3. Megan
Chapter Three
MEGAN
Aunt Delphine arrives on Tuesday in a caftan the color of a traffic cone and an outlandish pair of sunglasses with sparkly frames. She comes through the door, drops a roll of paper on my kitchen table, and starts opening cupboards.
“Where are the mugs?”
She finds them before I can answer. “So, Harris is building my display stands for the festival.”
I put my pencil down. “Harris?”
“You remember… your grumpy neighbor? He starts today.” My aunt fills the kettle with a little grin on her face, which is how I know she's enjoying herself. “You'll be helping.”
“Absolutely not!”
“It's already arranged. I’m too busy getting the stock ready and I have a lot of hemming to do.”
“Look, he said yes to helping you. Not me.”
“That man owes me, Megan. I drove him down the mountain the day he put a chisel through his hand and didn't tell a single soul about it afterward.” Delphine turns around and leans against my counter with her bangles clicking, taking a sip of coffee. “He’s a very private man.”
I look out the window, over the gravel, to the yard next door where a stack of lumber has appeared overnight like a mushroom ring.
“He growled at me. On Sunday I said good afternoon, and he made a noise like an animal.”
My aunt laughs. “Meet in his backyard at eleven-thirty. This will be character-building for both of you.”
“For me or for him?”
She changes the subject, telling me some gossip about the festival, before draining her cup and kissing my cheek on her way out the door.
The heat is intense by mid-morning. August in the mountains is so different from August in the city, with the pines throwing off a warm, resinous scent and the cicadas going bananas in the trees.
I put on my oldest denim shorts and a loose green tank, twist my hair up off my neck, and go down before I can talk myself out of it.
Harris is already set up. Two sawhorses with boards laid across them and a canvas roll of tools spread open in the grass. He’s wearing faded jeans, work boots, a t-shirt that used to be black and has given up. His arms are incredibly muscular, his thick dark hair pushed back from his face.
“Morning,” I say. I’m going to be civil, rather than over-friendly.
“Morning.” At least he didn’t growl at me again. My neighbor holds out the end of a tape measure without looking up. “Hold this. Right on the line, not past it.”
So this is how it goes.
Sighing internally, I hold the end of the tape measure.
Then I hold a board while he marks it, and hold another one steady while the saw screams through it and the sawdust comes off in a hot golden spray that sticks to my legs.
He doesn't chat or try to fill silences.
But he gives me instructions, in bursts of two or three words at a time.
“The other side.”
“Sorry?”
“Your thumb. It’s where the blade goes.”
So I move my thumb.
By the time we're screwing the first frame together, my shoulders are sweating. My hair has escaped down my neck, and I’m aware, in a distractingly unhelpful way, of exactly where he is at all times.
Then I put a screw in crooked and brace myself for his disapproval. Nathan would sigh through his nose, then take whatever I was helping with out of my hands and finish it himself. Then he’d tell everyone at dinner how crap I was and that he'd done it in the end, and I would laugh along.
Harris crouches beside me, close enough that his shoulder brushes mine. Cedar and clean sweat come off him in a wave that goes straight to my core.
“Back it out. Slower.”
“It went in wrong.” My voice sounds weird, like it’s unnaturally high-pitched.
He puts his hand over mine on the drill, warm and rough, and my heart takes off like a rocket. “Let the tool do it… don’t fight it.”
The screw sinks in, flush this time.
Harris stares at me. He clears his throat and then takes his hand back. I don't breathe properly for a while.
“Good,” he says, and stands up. He goes back to the sawhorses, and I sit in the grass with a drill in my lap and my cheeks flushed.
We stop when the sun gets ridiculously hot. He drinks from a jug in the shade of his truck; I sit on the porch steps with my sketchbook. I tell him I have a deadline, but really it’s because being close to him is becoming a problem.
His shadow comes over the page while I’m sketching.
“That's a dog?”
I look up. He's close, wiping his hands on a rag, and his eyes are incredible. Golden-green, with lines at the corners from a lifetime of squinting into weather.
“Nope. It's a fox.”
“Looks to me like it's a dog in a red coat.”
“Wow.” This guy has zero social skills. I turn the book toward him. “Okay. Let's hear it, then… what's wrong with my fox?”
Harris doesn't take the sketchbook, or touch the page. He points, hovering, close enough that I can feel the heat of his arm beside mine.
“He's standing square… they don’t stand like that. A fox is always about to be somewhere else.” His finger moves. “Drop his shoulders a little, make him rangier. Weight forward, over the front feet. Ears out, not up; up means he's decided about you. This one's still deciding.”
“Still deciding what?”
“Whether or not you're worth the trouble.”
I look down at the page. Every fox I’ve drawn is sitting up straight and smiling like a school photograph. Damn, he’s right.
“Nothing I draw feels alive,” I say. It comes out before I've decided to say it. “I mean, it used to. But not for a few months… my editor is being very kind about it, which is worse.”
Harris looks at the page for a moment longer.
“Draw what he's doing,” he says. “Not what he looks like.”
Then he goes back to work, telling me to keep drawing. Occasionally he’ll point out something in a quiet voice.
“Fence post.”
There's a bird on it, small and red, walking down the wood like it’s dancing. I get half a page before it goes.
“There. Under the steps.” It’s a chipmunk, sitting up with its cheeks full to bursting.
By the time the sun is lower in the sky, I have six pages of birds and animals caught in motion. It’s the best work I’ve done this year.
The doe comes out at the bottom of the yard when I’m helping him pack the tools away.
“Megan.” Low, barely a sound at all. His hand closes around my wrist. “Don't move.”
Harris is standing at my back. His mouth is close enough to my ear that his breath moves the loose hair there, and every nerve I own relocates to that one square inch of skin.
“She's got a fawn in the grass. Left of the stump.”
The grass parts and out comes the cutest little fawn, light brown fur spotted with white star-like spots. The doe lifts her head and then they're gone, both of them, without any sound at all.
Harris lets go of my wrist, but he doesn’t move.
I turn, and he's close enough that I have to tip my head to see his face. There’s dark stubble along his jaw and a slick of sweat at the base of his throat. He looks at my mouth.
“You've got…” I lift my hand up to where a streak of sawdust marks his hair.
He stares at me.
“Sawdust. I could get it.”
“Okay,” he says, roughly.
I go up on my toes.
“Lemonade!”
Delphine is on the porch with a tray and a pitcher of lemonade. We were so caught up in whatever the hell this is between us, that I didn’t hear her drive up, go into my cabin and make drinks.
“Harris, you'll stay for pie. Don't argue, I've carried it up from the Heart's Delight and I'm not taking it home again.”
We come apart like a couple of teenagers caught behind the bleachers. Harris turns to the sawhorses and picks up a board that he finished an hour ago.
“What kind?” he asks.
“Cherry.”
“I'm more of a cobbler man. But cherry’s good.”
The words drop through me like an ice cube down my spine. Isn’t that what my mysterious texter said?
Peach cobbler. And you?
I clutch my sketchbook tight against my chest and stare at the back of his neck, but he doesn’t turn to look at me.
It's just a pie preference; that’s all it is. A coincidence.
That's what I tell myself at midnight, lying on top of the covers with the fan pushing hot air around the room and my phone face down on my stomach.
Half the men in this county are probably cobbler men. There are probably more cobbler aficionados in Snowflake Falls than there are residents.
And anyway, the man I've been texting is warm and funny; he throws words at me like confetti. Harris is the opposite of that. They’re not the same person.
I pick up the phone when it lights up with a text.
Are you awake?
Unfortunately.
Bad night?
Long day. Can I tell you something weird?
Always.
I almost kissed my neighbor today.
The dots come up immediately, then stop, then come back, and take longer than they've ever taken.
Almost?
But then my aunt showed up with a pitcher of lemonade.
Good.
I roll onto my side and pull the sheet over my legs, hot all over and not entirely from the fan.
Are you jealous?
Tell me what happened first.
And I do. I don't know why; maybe it's because he's a stranger, or because he's just some words on the screen and none of this is real.
He doesn't answer for a while.
What did you want him to do?
I press my thighs together and stare at the ceiling.
Nothing polite.
Try again.
Everything. I wanted him to pick me up. He's got these big hands… I wanted him to stop being careful. Is this weird? Telling you this?
No.
I keep thinking about you, too. My mystery man.
Say that again.
I think about you. At night. More than I'd admit.
What do you think about?
You first.
Coward.
Are you in bed?
Yes. What are you wearing?
A shirt. That's it. It's too hot for anything else.
Then push it up.
My whole body goes molten. I look at the window, at the dark trees, at the fan turning slowly overhead, and I put my hand on my stomach and slide the hem of the shirt up over my ribs. My nipples pebble as the hot air from the fan blows across my body.
Done.
Good girl. Now touch yourself and I’m going to tell you what to do. Where is your hand?
Exactly where you told me to put it.
Slower.
That's cruel.
I know. Slower.
I slow down until it's barely anything, until the fan and my own breathing are the loudest things in the cabin.
Tell me what you'd do. If you were here.
I'd put you on the edge of your bed and get your thighs over my shoulders and take my time licking and sucking your swollen clit. Now faster.
I make a sound into the pillow that I'm glad nobody is awake to hear. I can barely hold the phone.
Say something else.
You'd be loud. You’d be screaming my name.
I'm close.
Good. Don't stop.
I come so hard I see stars, for a man whose face I have never seen. Then I lie there while my heartbeat comes down.
That was…
I know. Tell me you’re smiling.
I'm smiling.
Good. Go to sleep, gorgeous.
I turn the fan up and pull the sheet over myself, overwhelmed with a relief so complete it nearly makes me laugh.
How silly I was to think my neighbor could’ve been my text buddy. This mystery man made me come with his texts alone. He asks questions and teases me and makes me feel like I’m the center of the universe.
Harris Trent could never have done that in a hundred years.