Facing Leeward (A Siren’s Point Story #2)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

NILS

The chickens fuss around me as I kneel in the dirt, repairing the wire.

Tutu, always the more curious of them, clucks her way closer.

Gently, I nudge her away. I’d already be done fixing this by now if I’d just left them locked in the coop.

I hate doing that, though, and they’re trapped in there so often during the winter.

It’s been a particularly rough one, and it has only been getting colder.

I should let them enjoy being out as often as I can.

Testing the patched wire with my fingers, I sit back on my heels and turn a critical eye to the rest of it.

Tutu walks in front of me, head bobbing, grumbling softly.

Very carefully, I stroke my fingers over the soft red feathers on her back.

Before standing, I check behind me to make sure none of the others have moved closer where I could hurt them.

“Be go-go-go-good,” I finally manage to say as I leave, locking the door behind me.

Bending down to pick up the jacket I discarded on the grass, I hesitate. It’s a warmer day, sure, but it’s not warm. Tipping my head back, I look at the clear blue sky. It’s not supposed to snow, but I’ll keep an eye on it; let the chickens have another hour outside before I lock them back up.

Back in the house, I wash my hands in the kitchen sink.

The three eggs I gathered this morning are sitting in the bowl where I left them, mocking me slightly.

I should eat them. Fresh eggs are less frequent in the winter months, so I should take advantage of them when they come.

But, as has happened each time one of the girls has laid recently, my first thought isn’t of eating them but of sharing them.

If anyone would appreciate freshly laid eggs, it would be Oliver Martin.

Sighing, I dry my hands on a towel and look out the window over the sink, watching the chickens scurry around and peck at the dry ground.

I don’t think Oliver or Shiloh even know I keep chickens, so bringing eggs over unannounced would probably be a strange thing to do.

Usually, I just share them with my mom and sister, which is exactly what I should be doing this time around as well. Oliver doesn’t need my eggs.

Except…maybe he would appreciate them. He likes to cook, after all.

The only thing I’d be doing is frying them up to put on a slice of toast. A waste of fresh eggs, to be honest. Also, seeing as we didn’t have work today, there is every chance Oliver is at home, attempting repairs.

I’ve seen enough to appreciate the horror of that situation.

It might be a good idea to check on him.

Decided, I pull one of the spare egg cartons from my pantry and tuck the three eggs inside.

This is a weird thing to do. Knowing that, it shouldn’t take much for me to talk myself out of going.

Yet here I am, putting my coat back on to chase the chickens back inside their coop.

Eliza flaps her wings and squawks dramatically, fluttering her way up the ramp and doing a good job of frightening the rest further inside.

“I’ll check on you later,” I murmur, speaking each word deliberately as I latch the coop door.

I try to keep my sentences to a nice and tidy five words.

Less on a day where the stutter is worse, and definitely less if I’m stressed or meeting new people.

If there is one thing my twenty-seven years of life have given me, it’s a very solid understanding of the phrase “less is more.”

Oliver’s house is only a five-minute drive from mine, our properties separated by nothing but trees.

If I’d known the man before he signed on the dotted line, I would have warned him to keep on looking.

I would have steered him away from the crumbling old colonial and toward one of the new-build duplexes that had popped up on the town line.

But because I didn’t know him prior to his first day working on the boat with me and Shiloh, he unknowingly bought his snake oil straight from the salesman.

Honestly, I’m not sure he’s even figured out yet that he bought such a trash heap.

Not when he still refers to the house as a fixer-upper and still in a tone of voice one might use to describe their niece or a puppy.

It’s possible that’s just the way Oliver is, though—determined to see all his glasses as half-full, no matter how much water is actually there.

Pulling my truck to a stop in front of his house, I hop out and grab the eggs.

The grass crunches under my feet as I mount the sagging porch, shaking my head as I step over the rotted board.

The inside was more important when he first moved in, but now that it’s livable, it’s time to fix some of the exterior.

First up, this damn porch. Otherwise, he’ll come home exhausted from hauling one day, forget to hop the step, and put his foot through it.

Or I will, I suppose, on my next needless trip over to give him something he didn’t ask for.

I knock, listening carefully in case the man got his hands on a table saw or something. Silence feels like both a good and bad thing, because unfortunately, there is still a chance he’s doing something dangerous, just quietly. I knock again, a little louder.

Oliver answers the door with a hammer clutched in his hand like the opening scene of every horror movie ever made.

Earbuds are dangling from his neck by the cord, one of the drawstrings on his hoodie caught in the collar.

As always, he looks rumpled and adorable, like he rolled around in a bed before deciding to do housework.

“Nils!” he exclaims, eyes lighting up like a switch was flicked on behind them.

He always acts like I’m exactly the person he was hoping to see.

“Oh my gosh, were you out here long? I was listening to Britney Spears. Not the new stuff, but the old. The good albums—the classics. Do you want to come in? Hold on, let me deal with Britney.”

Silently, I follow him into the house, closing the door behind me and looking around.

He puts his knees together to hold the hammer between them, yanking the cord out from the phone in his hoodie pocket.

He must jostle the Play button, as Britney Spears lets us both know that she’s done it again through the speaker on the phone.

“Oops,” he mutters, turning it off completely and then grinning at me. Giving his hips a little shimmy, he adds, “Such a banger, though.”

I’m not sure Britney Spears and “banger” should ever be used in the same sentence, but I’ll concede that to him.

Oliver probably knows better than me. I hold the eggs out.

After grabbing the hammer, he takes the carton with his free hand, once more smiling like I’ve done something far more incredible than hand him three eggs.

“Fresh eggs,” I tell him carefully. I talk to myself at home, practicing mindfully wrapping my tongue around words in the hopes they’ll be easier to spit out in public.

Today was a bit of a mixed bag, half of them perfect and the other half halting and stuttered.

It’s less embarrassing to do it in front of the chickens than it is Oliver.

“No way. Do you have chickens? I would kill for fresh eggs every day, but I know they don’t produce as much in the winter.

In the summer, though? Think of all the things you could bake with a constant flow of eggs.

And eggs always taste better from chickens that are kept as pets—everyone knows that. How many do you have?”

He stops for a breath. “Seven,” I answer.

“Seven? Holy cow. What do you do with all the eggs? Are they all laying hens, or are some too old? If you ever have more than you can eat, I’ll pay you for them. Seriously, I will.” He brightens, a soft gasp falling from his lips as he thinks of something. “We could make cookies.”

I point at the hammer, forgotten in his left hand. He laughs.

“Oh, I was hanging something. I’ve almost got it straight, but I don’t know what happened to that level thing I bought, so I’ve just been eyeballing it.”

Keeping half an ear on his rambling, I glance around. He shouldn’t be hanging anything—none of the walls have been painted yet. Some still need plastering.

“I’ll he-e-elp,” I offer, grinding my teeth together on the last syllable.

I like Oliver, but he’s not easy to have a conversation with.

Not even because he’s so chatty it’s sometimes hard to get a word in edgewise, but because he’s a little too good-looking, a little too distracting when talking requires so much of my concentration.

Oliver’s pretty face might be good for the eyes, but it’s bad for the tongue.

If I want to have a conversation without stuttering, I have to pretend he’s the sun and not look directly at him.

“Really? I do think it would be easier with another set of hands. It’s actually a pretty big canvas.

I didn’t realize it until I lifted it up to the wall.

Heavy, too, although that’s mostly because it’s too long to hold comfortably.

” Setting the eggs down on the crate that is currently pretending to be a coffee table, he walks up the stairs, still talking at me over his shoulder.

“Probably why I’m not doing a very good job of getting it straight.

Ewan actually told me that the best way to hang it would be to have three people total, but I thought I could just do it myself. ”

“One of Ewan’s?” I ask, thankfully getting the man’s name out successfully.

I hate his mother for choosing that piece of work from the baby name book.

Words with a hard you-sound like that are hard for me, and I’ve still never quite recovered from the mortification of having to call on him during an assembly in elementary school; the way the teacher let me fumble for a solid minute, unable to do anything but repeat you, you, you, over and over again, the syllables getting harder the longer I tried, sick with nerves and embarrassment.

Eventually, she’d just done it herself, calling Ewan up and dismissing me back to my seat amid childish laughter.

I doubt anyone but me even remembers it.

There’s no way Ewan does, since he never bothered looking twice at anyone but Shiloh growing up.

“Yeah! I asked to see his studio, you know? I didn’t actually think he’d let me, since artists can be a little funny about people in their space.

But he said it was fine as long as Shiloh didn’t come along.

Anyway, he was working on this one ‘just for fun,’ he said, which is wild because”—Oliver gestures at the large canvas resting against his mattress—“look at it. Can you imagine making something like that for fun? He said I could have it when he finished, which I thought was a joke until Shiloh showed up to deliver it yesterday.”

Pausing for much-needed oxygen, Oliver rubs a hand over the back of his neck, thankfully not using the one with the hammer.

The comforter on his bed is rumpled and depressed in places where he’d been standing to try and hang the art.

Looking at the wall behind the headboard, I confirm one, that the walls are definitely still unpainted, and two, the nails are very much crooked.