Sophia
I'd been up since before six — not because I had to be, but because somewhere around quarter to, the wide-awake part of me decided lying still was off the morning's schedule.
Last night, on his porch, in the dark, I'd asked Caleb Maddox to come to mine for breakfast. He'd said yes — that low yeah, the drawl under it — and I'd woken still hearing it.
It was now ten of seven and the frittata I had in the oven still had a few minutes left on it.
While it finished, I cut strawberries into halves, then quarters, then a precision no strawberry has ever asked of anyone.
There were four shirts on my bedroom floor; the one I had on, soft green, was the one I'd decided looked like I hadn't tried, the trick to which is about an hour of trying.
I'd put on the mascara I tell myself doesn't count.
I had, in plain fact, put a face on for him, and I was choosing not to follow that thought to where it went.
Under all of it was the one thing I wasn't catastrophizing about at all: that I wanted him to come up that path. That part was simple. It was the only simple thing in the room.
I checked the clock. 6:52. I pulled the frittata out of the oven, hoping it would have a few minutes to cool before he arrived.
He started at the shop at eight, and breakfast plus a man who is never late came out to roughly now.
I wiped my hands on the tea towel and made my palm go flat on the counter and stay there.
The table was set for two, something I had rarely — if ever — done in the four years I had lived here.
A knuckle hit the front door. Two raps, unhurried.
I let out a deep exhale, and went to answer it.
He stood on my porch with the new sun behind him, and the one coherent thought I managed was that it ought to be illegal for a man to be put together like that before seven in the morning.
Six four, built by actual work and not by mirrors, dark hair he plainly hadn't run past anyone, whiskey-brown eyes fixed on me over the slow lazy curl of a smile that started at the left corner of his mouth and took its time getting anywhere.
He held up a tray of coffee and a paper bag, while I forgot to say good morning.
His eyes went past me to the laid table, the strawberries, the kitchen warm with breakfast. He looked at the fruit and put whatever it was away.
“You cooked.”
“I did.”
“I brought coffee. Figured I'd save you a job.”
“I have coffee.” There was a full pot going cold on the counter, made at five-twenty and abandoned the second the frittata worried me.
He looked at the pot, looked at the tray, and the left side of his mouth went up. “We'll be awake, then.”
“That appears to be the operating assumption.” I stood back. “Come in before my neighbors start a newsletter.”
He came in and the cottage shrank around him. He set the tray down and didn't sit until I waved him at a chair, then pulled it out and sat with his forearms on the wood like he'd been doing it for years.
I cut the frittata and slid a wedge onto his plate. He leaned in to take it and brought his scent with him — sandalwood and warm skin and something underneath it that was just him, all man, and close enough now to fill my whole kitchen.
He pointed his fork at the plate. “This beats anything Dottie's has ever put in front of me.” He cut a glance at the door. “Don't you dare tell her I said that.”
“I'll deny it under oath.”
“Where'd you learn to cook like this?”
“Aunt Lou. She ran a kitchen the whole street walked through, a peach cobbler people planned their week around, and one iron rule — any kid who ate at her table learned to feed themselves first. So we all did, one summer at a time. She wouldn't accept that anybody was helpless.”
“Were you helpless?”
“Deeply.” I smiled. “She kept me anyway.”
He reached over and took a strawberry off the edge of my plate like he'd been doing it for years. I let him. Then he reached into the bag and set a blueberry muffin the size of a softball on a napkin in front of me.
“Oh, yum.” It came out on a breath. “Thank you, Dottie.”
“Breakfast dessert.” He said it like he was reading it off a statute.
I laughed at that. “Is that a thing?”
“Course it's a thing.” He nudged the napkin half an inch closer. “Eat your dessert, Sophia.”
We took the second coffee to the porch — the kitchen had too much in it, and the porch had the morning instead, the cul-de-sac going gold at its edges, a sprinkler ticking two houses down.
I sat on the top step. He sat one below it, which put his shoulder by my knee and his forearms along his thighs in the full light, and the forearms were the trouble.
They were covered. I'd caught the edge of it at his collar across the road and past his sleeve in the trauma bay, but never sitting still in good light with leave to look. So I looked.
“You're reading me,” he said, not turning his head.
“Occupational hazard. You should see what I put people through in waiting rooms.”
He turned his arm over, the inside of it up to the light. “Go on. Diagnose.”
A compass rose on the back of the wrist. A run of script I didn't let myself read.
An anchor. And lower, near the bend of the elbow, a band of names in heavier, older ink — a different hand, a different year, nothing you get for decoration.
My eye caught on it, and I moved on, because some tattoos are a man's history and some are his grief, and you don't put a finger on a stranger's grief over coffee.
“Military,” I said, nodding at the compass and the anchor. “And you didn't pick these off a flash sheet. Someone who knew you did them.”
“Most of 'em.” He held my eyes a beat too long, and the porch went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with the hour.
I looked down into my coffee, which was safer. “I'll stop. I read strangers like charts and then I say the chart out loud, and I am now going to drink my coffee and be a normal person.”
He didn't drink his coffee, just kept that almost-smile on me, and I'd got as far as planning my own quiet death by mug when rescue arrived in a kaftan.
“Morning, lovebirds!”
Willow stood at her fence in a kaftan the color of a tropical disease and a sunhat the size of a satellite dish, watering can in hand, the whole of her tipped toward us.
“Morning, Willow.”
“Don't ‘morning Willow’ me, I have eyes. Caleb Maddox on Sophia's porch at the crack of dawn.” She fanned herself with the hat. “I'm eighty-four, dear. I am not dead.”
“Belly dancing today?” I tried.
“Nine sharp, and Deborah does not hold the back row.” She pointed the hat at me like a wand. “You two enjoy your day. And don't be good.”
"We'll do our best," Caleb said, and the smile went all the way up and took his eyes with it, and he shook his head at Willow like she was a much-loved menace.
“That's the spirit.” She gathered her can and her dignity and sailed up her path.
He watched her go, then turned the slow look back on me, and the morning tilted toward something.
“So,” I said, before it could get there. “Show me what's in your garage.”
He took my hand and walked me over — down the path and across the warm asphalt of my own road, in front of God and Willow and anyone awake. His garage door was up. He'd left it up before he ever knocked on mine.
I stopped in the mouth of it and forgot the door, because of the bike.
I had never once looked at it in daylight.
It was black, and then it wasn't: a deep oxblood came up through it at the edges of the tank, lit from inside where the light caught.
Worked into it, fine and patient and nothing a machine had done, was a long line of artwork running the tank and down the cowl.
I stepped closer without choosing to, and closer, until I saw the pattern was made of things — a compass rose I'd had eighteen inches from my face ten minutes ago, a run of script, a shape near the back I couldn't yet make out.
"You did that." It didn't come out as a question.
"Yeah."
"All of it. The build. The paint." I couldn't look away from it to look at him. "All of it."
"All of it. Better part of two years."
My hand came up and stopped an inch off the tank, the heat coming up off the metal into my palm. He'd come up on my left; I felt the warmth of him down my side before he spoke.
"You can touch it," he said, low.
I laid my hand on the steel. Sun-warm, and smooth, and under the smooth the faint grain of every layer he'd put down.
I followed the line of the artwork with one finger, toward the shape I hadn't been able to read — and he leaned in over my shoulder to point it out, his chest warm against my back, close enough that I heard him breathe.
And the shape came clear. A headstone. Worked into the oxblood, small and exact, and across the face of it, fine as thread, a name. JASON.
I went still over it. I'd walked past that name once already this morning — the band of older, heavier ink at the bend of his elbow, the piece I hadn't touched.
"Who's Jason?" I'd turned to face him; the bike couldn't answer me.
He took a breath and let it go.
He was looking at the painted headstone, not at me, and his voice dropped under the drawl to something with no lean left in it.
"Jace is what I called him. Best friend I ever had.
Since we were kids — two streets apart, every spare hour with our heads under the same dead engine, teaching ourselves the whole of it off a manual because we were too stubborn to think we couldn't. He had better hands than me. Never got around to telling him."
"What happened?"
"Killed. We were seventeen. Wrong place, wrong time — some man with a gun and a bad night, and Jace standing where it came down. Nothing to do with anything." His jaw worked once. "That's the part that —" He stopped and didn't finish.
I looked back at the bike. "And this is —"