16. Wren
Wren
I curl the sandpaper around my finger and try to work the curve where the wing spreads out. The grain’s fighting me, like it always does with cherry. Every time I go over it, it feels like the wood’s just being stubborn. My thumb’s raw. The edge looks rough.
I switch hands and try coming at it from a different angle. The sandpaper snags, rips up a little bit of wood, and now the whole wing looks like something chewed on it.
“Fuck.”
I put the bird down on the workbench and press my hands flat on the surface.
The whole shop smells like pine shavings and linseed oil.
My tree’s shoved in the corner under a drop cloth.
I can’t even look at it right now. Yesterday I went at it too hard and sanded a patch down to nothing, like I could just get rid of how I was feeling if I worked at it long enough.
My phone is face-up next to the chisel rack. Soren’s text, from forty minutes ago: On my way. Is the garage door open?
I texted back yes, then wasted forty minutes screwing up this bird.
I smell him before I hear him coming in.
There he is, moving through the sawdust like he owns the place. My hands freeze. My whole body just stops. My brain can’t decide if I want to bolt or drop to my knees.
I turn around.
Soren’s standing in the open garage door, backlit by afternoon sun, wearing jeans and that blue-purple cardigan I’ve watched him cross the quad in a hundred times.
His hair’s a little messy. His eyes are careful.
He’s holding a Tupperware container with both hands, gripping it like it’s the only thing keeping him upright.
Keats’s tiny carved head pokes out of his cardigan pocket: the waxwing, always the waxwing, always with him.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
There’s six feet of concrete between us.
My chest hurts. Six feet isn’t much, but it feels like a mile.
I can see the line of his throat, the spot where his pulse jumps under his skin, and my jaw aches.
My teeth feel too big for my mouth. Every muscle in my shoulders is burning from holding still when all I want to do is close the gap and put my mouth on him.
I want to shove him up against the wall and bury my face in his neck until I can’t smell anything else.
My cock throbs, just from watching him breathe.
“Milo’s brownies,” he says, lifting the container. “He said to tell you they’re not a bribe, they’re emotional infrastructure.”
I almost laugh. Almost. “That sounds like Milo.”
“It does.” He steps inside, then takes another step.
He looks around the shop, slow, checking everything out.
My pegboard with all the hand tools, the clamps, the vises, curls of shavings on the floor I didn’t bother to sweep up because I couldn’t even find the broom.
Every step he takes makes it harder to breathe.
There’s a flush on his cheeks, and his lips part when he breathes.
Soren in my space, surrounded by my stuff, touching my things.
My brain is making all kinds of noise I don’t want to deal with right now.
He sets the brownies on the corner of the workbench. His eyes land on the finch with the chewed-up wing.
“New one?” he asks.
“Trying to be.” I pick it up, turn it in my fingers. “The wing’s giving me trouble.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“It’s rough.”
“Wren.” Soft, but it’s got a point. “I have seven of these. I’m the leading expert. It’s beautiful.”
I put the bird down. My throat’s dry, my hands are twitchy, and there’s nowhere left to hide.
“Can I see everything?” Soren asks.
I knew this was coming. Knew it when I read his text last night. Can we talk before the showcase? And I said yes because Aaron was right, because Soren was right, because carving birds for a guy I was too scared to face was exactly how I got into this mess.
“Yeah,” I say. “Okay.”
I lead him over to the back wall, to the high shelf.
There’s a little lineup here. Some rough, half-carved pieces I gave up on when I lost my nerve. The seven birds Soren has are all named, lined up in that row he showed me. I saw them in his room once and almost had a heart attack. These are the ones that never made it off this shelf.
Soren reaches up and touches one of them, a half-shaped wing, running his thumb along its back. His face goes still.
“Stumble—the robin.” I have to clear my throat. “I sneezed while I was carving her primaries. Wrecked the wing. Didn’t have the heart to start over, but I almost kept her. Couldn’t believe I gave you something that wasn’t right.”
“The crooked-wing robin,” Soren says softly. “You told me about her. When you were—“ He trails off, but I know what he means. When I was still inside him and the words were pouring out of me like sawdust.
“Yeah.”
Soren goes quiet for a second, tracing his thumb over his palm like he’s remembering the crooked wing.
“You know why I named her Stumble?”
“You name them?”
“All of them.” His voice goes soft. “Stumble. Because she wobbles but she never falls off.”
I just nod because I don’t trust my voice.
“What else?”
So I show him. All of it.
I grab my sketchbook first. My hands are shaking a little as I pull it off the shelf and open it on the workbench.
It’s just page after page of his face. Mostly quick sketches.
The angle of his jaw from across the quad.
His profile at the library desk. His hands wrapped around a coffee cup.
There’s one that’s more finished, him sitting on the bench by the oak tree, reading, with the light catching his hair.
Soren stares. His finger hovers over the bench drawing but doesn’t touch it.
“Your fingers caught on a splinter. I saw you pull back.” I swallow. “It took me twenty minutes to fix it. I sanded it smooth and rubbed it with linseed oil so the grain would stay put.”it with linseed oil so the grain would hold.”
“I noticed it was fixed. I just thought campus maintenance finally got around to it.”
“I am campus maintenance.”
Half a laugh, half something else. “Right. God, Wren.”
“I bought another copy of that Mary Oliver book, too.” I nod at the dog-eared paperback on the shelf. “You returned the library one before I could get in line behind you, and—“ I shrug. “I wanted to see what you underlined.”
For a second, I almost show him the bookshelf design.
The measurements are scribbled on a piece of plywood leaning against the wall.
It’s a shelf with a ledge, just the right size for all seven birds.
My mouth wants to say, I can build you this, let me be useful, let me earn it.
But that’s the old move. Lead with a project, hope he keeps me around for what I can make.
“There’s a bookshelf design over there,” I say, nodding at the wall. “Started it after I saw your room. But I’d rather talk to you about it first. If you want one. Later.”
I could build him a table that would last longer than both of us, but ask me to say I love you and suddenly I can’t speak. For once, I need to try words first.
Soren glances at the plywood, then back at me. His face shifts. Maybe he gets it.
By the time we’ve made it around the shop, Soren’s clutching the sketchbook to his chest like he’s trying to soak it in. His eyes are bright and his knuckles are white on the cover.
“I know it was wrong,” I say. “Not telling you. Letting you think they were from some ghost. Some fantasy guy who was better than me.”
“Wren—“
“I needed you to know I could make you happy before you saw me. The real me. Because the real me is—“ I wave at the shop. At myself. Sawdust in my hair, calluses on my hands, a guy who’s better with a knife than with words. “This. I’m just this.”
Soren sets the sketchbook on the workbench. Carefully, next to the ruined finch.
“Can I tell you something?” he says.
I nod.
“The birds made me so happy. Every single one. I carried Keats in my pocket everywhere, I lined them up on my windowsill, I wrote poems about the hands that made them.” He takes a breath.
“But I didn’t fall for a wooden bird, Wren.
I fell for the person who carved them. For the fact that someone saw me.
Really saw me. And cared enough to show me, even when he was scared. ”
My eyes sting.
“And then you stepped between me and Derek, and you smelled like pine and safety, and you asked if you could kiss me like it was the most terrifying thing you’d ever done.
” His voice wobbles but holds. “I fell in love with that. The guy who fixes benches and gets between me and a bad alpha and worships me with his hands and his mouth and can barely string three words together but every single one counts.”
My cock twitches at the words worships me with his mouth, and my bite on his neck throbs like a second heartbeat. Mine. My omega.
Me. All of me.
“It was you the whole time,” Soren says. “Not just the birds. You.”
The lie I’ve been dragging around, the one that says I’m only worth what I can build, goes quiet. For the first time in years, it shuts up.
“I should have told you sooner,” I manage. “I should have used my mouth instead of my—“
“Your mouth is extremely talented,” Soren says, and a startled laugh punches out of me, wet and helpless.
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.” He steps closer, close enough that I can feel the heat coming off his skin.
His fingers brush the inside of my wrist and my breath catches way too hard.
I want to grab him, pull him in, press my face into his neck and breathe him in until that’s all I can smell.
I want to bite down right where his pulse is going crazy and make him shake.
Instead, I just stand here with my hands shaking, trying to be someone who actually talks.
“The hiding hurt.” His voice goes quieter, like he’s been carrying this sentence and needs to set it down carefully.
“I need you to know that. I spent a whole day rearranging birds on my windowsill and eating Milo’s brownies and trying to figure out if I was angry or in love.
And the answer was both, and the angry part was real.
Months of not knowing who you were, of wondering if I was crazy for caring this much about a stranger—that wasn’t nothing, Wren. It hurt.”
I had that coming.
“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“I know you are.” He holds my gaze. “And I’m not building a wall out of it. But I needed to say it out loud, because if we’re doing the ‘words first’ thing, that includes the ones that aren’t easy.”
“Yeah.” My voice comes out rough. “Yeah, it does.”
“So,” he says, and the wobble gives way to warmth. “I want to build something with you. The actual you, who talks to me with his actual mouth, even when it’s hard.”
I close my hand over his and press my thumb to his pulse. It’s racing under my thumb, and my own heart answers right back.
“I promise,” I say. “Words first. From now on. Even the ugly ones.”
“Especially the ugly ones.”
“Even the ugly ones.”
He smiles. Not the big, showy one he gives his friends. This one’s smaller, real. The one I’ve watched from across the quad a hundred times and always wanted to see up close.
I kiss him.
He tastes like brownie and sawdust and something in my chest just splits open. His hands come up to my jaw, his thumbs brushing sawdust off my face, and I pull him in until there’s no space left between us. It’s not frantic. It’s just us, right here.
When we break apart, he rests his forehead against mine. His breath is warm on my lips and it takes everything I’ve got not to go after his mouth again. Later. We have time.
“The showcase,” he murmurs. “Kendra wants to tell our story her way.”
“I know.”
“What if we tell it ours?” His eyes flick to the tree under its drop cloth. “Your tree. My poems. What if we put them together? The birds in the branches with the stanzas underneath. One installation. Our version.”
I can picture it. My tree with all its branches, each bird sitting where it belongs, and under each one, Soren’s words on thin wire, spinning a little. His voice, my hands.
“You’d want that?” I ask.
“I’d want that more than anything I’ve ever wanted at a poetry reading, and I once wanted a bathroom break so badly I almost cried.”
I laugh. It sounds weird in my own shop. Good weird.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s build it.”
We’re still standing with our foreheads together, fingers laced, when a car door slams in the driveway. Then Aaron’s voice carries right through the walls: “If anyone is naked in there, I’m turning around and billing you for therapy!”
Soren freezes. I close my eyes.
“Dammit.”
Aaron shows up in the doorway first, grinning like he’s been glued to his phone all day. Callum ducks in behind him with a paper bag, and Ava squeezes in next, already looking around the shop.
“Oh my god, the birds.” Ava makes a beeline for the shelf. “Callum, look at the detail. Are these all for Soren? This is the most romantic thing I’ve ever—“
“Ava,” Callum says mildly.
“I’m just saying! Milo told me about the bench and I thought he was making it up, but this is—“ She holds up one of the half-carved pieces to the light. “You’re insane. In the best way.”Aaron drops onto my work stool and kicks his feet up on a sawhorse.
“See? Just show up and be honest and people don’t run screaming. ”
“You told me to stop touching my tree,” I say.
“Also that. The lower left still looks like shit, by the way. You’re going to have to re-bark that whole section.”
“I know.”
“I can help,” Soren says quietly. He says it like he’s volunteering for the long project, not the afternoon, and I can’t say anything to that.
Aaron catches my eye. Doesn’t say anything. His whole face says it: See? You disaster. You absolute disaster. He’s still here.
Ava’s already texting someone while Callum unpacks food from the bag. Soren wanders over to Aaron, and I hear them talking about wood, Aaron making fun of my “sad cave” and Soren actually laughing. Lavender and sawdust, all mixed together. My shop’s never smelled this good.
I pick up the finch with the chewed-up wing and turn it over in my hands.
The grain runs against me on this one. It always will. But I know how to work with wood that doesn’t want to cooperate.
I set it down on the shelf with the others. Flawed birds, all in a row.
They look pretty good together.