Chapter 11 A Man Wearing a Literal Boa #4
“Oh yeah? What’s the world’s largest bottle of ketchup? A cutting commentary on American consumerism?”
“I find ketchup inherently sinister, so I can’t be objective on that one.”
His face strained, determined not to laugh. “This place was his last design. It’s the man’s final word on every visual story he wanted to tell. And since it’s unfinished, it’s like his conversation with nature never ended. Aren’t you curious what it was he died trying to say?”
She’d heard countless pretentious idiots regurgitate Vincent Groff’s Wikipedia page in the back seat of her car, but no one had ever spoken about him the way Elliot did.
Like he wasn’t some genius from on high, but an artist searching for something in his own work.
A man staring down an unfinished piece, begging for it to reveal itself.
She leaned her head against the driver’s-side window to get a better look at him. “You said that everyone thinks that’s where the bridge was supposed to go. I’m assuming that means you know the truth.”
His eyes glinted with triumph. “Of course.” He beckoned her out of the truck and led her to the back of the house, past the carport and the wall of windows, all the way to the messy patch of pea gravel Gran had laid down ages ago, a place to watch the sun sink into the lake in an Adirondack chair.
He stood behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders, positioning her until she was centered against the exterior of her house.
“See?” he whispered. His fingertips drifted lazily from the tops of her shoulders down her arms. For a second, she imagined the uninterrupted path of his fingers—the length of her wrists, the inside of her palms—but they stopped short just above her elbows.
“There’s a building plan on Reddit that shows a shallow, sloped deck, and for years, people were searching these woods for it to find this place—”
“There isn’t a deck on the house.”
“But no one knew that, and even now, they’re all stuck on this idea that it’s a functional bridge over a water feature or something you actually cross, but in the sketches he left your grandmother, you can see that it’s not an actual bridge, but a visual bridge.”
He lowered his head until his chin hovered just above her shoulder—moving closer and closer before halting their kinetic energy with a rush of heat against her skin.
Her breath caught. He wasn’t touching her in as many places as he easily could be, but she was just so…
aware of him. The warmth radiating off his body.
The smell of his soap. He was all over her but nowhere, all at once.
He swallowed hard beside her ear, her only clue as to whether their physical closeness had any effect on him at all.
“He was using the reflection of the sun on the lake right before sunset to connect with the angle of the deck so it created one continuous line stretching through the forest all the way to the other side of the water.” He raised his hand to her chin and let his thumb gently tug it down until her eyes were exactly where he wanted them.
The lake blurred into the sun, her vision fuzzing at the edges.
“See?” he asked her, dropping his hand. The touch lingered, a ghost of a physical presence just below her lips.
“Imagine the edge of a platform at the bottom of your field of vision disappearing into the sunlight reflected on the water. It’s a bridge.
Extending from the forest, over the water, all the way to…
forever,” he said, twirling the ring on his left hand.
She squinted at the horizon, searching until the image in her head revealed itself.
Then it did. She could see it. The yolky sun melting into the lake.
Reflections of saturated yellows and oranges bursting every which way.
Her lungs breathing in sunlight as her feet stood right at the edge of the world.
A collision of vision and nature. It was the kind of beautiful that felt vast and made her seem insignificant in the best possible way.
“Each day,” he continued, “our perspective of the sun shifts, but what he planned is for the bridge to connect perfectly at sunset on the summer solstice.”
She frowned at the sky. “So the guy who was a terror and refused to let anyone sleep picked the longest day of the year for his little project?”
He laughed, a little defensive. “It’s poetic.
People always talk about Vincent Groff like he’s this cold, modern architect, but the way he played with light and perspective was so…
whimsical. And deeply romantic.” His whisper brushed against the shell of her ear.
“He didn’t want to design stale, beautiful objects.
He wanted his homes to force his residents to confront their surroundings and find the natural beauty in them. ”
It was what she tried to do with her art. Grappling with the parts of nature that’d been abandoned, forcing herself to really see them.
That was when she felt it. Like starting to see what shape a sculpture would take. That itch she got when she knew she was onto something and inspired enough to see it through to the end. Compelled. “We should finish it ourselves,” she said.
She turned to face Elliot and found he was already looking at her.
“You really want to?” he asked. His face looked surprised that she’d offer to do anything with him, let alone this. But at the edges of his disbelief, she detected what she thought was hope. Excitement.
Her stomach jumped. She was playing with fire. “I’ve been thinking about it more—independent of anything you’ve suggested—and I’ve decided we should be friends. Like actual friends. Not friends.” She arched her brow. “And this is something I would do with a friend.”
He cocked his head to the side. “So now you want to be my friend. ‘What’s your angle?’ ”
She rolled her eyes. “Take the win, Hodges.”
“Okay,” he answered with a lopsided grin. “Let’s finish Forest’s Bridge together.”
The slanting sun painted his face in gold, and for a moment, she saw all of Elliot, right down to his beating heart, and she could almost imagine that he saw all of her.
“If earlier,” he started, his eyes on the water, “I’d told you that you looked really beautiful, would you have let it go to your head?”
The compliment, hypothetical or not, rearranged something inside her chest. She rolled her lips under her teeth and faced the sunset.
“Probably,” she responded, suppressing any trace of delight curling around the edges her voice.
“I’m incredibly susceptible to flattery.
Not to mention, it’s not the kind of thing you say to a totally platonic spouse. ”
She felt his warm gaze against her side profile as he said, “That’s what I was worried about. Good thing I kept that thought to myself.”
“Thank god for that,” she replied. Then she turned her heels on the pea gravel patio and walked inside.
Lainey could no longer pretend she didn’t want anything more from Elliot Hodges than access to medical insurance and a way out of town. She wanted…something.
And she wished more than anything that she knew what that was.