Chapter 12
“This is a great idea, you know.” Celeste lowered her binoculars to peek at John. When they’d come out an hour before, she’d waited for him to sit before choosing her own spot across the porch. “Backyard birding sessions. People will eat this up.”
“We’ll see.” When John allowed himself to daydream about guiding professionally, he nurtured these little nuggets of ideas. He wanted to eschew the race for the rarest birds and focus on helping people see what was all around them. Most people had no idea how much there was to discover from their own porches. He’d mentioned the idea to Celeste on their hike, and she’d literally leapt with excitement, inviting him to her yard at his earliest convenience.
At the time, it had been simple to say yes. But that was before he’d been transfixed by the water pouring off Celeste’s shoulders in the mountains and before he’d sensed her pulse just below his lips in the bowling alley. Some people doled out flirtation easily—Chris could be found entwined with any number of people in the course of a night—but John could count on both hands the number of times he’d been close enough to a woman to memorize the curve of her ear.
And walking through her house today had laid down another layer of intimacy. He’d been in homes that felt like showrooms, arranged more for appearance than use. But this place was clearly Celeste—walls painted eggshell and lavender dotted with framed posters and pencil sketches, potted plants trailing vines down crowded bookshelves, a worn brown couch with pink throw pillows and a colorful quilt folded over the top. Her kitchen was pure sunlight bouncing off yellow counters, with a small round table on which a sketch pad was splayed open, the drawing on the page a mirror of the philodendron spilling its leaves across the table.
She’d seemed nervous when he arrived, and he’d wondered again if going to her home had been a bad idea. But the morning air and a view of the clear sky in her yard had seemed to set both of them at ease. And by the time they’d spotted the first bird in her yard—a white-winged dove flapping to a slow landing on the back wall—John had pulled his brain out of the bowling alley and was able to appreciate the slow glide of Celeste’s porch swing. There was still a connection between them, something thin and flashing like a fishing line, but it didn’t strain their rapport once they’d started focusing on birding.
“I’m serious, John.” Celeste lifted the spiral-bound notebook where she was keeping her list for the contest. “We even saw a couple of new birds out here we didn’t see on the hike. I am seriously amazed. I don’t think I would have known what I could see from here.”
The yard was small, landscaped with rusty rocks and rosy pebbles with two long basins full of brittlebush, sage, and other native plants. Spiky aloes bordered the yard, their stalks dripping with salmon-colored flowers.
“You’ve got a very bird-friendly space here. Those hummers love the blooming aloe.” They’d added two birds to their list, both hummingbirds. The Anna’s, with its stunning pink throat, could be found almost anywhere in town with blooming flowers. But the more elusive broad-billed hummingbird had been a nice surprise, and when John told Celeste he suspected it was likely nesting nearby, she’d clapped her hands like an excited kid.
After picking a spot for the birdhouse, they’d talked about what types of feeders she could put up, and where, and he’d given her a list of the most likely birds to be spotted in her part of town. But mostly, they just sat and watched. Celeste had been studying, evidenced by the dog-eared pages of the guidebook she clutched in her lap, and she was able to identify many of the birds that stopped over in the hour they sat together. Even though many of them were already on their list, Celeste gave each her rapt attention.
They lapsed into an easy silence long enough for John’s mind to go comfortably still as he soaked in the sun that reached them under the porch awning. His eyes drifted open at the sound of a gentle hum and he saw Celeste, her arms stretching overhead, the hem of her ribbed tank top inching up just enough to show a finger’s width of pale skin. She’d slipped out of her sandals when they’d sat down, and the bare toes of her right foot—toenails a bright green today—drew a lazy S up the curve of her left calf.
The line pulled taut. Awareness hummed in John’s blood, matching the pitch of Celeste’s sigh as she curved her body slowly to one side, then the other, hands clasped above her head.
A sharp series of pews sang out from a tree in a neighbor’s yard, and Celeste’s eyes jolted open. Her attention on the tree gave him time to squeeze his eyes shut tight.
“That one!” Celeste stood, pointing to the tree. “I hear that one all the time but I can’t find it. What is it?”
John reached for his guidebook, but Celeste waved him off. “No, please. No more lessons today, just tell me. I sit out here with my coffee and my binoculars just waiting to see it, but it just shoots its little laser gun over there out of sight.”
John laughed, remembering how he’d always thought of Star Wars when he heard these birds in the trees outside his house in Santa Rita. “It’s a northern cardinal. Do you usually hear the call-and-response?”
Celeste shook her head. “I don’t know?”
“Often you’ll hear a pair calling to each other. Going back and forth.”
Celeste stood quickly and approached him, grinning. The bench glided back as her weight settled on the other side, just as the cardinal’s mate answered its call.
“There it is.” He kept his voice quiet. “One is still in that tree, but it sounds like the other is across the yard.”
Bright chips and pews traveled across the air. John closed his eyes to listen.
“What are they saying?” Celeste asked in a whisper.
He tipped his face back and let the sun heat his cheeks. “I don’t know exactly, but they’re keeping track of each other as they search for food, making sure no one goes too far.”
“I used to do that with Morgan. If we were in a store, she’d hide in the racks of clothes, and I’d call out, ‘Moo-oo.’ That was my nickname for her.” The bench swung back and forth, stirring a small breeze around them. “And she would call back, ‘Ma-ma.’?”
They listened to the cardinals for a moment. He heard them switch positions, the calls changing direction, and even though his eyes were closed, Celeste’s quiet squeal told him she’d spotted their bodies streaking through the yard.
“Tell me what else you hear,” she said quietly after a minute. “What else is happening out there?”
When he peeked at her, she was watching him, her feet tucked under her. “It’s my yard, after all. Shouldn’t I know the story?” Her arm stretched between them and her index finger pushed into his upper arm. But what seemed to have been intended as a teasing poke lingered, until her hand flattened and her palm cupped the curve of his shoulder. Even through the fabric of his T-shirt, heat radiated from Celeste’s fingertips as her eyes widened before she snatched her hand away, staring at it for a moment like it had betrayed her.
John cleared his throat and looked back out at the yard. “Sure.” His voice was lower than usual, stuck somewhere right in his sternum. “Yeah, okay.” Any reason to close his eyes again and loosen the line that had tightened between them in the past few minutes. It would be easier if it was just him, but his inconvenient attraction didn’t seem to be one-sided, though he could tell it was unwelcome for Celeste.
Eyes closed, John pushed back his thoughts of the imprint of her palm and listened. If he couldn’t concentrate on the birds, there was no point to any of it.
A slow breath brought in the sounds around them, lines of songs and bursts of calls in Celeste’s yard and beyond.
“House finch up high, probably on the electrical wire. He’s doing a territorial call.”
“Are they the ones with the red chests?”
He nodded and hummed. “A northern mockingbird to the east, looking for love. Funny thing about them is that they don’t just mimic other birds. Sometimes they’ll do frog calls or even car alarms if they’ve heard them enough.”
He listed a few others, his closed eyes still lit from the sun. Doves—white-winged, Inca, and rock—cooed from places in the yard and beyond, a Gila woodpecker proclaimed its territory from a nearby utility pole, house sparrows chipped from all directions, and a verdin’s song, so much bigger than its tiny body, rolled out from the palo verde next door.
“So many creatures living their lives all around us all the time.” Celeste’s voice was breathy, almost wistful. “So many little stories.”
He risked a look in her direction to see her watching a group of sparrows bathing themselves in a patch of dry dust. They kicked it up into their feathers, some even splaying open their wings to flutter them along the ground.
“I was reading about house sparrows the other day.” Her eyes didn’t leave them as she spoke. “It’s like we’re not supposed to like them because they’re an invasive species, but they’re just doing their best. I mean hell, they mate for life, which is more than I can say for myself.”
Her brow furrowed as her fingers tangled on her lap, her own joke obviously biting.
“Probably not a fair comparison, as you do have a significantly longer lifespan than a sparrow. They only have to stay in a relationship for two years,” he deadpanned. “And the most recent research indicates that they might not actually be that faithful in that time.”
Her answering smile filled him with satisfaction. She tucked a lone strand of hair behind her ear and straightened. “Well, when you put it that way, I’m basically a paragon of relationship success.”
He couldn’t get over how freely she spoke about her life, even the bad parts. It inspired him to keep talking. “I admire you, though. Doing what you needed for yourself, I’m sure it wasn’t easy.”
It had taken John actually catching Breena in the act with someone else to finally leave a relationship he knew wasn’t right. Without that punch in the gut, they might have gone on for years, liking each other less and less each day.
Celeste wasn’t watching the sparrows anymore. She was looking at him, eyes wet at the corners and mouth slightly agape. Her head tipped to one side as she reached up to twist her fingers into her bun. “The weird thing is”—she tracked a bird across the sky, but John stayed focused on her—“when I finally left, yeah, I was mad at Peter. Somewhere along the way he seemed to go from loving me to not even really liking me very much, and that left some marks. But the person I was really angry with was myself, for letting it go on for so long. For being so afraid to be alone.”
Her fingers tapped a rhythm on the bench between them, and without thinking, John covered her hand with his own, stilling her movement. He shouldn’t have touched her, not with this thing between them growing warmer in the sun, but he hated seeing her shrink like this. “I know we haven’t known each other for very long, but I would never use the word ‘afraid’ to describe you.”
When Celeste’s eyes found his, they locked him in place. Her voice came just above a whisper. “What word would you use?”
Surprising. Effervescent. Enticing. “Brave.”
“Oh.” The sound fell from her mouth, barely audible. That line between them was thick now, and tight, tugging his gaze to her mouth. Her tongue darted across her lower lip.
Beneath his hand, her wrist twisted, bringing them palm to palm.
For a stretched-out moment in the sun on the swinging bench, he let himself believe it could be easy. He could follow that line to Celeste’s waiting mouth and pull her lip between his teeth. They could move to her bedroom and let this seed between them grow and bloom. He’d make her forget that anyone had ever left her feeling unwanted.
But life was more than this moment. Celeste wanted to be on her own, and he wouldn’t be responsible for delaying that, especially when he was on a similar road himself.
He stood so quickly the bench rocked back. “I better go.” He swiped up his guidebook. “I have some work to do.” He’d just gotten an order for a table made from reclaimed wood he’d hauled up from an old barn on his parents’ property. A few hours in his shop were exactly what he needed. “Thanks again for letting me try this out.”
“Right.” Celeste stood, wiping her hands down over her hips, following a path John would trace only in his imagination.
It was best for both of them to ignore this connection. Even if it pulled at him as he walked back through her house, where a streak of sunshine lit up her bookshelf, so burdened it looked on the verge of collapse. Even if it tugged as she smiled from her doorway, her outline in shadow as he turned his head back to say goodbye. Even if it dragged at him all the way to his car and across town to the safety of his workshop.