Chapter Six Vivien
Drew leaves with his father who is more than an hour late for the pickup. But at least he showed, that’s progress I suppose. Thoran and I have stepped into the next part of our obligation, the dreaded photo shoot.
The photographer has us on a stump for forty minutes.
Not just any stump, it’s the stump. It’s the massive cedar round they haul out for every event in this town. It’s sanded, shellacked and hung with plaid bunting. There's a crowd, of course. Jules is directing from six feet back with a coffee in each hand and no intention of drinking either one.
"Closer," she calls. "Vivien, honey, you're standing next to him like he's a coworker."
"He is a coworker, remember,” I mumble. It’s taking everything in me not to lose myself in the moment.
"Closer," she insists.
“I’m on it.” Thoran puts his hands on me and I melt under the heat of his touch.
One hand is at my waist, spread wide, with a thumb along the bottom of my ribs.
The other comes up and moves my hair off my shoulder like he's done it a hundred times before, like it's his to move.
I feel the heat everywhere. The shutter goes and Jules coos with delight.
Thoran turns me a few degrees into the light. The shutter goes again.
"Perfect," the photographer says. "Now laugh at something."
"I don't know what to laugh at," I say. “This is so not my skill set.”
Thoran leans down and says something into my ear that is not remotely appropriate for a family festival. I laugh so hard I have to grab his forearm to stay on the stump.
Click.
"That's the one," Jules says, delighted. "That's the poster. Adios AI Lumberjack Lovers."
“We’re done then?” I ask.
“Not even close, maybe a little more serious now.”
It goes on. Thoran puts a hand into the back of my hair and pins my head to that perfect spot on his chest. Somebody wants us with the axe. Somebody shouts for Thoran to lift me. He does it in one effortless swoop.
By the time the photographer starts changing lenses again, Thoran's hand has settled at the small of my back. My whole body has quietly stopped pretending to be surprised about it. He dips his head. His mouth is at my temple.
"Come on. Let's get out of here."
"Wait, did they say? I think we're not done—"
"We're done." His lip curls at the corner.
Thoran pulls me in against his side and we slip out the back door of the arena into the loading corridor. He makes another turn and all of a sudden we’re in the alley behind it. The noise cuts off to a distant hum.
It's cooler back here. Green and damp with a lagoon smell that comes up strong between the buildings. There's a stack of pallets, somebody's forgotten sawhorse, and a strip of sky going gold above the roofline.
I put my back against the block wall and press my hands flat to it.
"Okay," I breathe. "Okay."
He doesn't crowd me. Thoran leans on the opposite wall with his arms crossed and gives me the whole width of the alley, and somehow that's worse.
"You want to sit down?"
"I want—" I laugh, and it comes out shaky. "I don't know what I want. That was a lot."
"It was."
"Everyone in that arena thinks—" I shake my head at the thought.
"I know what they think. Let them."
I glance at him. He looks back, steady as the wall behind him, and he does not fill the silence. That's the thing about him. Thoran doesn't fill silences. I spent years with a man who filled every single one, who talked over the top of every hard thing until the hard thing gave up and went away.
He deserves to know what he’s getting into with me no matter how short lived our arrangement is, so this time, I fill the silence.
"I’ve only been divorced for about a year. Drew's dad lives in Peony Pointe. So he goes back and forth quite a bit," I say.
Thoran doesn't move.
"Two hours out. Or two hours back, depending on which direction you think I'm facing." I fold my arms. "It's the bigger town. Better schools and actual grocery stores, a vet who isn't also a taxidermist. Everybody up here says it like it's a place people move to."
"Some do, but I’ve been and I’m not impressed."
"I was one of them." I pick at a chip in the block wall with my thumbnail.
"I married him at twenty-four. I did the books for his shop.
I did the calls, the invoices, the ordering, all of it really.
For nine years, I was the groomer and none of it had my name on it anywhere.
" I shrug. "That was fine. I told myself it was fine, because it was ours. "
"And then it wasn't." There’s no judgement in his tone, just a genuine need to understand.
"And then it wasn't." I look up. "He didn't do anything dramatic, if that's what you're waiting for.
There's no big story. He never wanted to be a dad. I think I thought he’d change his mind over time.
Instead he just got smaller and smaller about me.
Little corrections. Little jokes with an edge on them.
And then one day I heard myself apologize for the way I laughed, and I thought, huh. "
Thoran's jaw does something. But whatever it is, he keeps it there.
"He sees Drew when it's convenient," I say. "It's not often convenient."
"Drew told me that. First day, in about six words. Around the time I watched you put up the sign at your shop.”
"Yeah, well." My eyes sting and I blink it back. "My son is nothing if not efficient."
For a while there's nothing but the hum of the arena and a truck downshifting somewhere out on Main.
"You know the first sign I ever made?" I say, laughing at myself. "I found a piece of barn wood and pulled it out of a burn pile. I painted it by hand, at the kitchen table, at eleven at night, because that was the only time I had. Vivien's Grooming."
"How'd it turn out?"
"It was ugly, crooked." I'm smiling now and I can't stop. "But I loved it at the time. I thought it was good, was proud of it even. I did a whole photo shoot of it like I would be some kind of social media star. It was silly when I think back."
"Where's it hang now?"
And there it is. Thoran put his finger on the crux of my entire first marriage in one simple question.
"It doesn't." I have to look at the pallets. "He said it looked homemade. Said it made him look like he couldn't afford to get his wife a real sign. He put it back in the burn pile and I—" My throat closes. "I let him. That's the part. Nobody took it from me, I handed it right over."
The words come out with more in them than I meant to put there.
I hear the change in the light before I hear him move.
He pushes off the wall, and then he's in front of me. He’s close enough that I have to tip my chin up.
Thoran doesn't touch me. He puts one hand on the wall by my shoulder and leaves it there.
"You still got the picture?" he asks.
I blink. "What picture?"
"You said you took pictures of it." His voice is low and even. "You still got it?"
"I… probably yes. Somewhere. On an old phone maybe.”
"Then it's not gone."
"It's a photograph—"
"It's a set of measurements," he says. "It's a color, and a shape, and a lean on the last G. I've got a shop with a table saw in it and a stack of cedar I can't do anything with until Lumberjack Days pays for that pad." He shrugs one shoulder. "Send me the picture."
I stare at him.
"You want to rebuild my ugly sign."
"I want to build your sign." He says it like a man reading off a work order.
Something enormous turns over in my chest and I cannot get a breath around it.
"Thoran—"
"You don't have to hang it out front," he says. "Hang it over the dryers. Hang it in the back where nobody sees it but you. That's not my business."
And that's what does it. It’s not the offer. It’s the way he hands it to me and then takes his hands off it.
I look up at him in the gold light coming down between two buildings, with the whole town roaring on the other side of that wall about a couple who is supposed to be pretending. I take a breath because I know if I do this, I will lose myself in an instant.
I do it anyway.
I reach up and take a fistful of his shirt. I feel my way across the chiseled lines in his stomach. Thoran doesn't move. Not one inch. Instead, he lets me pull. He lets me be the one who closes the space between us.
In the half second before my mouth finds his I understand that he's been standing here this whole time waiting for me to decide. Then I kiss him, and he stops waiting. Our lips press together and he parts them with his tongue. It’s desperate and full of heat.
His hand comes off the wall and slides into my hair. He cradles the back of my head like it's something breakable. His other hand finds my waist and gathers me in. He kisses me the way he does everything else, unhurried and certain.
My back meets the block wall. His thumb moves along my jaw. Somewhere on the other side of six inches of concrete a crowd cheers about something that has nothing to do with us. Then I can't hear anything over the sound of my own breathing.
I lose myself exactly the way I knew I would. But the terrible part is that this kiss doesn't feel like losing anything at all. It feels like being handed something back.
He breaks first, barely. Rests his forehead against mine. His hand stays in my hair. "Vivien." My name comes out rough. “Let me take you home.”