3. Fran
— ? —
Fran
Fifteen Months Earlier
Four months into the marriage, and I still don’t know what to do with the nights.
We have a rhythm now, and it’s the rhythm of two people who share an address and not much else.
This morning I’m at the counter by six, travel mug in hand, when Logan comes down already dressed for the workshop.
He nods. I nod. “Hartley dinner’s Thursday,” he says.
“I’ll meet you there.” “The caterer needs a final count.” “Sent it yesterday.” He fills a thermos with tea, and for a moment his hand rests on the counter eight inches from mine, close enough that I can feel the heat coming off his skin, and neither of us moves to close the gap.
Then he’s gone, out to the shop or the Davis offices, and I drive to my flower farm and lose myself in soil and stems and the honest work of growing things.
Dinner, on the nights we manage to eat together, runs the same way: quiet, practical, two people passing the salt and their schedules across a table and nothing else.
But the nights. The nights are something else entirely.
It starts around week three, when I can’t sleep and wander downstairs for water and find him in the kitchen at two in the morning, standing at the counter eating cereal like a college student.
He’s wearing boxers and nothing else, and I’m wearing an old t-shirt that barely covers my thighs, and we stare at each other for a long, strange moment before he offers me the box of Cheerios without a word.
We sit on opposite ends of the counter, eating dry cereal in the dark, and he tells me about the commission he’s working on, a dining table for a client in Boston who wants something “organic but structured,” which Logan says is meaningless but he’s figured out how to translate.
He talks about wood grain and joinery techniques and the way different finishes catch the light, and I find myself leaning in, asking questions, actually interested in the answers.
That’s the first crack. The first glimpse of the man underneath the ice.
After that, the nights start to blur. Sometimes I find him in the kitchen.
Sometimes he finds me in the living room, reading with a single lamp on.
We talk, really talk, about things that don’t matter and things that do, and slowly, carefully, the stranger I married starts to become someone I recognize.
Someone I want.
I don’t let myself think about it too hard. Wanting my husband seems like the kind of thing that should be uncomplicated, but nothing about this marriage is uncomplicated, and I’ve learned to be careful with my hopes.
***
Tonight, though. Tonight I can’t sleep, and I’ve already checked the kitchen and the living room, and he’s not there. I’m about to give up and go back to bed when I notice the light under the workshop door.
The workshop is his space. I’ve never gone in uninvited, never felt like I had the right.
But it’s two in the morning and I’m restless in a way I can’t name, wearing yesterday’s dress because I couldn’t be bothered to change, and before I can talk myself out of it, I’m pushing the door open looking for nothing.
I find everything.
He doesn’t hear me at first. He’s bent over a workbench, shirtless despite the chill, shaping something by hand with long, even strokes.
The muscles in his back shift with each movement.
His shoulders are ridiculous. His forearms are worse, thick, corded, dark with ink that crawls over muscle and tendon as he works, and his hands, Jesus Christ, his hands.
They’re huge. They’re careful. They’re doing something precise and unhurried to a curve of pale wood like the wood might bruise if he rushes it.
I stand in the doorway like an idiot and take the hit of him full in the chest.
The size of him. The focus. The stupid, exquisite care in hands that big.
Sawdust in the hair at his nape. A dark line of it caught in the sweat along his spine.
Jeans slung low enough that I can see the two dimples at the base of his back and the start of that obscene V disappearing under the waistband, and my brain, traitor that it is, goes immediately, helplessly, south.
The female gaze arrives like weather. I am soaked in it. I am not sorry.
“I can feel you looking,” he says without turning around, and I nearly jump out of my skin.
He turns, and the rest of him is worse. Chest. Shoulders. The ink that curls over one pec and down his ribs like someone mapped a forest onto him. A smear of dust across his sternum. That mouth. Those hands, still holding the sandpaper.
Then he sees me, actually sees me, in the dress, in his doorway, at two in the morning, and the color drains and floods back into his face so fast I almost laugh.
“Fran - I didn’t - you’re not supposed to-” He looks down at himself like he’s only just noticed he’s half-naked, makes an aborted grab for a shirt that isn’t there, knocks a chisel off the bench with his elbow, and swears, low and mortified.
“Fuck. I - I usually lock - I didn’t think anyone - it’s late, you shouldn’t have to-”
“Logan.”
“I can put a shirt on. I have a shirt. Somewhere. This isn’t-” He drags a hand through his hair and leaves a streak of maple dust in it, which does not help. “This isn’t how I - you shouldn’t have to look at-”
“Okay, first of all, I was absolutely staring.” I step inside before he can bolt or spontaneously combust. “Second, you’re very stare-able. Third, please do not put a shirt on. I just got here.”
He stops. Blinks. “Stare-able?”
“It’s a word.”
“It’s not a word.”
“It is now. I just used it in a sentence.” I let my eyes drag over him, slow enough that he can see me doing it, and watch the flush climb from his throat to his ears. “You always work half-naked at two in the morning, or did I get lucky?”
“It’s - the shop gets warm. When I’m-” He gestures helplessly at the bench, at his own chest, at the general disaster of being perceived. “I didn’t think you’d come in.”
“I was looking for nothing. Found you instead.” I wander closer, looking around at the organized chaos of tools and wood and half-finished pieces so I don’t keep eating him alive with my eyes. “What are you working on?”
The panic fades into something more serious, then, when he glances at the piece on his bench, something almost shy. A curved panel, pale wood with a grain that seems to shimmer even under the harsh shop lights.
“Nothing. Just… experimenting.”
“Experimenting with what?”
He hesitates. I can see him doing the calculation, how much to share, how much to keep behind his walls. I’ve learned to recognize that pause. It happens every time I get too close to something real.
Then I ask a real question, and he forgets to be awkward.
“I’m trying to figure out a new joinery technique,” he says, and his whole face changes.
Lights up. The grumpy giant tips over into nerd so fast I feel it in my teeth.
“Something that would let the pieces curve without losing structural integrity. Traditional joinery hates a compound curve - you end up fighting the grain or you lose strength at the stress points. But if you cut the shoulders like this-” He steps back, gesturing me in, already gone, already talking with his hands.
“See? The fibers run with the bend instead of across it. Most people would just steam and clamp and pray. This way it wants to hold.”
“Can I see?”
He nods, eager now, the mortification burned clean off him. I move in beside him and the smell hits, sawdust, mineral oil, warm skin, him. The wood is beautiful. Creamy white with subtle veining, sanded so smooth it looks like silk.
I reach out without thinking and run my fingers along the curve.
His breath catches. Audible. Filthy, that little sound, in a room this quiet.
“What kind of wood is this?”
“Maple. Sugar maple, specifically. It’s got this-” He moves beside me, close, pointing at a particular section of the grain.
His forearm brushes mine. Neither of us moves away.
“See how the figure catches the light there? That’s called quilting.
Happens when the fibers grow in a certain pattern.
Most people would sand it flat, but if you work with it instead of against it… ”
He trails off.
He’s looking at me, not the wood. Amber-gold eyes, warm in the low light, open and eager and almost hopeful, and I am so fucked it’s not even funny.
“Show me,” I say, and I am not entirely sure what I’m asking for anymore.
He reaches past me, chest almost against my shoulder, heat rolling off him, and presses a small block of the same maple into my hands. “Feel the weight of it. Maple’s dense. Heavier than it looks. That’s what makes it good for furniture. It’ll last forever if you treat it right.”
The block is warm from his hands. I turn it over, feeling the heft, the smoothness against my palm, and I am thinking extremely un-furniture thoughts about those hands.
“How do you know which wood to use for what?”
“Experience, mostly.” He’s close enough now that I could lean in and lick the sawdust off his collarbone.
I do not. I am a lady. Barely. “Each species has its own personality. Oak is stubborn. Wants to do things its own way. You fight it, you lose. Walnut’s easier to work but a bitch to finish - blotches if you look at it wrong.
Cherry darkens over time, so you have to plan for what it’ll become, not what it is. ”
“And maple?”
“Maple is…” He pauses, considering, and I watch his mouth while he thinks. “Maple is patient. It’ll let you make mistakes. Forgives a lot of sins, as long as you put in the work to correct them.”
I look up at him. He’s so close I could count his eyelashes. The air between us has gone thick, syrupy, stupid with it.
“That’s a lot of pressure to put on a tree.”
“Trees can handle it.” The corner of his mouth twitches. “They’ve been around longer than we have. They’ll be around after we’re gone.”
“That’s either very comforting or very depressing.”
“Why can’t it be both?”