2. Wren
Wren
Three beats smooth, one beat catch. The fan in the corner has this hitch in the motor I keep meaning to fix and never do, because the rhythm’s good for working. My hands know the count even when my brain’s checked out completely.
Right now, my brain is definitely somewhere else.
Sawdust and linseed oil, that faint metal tang from the belt sander I haven’t cleaned. It gets into everything. My clothes, my hair. Mom says it was “the smell of a life,” when she’d come home from the studio with clay under her nails and kiln smoke hovering around her. I guess this is mine.
The bark texture on the lower trunk is almost right.
I’m working with a V-gouge, making shallow passes, following the photo I pinned up weeks ago of a white oak from the east side of campus, one with this crazy twist in the trunk where it grew around a fence post someone left behind forty years ago.
The tree just swallowed it. Made it part of itself. I like that.
My festival piece stands waist-high on the worktable, branches reaching up like open hands. Individual leaves on the first two layers, veined and thin enough that the overhead light comes through. The canopy’s going to spread wide when it’s done. Generous. The way a real tree is.
I set the gouge down and run my thumb over the joint where branch meets trunk. Smooth. Clean grain.
Behind me, the acceptance letter for the Summer Arts Festival is tacked to the corkboard.
It’s been up there two weeks, pinned next to a photo of my mom at her potter’s wheel and an invoice for the Harmon Hall stairwell.
I read it once, my stomach did this weird hollow flip, and I haven’t looked at it since.
The tree will have to speak for me. People will either get it or they won’t.
What I’m definitely not looking at is the shelf.
It runs along the back wall, right over the belt sander. On it, an assortment of half-finished and abandoned birds.
Because for the past year, I’ve been carving birds for an omega I’ve never actually spoken to. Which is totally reasonable. Anyone would do that. Other people doomscroll or play twelve hours of Elden Ring; I speedrun “deeply weird anonymous courtship ritual.”
Seven already delivered. Each one placed somewhere I knew he’d find it.
The last one took me almost a month to get right.
I sanded the beak four times because the first three weren’t right, and Soren would know.
He wouldn’t know he knew. He’d just hold it and something would feel off, some fraction of a millimeter, and the whole thing would lose its magic.
The anonymous artist would become just some guy who rushed a beak.
That’s the thing. Off the shelf, in his hands, the birds are perfect.
They say exactly what I mean. It’s the guy behind them who’d ruin it.
Me, showing up with sawdust in my hair and nothing interesting to say, three-day-old cereal bowls piled in the sink, and watching whatever version of me he’s built in his head just... fall apart.
I pick up the gouge. Back to the bark.
My phone buzzes on the bench. I ignore it. It buzzes again. And again. Three in a row.
I sigh. Wipe my hands on my jeans and grab it.
Aaron: bro
Aaron: you’re in your sad cave aren’t you
I type back: Working.
Aaron: WORKING he says. working on what. the tree or another gift for your boyfriend who doesn’t know you exist
Aaron: come out tomorrow. coffee. noon. you’re coming. this is not a negotiation
Aaron: if you say “busy” i will come to your workshop and sing
Ugh. History says that he absolutely will.
Fine.
Aaron: wear a shirt without sawdust on it. it’s called making an effort
I switch the phone off and turn back to the tree. The bark needs another hour, maybe two.
It’s the rest of me that needs work.
***
Aaron’s already at a table when I get to the campus coffee shop the next day, which—okay, I’m like four minutes late, so that’s not the flex he thinks it is.
He’s got two drinks ordered already and is hunched over an open engineering textbook, dark hair catching the light.
There’s a dark streak of graphite along the side of his thumb.
He must have come straight from lab. He straightens up when he sees me, eyes bright.
“You’re late,” he says.
“You’re early.” I pull out the chair across from him. The coffee shop is half-full, one of those generic playlists going, the kind that sounds like the acoustic cover of every song that’s ever existed.
“I’m always early. It’s called respect.” He pushes one of the drinks toward me. “You look like you slept in your workshop again.”
“I didn’t.”
“Your hair says you did.”
I try to flatten it with one hand. It doesn’t work. Aaron grins at me, the same grin he’s had since he was four and figured out that being louder than me was basically a cheat code, and I’ve never found a counter for it.
“So.” He leans back, crossing his arms, studying me with that look that means he’s about to be an asshole on purpose and enjoy every second of it. “How’s the tree?”
“Good. Third branch is roughed in. Canopy will take another week, maybe.”
“And the birds?”
“What about them.”
“You carved another one, didn’t you? Which one this time?”
I hesitate, but there’s no point in resisting. He’ll only keep poking at me until I tell him. “A cedar waxwing.”
“A cedar waxwing.” He says it slowly. “And why a cedar waxwing, specifically?”
I take a drink of my coffee. “They’re interesting birds.”
“Uh huh. Nothing to do with the guy.”
“Their crests have good lines. Architecturally.”
“Architecturally.” Aaron drops his head onto his textbook and actually thunks it. “Wren. You are the most hopeless person alive. Like, genuinely, as a species, you should not have made it. Natural selection had a whole plan and you just walked right past it carving a cedar waxwing.”
“And yet here I am.”
“Here you are. Carving birds for a stranger—“
“He’s not a stranger.”
Dammit.
Aaron’s eyebrows go up.
“Oh, he’s not? So you’ve talked to him? Introduced yourself? Gotten his number? Had a single conversation that wasn’t you leaving a bird somewhere and running away?”
I wrap my hands around the cup. Open my mouth—
“And don’t say you aren’t doing that. You strategically relocate. It’s running away with extra steps.”
“It’s not—“ I stop. Take a deep breath. “They’re just things I make. He seems like the kind of person who’d appreciate them. That’s all.”
Aaron just looks at me. Long enough that I have to stare at the table instead.
“Wren.” His soft, concerned voice is worse than his teasing. “You’ve been doing this for too long. You’ve carved him a literal aviary at this point, and I know you try to coordinate your shifts with maintenance around where you know he’ll be. You told me about the library last month.”
“The card reader kept breaking.”
“And that was an emergency requiring multiple repair jobs, because? You made up reasons to go back.”
I don’t say anything. I run my thumb along the edge of the table.
“You can’t keep hiding behind the gifts instead of being a real person to him,” Aaron says. “Like, with your mouth. Using words. The birds are you at your best, I get it. But he doesn’t know that. He’s falling for a ghost.”
“I know what words are.”
“Do you? Your last text to me was ‘fine.’ I get more emotional depth from a parking meter.”
“Parking meters don’t text.”
“My point exactly.” He leans forward, elbows on the table. “I’m serious, man. The birds are incredible. You’re the most talented person I know, and I’ll deny I ever said that. But he can’t fall for the gift if he doesn’t know who gave it. At some point you actually have to—“
The bell over the door chimes.
Warm air blows in from outside. And with it, laughter, bright and layered, two other voices tangled up with one that drops my stomach through the floor.
I look up.
Soren walks in.
He’s mid-sentence, gesturing with one hand, the other holding the strap of his ever-present canvas bag.
He’s wearing one of his cute cardigans that I would bet money he knitted himself.
This one is a deep blue-purple that looks almost royal against his skin.
His friend says something, and Soren’s head tips back when he laughs. A flush crawls up his neck.
Lavender and ink cut through the espresso in the air, his scent threading into the room. I go still.
The line of his throat when he laughs. His soft-looking skin.
The tiny flutter of pulse right below his jaw.
My mouth actually waters. I want to put my teeth there.
I want to feel that pulse under my tongue.
My whole body goes hot and stupid in a way that has zero business happening in a coffee shop at noon.
Mine, some animal part of me says, low and sure and completely unbothered by my opinion.
I’m a grown man with a job and a 401(k) match I don’t understand and I am, right now, in public, thinking about what the skin behind his ear would feel like under my thumb. Great. Normal. Aaron is going to see it on my face in about four seconds.
”—and I’m telling you, if the wood elf doesn’t show his face soon, we’re hiring a PI,“ his friend is saying.
“You’re not hiring a private investigator for my secret admirer.” Soren’s voice is warm and a little embarrassed, trying to sound firm and failing. “That’s insane.”
“What’s insane is you’ve been getting handmade gifts from a mystery alpha and you haven’t even tried to find him.“ His other friend chimes in. He tosses back his overlong fringe, nose ring glinting, and starts looking around the shop.
I grab Aaron’s engineering textbook and hold it up in front of my face.
Aaron blinks at me. I must look insane.
“Are you,” he whispers, “hiding behind my textbook?”
“I’m reading.”
“It’s upside down.”
I flip it. My hands are not entirely steady.
“It’s not concerning. It’s...” Soren stops, and my heart is going to come out of my throat. It’s what? What? “It’s nice. Someone is being nice. Can we not make it weird?”
“It was weird on bird three,” the first friend says. “We’ve left weird behind. This is devotion territory.”
“He’s an artist,” Soren says, voice rising a little. “Whoever he is. The detail... you don’t do that unless you care about what you’re making.”
He’s right. I do care.
“Wren.” Aaron’s voice is barely a breath.
I lower the textbook about an inch. Aaron’s staring at me, mouth open, his gaze cutting from my face to Soren’s back and back again. Realization passes over his face, followed by absolute glee.
“Holy shit,” Aaron whispers. “That’s him. That’s the guy. That’s your guy.”
“Shut up.”
“Oh my God. He’s right there. He’s fifteen feet away—“
“Aaron. Shut. Up.”
“Go talk to him.”
“No.”
“Wren, he just called you an artist. Go say hi. Say literally anything. Say ‘nice weather.’ Say ‘I want to marry you.’ I don’t care.”
“I can’t just walk up to him—“
“And what? Participate in society? You’re holding my textbook like a riot shield, man, it can’t get worse than this.”
It can. It absolutely can. Because Soren’s at the counter now, his back to us. He orders, I can’t hear what, just the soft cadence of his voice, and then he laughs at something the barista says. Easy. Open. Like laughter is something he does with everyone he meets.
I shift in my chair, trying to think about literally anything other than the way his shoulders move under that cardigan. Sandpaper grits. The fan in my workshop. Three beats smooth, one beat catch. The way his throat would look with my mark on it.
Doesn’t work.
Aaron kicks me under the table. Hard. “Go. Now. While his friends aren’t looking.”
“I’m not ambushing him at a coffee counter.”
“It’s not an ambush, it’s a greeting. Humans do it. You’re technically one of those.”
“Technically.”
“Wren—“
“What am I supposed to say? ‘Hey, I’m the guy who’s been leaving you carved birds because I watched you read a poem on a bench once and thought you were the most beautiful person I’d ever seen and it broke my brain’?”
Aaron pauses. “Okay. Maybe don’t lead with that exact sentence.”
Soren gets his drink and turns. For half a second he faces our direction, his eyes scanning the room, and I raise the textbook again. Lavender and ink drift past when he walks by, close enough that my fingers twitch on the cover, and every instinct I have says follow him.
A few seconds later, the door chimes.
Gone.
Around us the coffee shop fills back up with normal sounds: the espresso machine hissing, someone’s laptop playing a video too loud. Aaron’s quiet for a long time. He takes his textbook back from me and sets it on the table.
“You know,” he says, not teasing at all, “at some point the birds aren’t enough. You have to actually be the guy who made them.”
I drink the rest of my coffee. It’s cold and it tastes like the inside of a cardboard box.
“I know.”
I’ve known for a long time. Since the first one. Since I left that little robin on the bench and watched from across the quad as he picked it up and held it to his chest like it was the most precious thing he’d ever seen.
I knew then. And I want to keep him.
Aaron kicks me under the table one last time, softer, and I let him.