday? For my work thing?” Her hands fiddled together over her stomach, where the fabric clung to the indent of her belly button.
John put his eyes back on the sky. “Definitely sure.” Between bird sightings that morning, Celeste had mentioned a work gathering she had in a few days. It was time for John to follow through with his side of their agreement.
“You know,” she said, “for someone who’s my occasional boyfriend, I know almost nothing about you. My teacher friends are nosy. I should know some things.”
He sat up, rolling out the stiffness in his neck. “There’s not too much to tell. Especially after I lost my job. I watch birds, I work in my woodshop, that’s basically my life.”
He braced himself for a “That’s all?” or something of that ilk. Especially to someone as vibrant as Celeste, his simple life must seem rather dull. But she just nodded and sat up, pulling her knees in to her chest. “How long have you been in Tucson?”
“About ten years.” John reached down to grab the toes of his hiking boots, relishing the deep stretch in the backs of his thighs. It was hard to believe he’d been settled in Tucson for just over a decade, especially because it had happened almost accidentally. He’d come for graduate school, left briefly, then come back and stayed. When he’d broken things off with Breena, his brother Jared had suggested a move up to Phoenix, but John knew he wouldn’t last a month amid all the concrete.
“And where were you before then? Hiking the wilds of South America searching for exotic bird species?”
“Not quite.” He would have left it at that, but whether it was the sunshine or just his companion, he felt more amenable to sharing parts of himself than he had in a while. “After college I started graduate school for biology, but some stuff came up at home and I went back for a bit.” Said “stuff” had included his mom getting sick, his baby brother routinely being dropped at home in the dead of the night by the local sheriff, his middle brother putting in a couple of years of college ball before being drafted, and his dad struggling to keep the store going between trips to the doctor in Tucson. His parents had sworn he didn’t need to come back, but they hadn’t presented any alternatives, either.
“Did things turn out okay at home?” Celeste’s eyes had narrowed a bit, but she didn’t pry for details. And oddly enough, it made John want to give them.
“Yeah, Mom has been cancer-free for fifteen years now. But when I was there I ended up helping a lot with our store and stuck around for a while.”
Celeste wiggled her toes in the sun, small specks of sand along her feet shining like glitter. “What kind of store?”
“Maguire Ranch Supply.” Just saying the name conjured up the place in his mind—cramped aisles that had served as a playground for a set of brothers growing up in the grasslands while their parents built a business. “I hauled around a lot of bags of feed in those years.”
Celeste’s huffed laugh caused John’s defenses to rise before he could stop them, trained from years of Breena’s subtle teasing about his parents’ “cute little store.” “It probably doesn’t sound like much, but running a business like that is a lot of work.”
“Oh, I have no doubt about that at all. I was just thinking about how the population of Santa Rita must have enjoyed watching a young John Maguire toss around bags of feed.” Her eyes widened as her jaw dropped. “Not that you would have been better-looking then than you are now. There’s a lot to be said for maturity, and a little silver in the beard goes a long way.” She dropped her face into her hands before peering back up, red-cheeked. “Please just ignore me. My internal filter doesn’t always exist. I don’t mean to objectify you.”
A laugh burst from John’s lips as he raised a hand to rub at his beard but stopped midway, suddenly more aware of his facial hair than he’d been a few minutes before.
“It’s fine. I remain totally un-objectified.” He cleared his throat. “Do you think that’s enough background for your friends?”
Celeste blinked before nodding, slipping her socks and boots back onto her bare feet. “Yeah, I think that’s good. Now we just need the story about how we met.” She stood, throwing her backpack over her shoulders.
John rose and stretched, subtly making a visual pass of her body just long enough to confirm that her tank top was now blessedly dry before grabbing his own pack.
Celeste jumped easily down the rocks to the trail and tipped her face back to him as she spoke. “How about this: We met birding, maybe at some popular birding place like—”
“Rivera Park,” he filled in. It was a sure stop for everyone in town.
She nodded. “Rivera Park it is. We met looking at the same bird, and then I asked you out for french fries.”
He slowed as he climbed down a boulder. “French fries?”
“French fries are my go-to. Great on any occasion.” She turned to him with a wink. “And I’m pretty sure I’d be asking you, given that you’re quiet and I never shut up.”
It would take him weeks of hovering at the edges of someone like Celeste before he’d consider making a move, and even then he wouldn’t quite know how to pull it off. But he didn’t want to let the other part of what she’d said slide by.
“I wouldn’t say you never shut up, by the way,” he said, walking behind her. “You just share freely. For the record, I like it.”
Her feet skidded along the trail, sending a small cloud of dust swirling around her boots. As she twisted her body back to him, a wisp of brown hair fell across her face, and she moved quickly to tuck it behind her ear. Her chest rose and fell with one breath before her lips turned up. “Thank you.”
Celeste’s eyes drifted up, over John’s shoulder and up farther still, into the sky. “Red-tailed hawk,” she murmured. They’d seen a few already that day, but he turned regardless, never one to give up a chance to watch a bird. Its pale underside, streaked with gray and copper, flashed in the sunlight as it rode a column of warm air, tipping its wings to spiral down and back up.
Behind him, Celeste’s voice was just above a whisper. “Pretty fucking cool.”
He couldn’t have agreed more.