3. Levi
LEVI
Igo back that afternoon.
I don’t have a reason. I spent three hours at home after leaving the gallery this morning, sitting at my kitchen table with a carving tool in my hand, a block of pine in front of me, didn’t make a single cut.
I kept thinking about her face when I said the thing about the carving.
Sounds like what I say about the carving.
The way her expression changed, not dramatically, not a flinch, but something behind her eyes going still.
The same thing I felt when she called my carving work.
So I’m back. No excuse, no pretense. The bell chimes and she looks up from the counter, and if she’s surprised to see me twice in one day she doesn’t show it.
“Gallery’s open till five,” she says.
“I know.”
She almost smiles. Almost. It’s there in the corners of her mouth and then it’s gone, and I want to see what it looks like when it actually lands.
I notice her hands first. There’s a gray smudge along the edge of her right palm, another across two fingers.
A sketchbook sits open on the counter next to a stack of invoices, charcoal pencil resting in the spine.
She’s been drawing. She sees me notice and closes it, slides it under the invoices. But the smudge gives her away.
“What were you drawing?” I ask.
“Nothing.” She slides the sketchbook further under the stack. “Just keeping my hands busy.”
I don’t push. I understand the instinct to close a door when someone looks too closely, because I’ve been doing it my entire life.
Instead, I walk to the watercolor I stood in front of this morning.
The ridge at sunset, the smoke-colored sky.
I look at it again, and it’s still good.
I still feel it—that quiet pull a piece of art has when the person who made it was paying real attention to something.
“I never told anyone about the carving,” I say.
I don’t know why I start talking. She hasn’t asked me anything.
But the gallery is quiet, and there’s something about the way she listens that makes me want to put words in the space between us.
“After my grandfather died, I kept going. Every night, the kitchen table, door closed. It was the only thing I’d ever done where my hands got to be careful instead of strong. ”
She comes out from behind the counter. Leans against the edge of it with her arms crossed, watching me. Not interrupting.
“I didn’t want anyone to know because the second somebody sees a guy my size doing something delicate, they turn it into a story.
The gentle giant. The big softie. Another version of me that somebody else made up.
” I look at my hands. They’re resting at my sides, loose, and I’m aware of how large they are in this room full of delicate things.
“I’d rather people think there’s nothing under the surface than watch them invent something that isn’t there. ”
She’s quiet for a long time. Then she uncrosses her arms and walks back behind the counter. My stomach sinks. I’ve said too much, gone too far, been too honest with a woman I’ve known for less than two days. But she doesn’t close the conversation.
The sketchbook comes out. She sets it on the counter between us, her fingers resting on the cover, and I can see her deciding. The same calculation I make every time someone gets close to the carvings. How much to show. How much it will cost.
She opens it.
The first portrait stops me.
It’s Lea. Lea Monroe from the coffee shop, drawn in charcoal, cradling a ceramic mug.
The likeness is perfect, but that’s not what gets me.
It’s the look on Lea’s face—a private, unguarded moment of someone holding something warm and thinking about something far away.
Iris caught her between the version of Lea that greets customers and the version that exists when nobody’s looking.
I turn the page. Laurelle, bending over a bucket of wildflowers, her fingers deep in the stems. Neve behind the bar at the brewpub, eyes closed, head tipped back, a half second of exhaustion she’d never let anyone see.
Millie laughing. Kendall mid-sentence, caught in the middle of a word, her whole face alive with whatever she was saying.
Page after page. The Trading Post shop owners, tourists I don’t recognize, a few locals I do.
An older man asleep on the courtyard bench with his hat over his eyes.
A kid crouched in front of the ceramics shop, poking a stick into the cobblestones.
Each one drawn with a tenderness that makes my throat tight, because every single one captures something its subject would never willingly show.
“These are incredible,” I say.
“They’re just sketches.”
I look up at her. She’s watching me page through the book with her arms crossed again, protective, her fingers gripping her own elbows. The deflection is so familiar it almost makes me laugh. It’s just something I do. It’s not anything.
“Iris.”
“They’re practice. They keep my hand sharp for framing and matting work.”
“Iris.”
She stops. My voice is quiet, but she hears something in it that makes her go still.
“These belong on the walls.”
“They’re not…”
She trails off. Looks at the sketchbook in my hands, then at the gallery walls covered in other people’s art, and I can see the sentence she won’t finish.
They’re not good enough. She can spot extraordinary in a stranger’s carving thirty seconds after holding it, but she can’t see it in her own work.
“Why won’t you let me show your work?” she asks.
Turning it back on me. I know the move because I made the same one this morning.
“Why won’t you show yours?”
The question sits between us. Neither of us picks it up because the answer is the same for both of us. We both know it now, and saying it out loud would make it real.
I set the sketchbook on the counter. My fingers brush hers as she reaches to take it back, and the contact goes through me in a way I wasn’t prepared for.
Her hand is small and warm, charcoal dust still on her fingertips, and I can feel the faint grit of it against my skin.
My hand could close around both of hers with room to spare.
She doesn’t pull away. I don’t either. We stay like that for a beat too long, her fingers under mine, the sketchbook forgotten between us.
The gallery is quiet. Late afternoon light coming through the windows, hitting the carved cobblestones in the window display at the angle I designed them for. She’s looking up at me, and I’m looking down at her, and the space between us has been shrinking without either of us deciding to close it.
“Stay,” she says. “I close at five. Stay until then.”
I stay.
She goes back to work. Adjusting a frame on the east wall, answering an email, wrapping a small ceramic piece for a customer who comes in at 4:30.
I sit on the bench near the window and watch her move through the space she built, and I understand something about her that I didn’t have words for this morning.
She made this gallery the way I make a carving.
Every piece placed with intention, every frame chosen to show the work at its best, the lighting and the spacing and the flow from wall to wall.
The gallery is her art. She just won’t call it that.
At five, she locks the front door and turns the sign.
The courtyard outside is going golden, the last of the September sun catching the old mining-era stonework and the iron railings.
She switches off the track lighting, and the gallery goes soft—just the window light and the glow from the courtyard.
I should leave. I know I should leave. She closed, and I’m still on the bench by the window, and neither of us is moving toward the door.
She pulls the sketchbook back out and opens it. Then she grabs a piece of charcoal from the cup by the register and looks at me.
“Don’t move,” she says.
“What?”
“The light on you right now.” She’s already drawing, her eyes flicking between the page and my face with a focus so sharp it feels physical. “Just…stay where you are.”
I sit still. I’m good at still. People expect restlessness from someone my size, the same way they expect aggression, but I’ve always been the one who can hold a position longer than anyone else on the crew. Patience is the thing nobody reads off my body correctly.
Her charcoal moves in quick, confident strokes—nothing like the hesitation in her voice when she talks about her own work. Her hands know something her mouth won’t admit.
“You do this a lot,” I say. “Draw people who don’t know you’re watching.”
“You know I’m watching.”
“Yeah.” My voice comes out lower than I mean it to. “I do.”
Her hand slows. She looks at me over the top of the sketchbook, and the gallery is so quiet I can hear her breathing change.
The gold light from the courtyard is hitting the left side of her face and leaving the right in shadow, and I think about how I would carve that.
The angle of her jaw. The line where light becomes dark.
The hollow at the base of her throat where her pulse is beating faster than it was a minute ago.
“I’m only getting your face,” she says. “The flannel is hiding everything.”
The words sit in the air between us. She hears herself say them and goes still, and her cheeks flush, and she starts to backtrack.
“I mean the anatomy. For a portrait to work, I need to see the structure underneath. The muscle and the bone. The way the shoulder connects to the…”
She trails off. Her fingers are tight on the charcoal.
I unbutton the flannel and shrug it off my shoulders.
Her breath catches. I hear it clearly in the quiet of the closed gallery.
She’s staring at me, charcoal suspended above the page, and whatever she was about to say is gone.
I’m sitting on the bench in the last of the daylight, bare from the waist up, and she’s looking at me the way she looked at my carving.
Reading the surface. Seeing what’s underneath.
“All of it?” I ask.
Her eyes come back to mine. I watch her process the question. I watch her understand that I’m not flexing or posturing or giving her the version of my body that other people have always demanded. I’m asking if she wants to see what’s actually there.
“All of it,” she says.