6. Harris
Chapter Six
HARRIS
The camera comes out of the drawer a couple of days later and I don't let myself think about it too much.
Megan's on her porch with her feet up on the rail and the sketchbook propped against her knees. The soft light coming down through the pines is highlighting the freckles across her face. Beautiful. I get four frames before she catches me.
“Are you photographing me?”
“No.”
“Harris!”
“Hold still.”
She laughs, pulling a face, and tells me her hair is a disaster, but I keep shooting anyway. Later that night, I’m looking at the photos come up on the screen with my hand over my mouth. The last person I pointed a lens at was my mother, and she’s been dead eleven years.
The following day, Megan comes across to my cabin barefoot with a bottle of wine in one hand and the other holding her sketchbook in front of her like it’s a precious offering.
“Look at him. Check out his shoulders…”
It's the little fox from her story, coming out from under a fallen trunk. Behind him she's put an owl on a stump, watching him curiously.
“You’ve got it. He’s real now.”
She sits down on the step beside me. “I did eleven pages of the book yesterday. I did two in July, Harris, and both were of the same tree.”
Megan's still going, excited hands gesturing everywhere, and I put my arm around her and let her talk. Suddenly she stops, turning to face me.
“Can I draw you?”
“Nope.”
She gives me a dazzling smile. “I brought wine to your house specifically to ask you if I could draw you, you know…being polite.”
“Kiss me first, then we can start negotiations.”
Her cheeks flush red and she kisses me. Somewhere along the way, the sketchbook slips from her hands as I pull her onto my lap. After, in bed, she retrieves it and I let her sketch me while I’m falling asleep.
Megan’s best friend Winnie arrives on Friday at the festival set-up in an ancient car that shouldn't have made it up the mountain. Her hair is a shocking pink color and she’s maybe five feet tall at most. She gets out and hugs Megan for about a minute and a half.
Then she turns on me.
“So you're the neighbor.”
“Harris.”
“Winnie. I've heard a lot!” She looks me up and down. “You're a giant. She undersold it.”
I've had a lot of practice at making people go away. I stand there and try to look intimidating, but tiny Winnie Morgan puts her hands on her hips and beams at me.
“Oh, that's cute,” she says. “You do the big scary thing because you’re not a people person. You're the human equivalent of a grizzly bear who’s secretly a cinnamon roll.”
Megan makes a noise into her hand that sounds like a muffled giggle.
“I am not a cinnamon roll,” I growl.
“You should try making them. Seriously, dude… you’ve got those enormous patient hands.” Winnie's already walking past me toward the stands. “Meg, who's the one with the birdhouses, is he single?”
She's insufferable, and by the end of the afternoon she's got Delphine's whole display rearranged and half the committee doing what she tells them. Somehow, I can’t help but like her, especially when I see how much she treasures Megan.
In the middle of the committee arguing about where the band should set up, while half the town is standing on the green in the heat, Megan goes quiet. She’s looking down at a message on her phone. She turns it and shows me.
Saw your instagram posts… Snowflake Falls looks fantastic. I think we should talk properly, I've been doing a lot of thinking about us.
I read it twice. There’s an image in my head of me finding her ex and punching him to the floor, telling him there is no “us” where Megan is concerned. She’s mine.
Megan shakes her head. “Nathaniel goes quiet for months and then he decides he's ready to talk.”
“Mm.”
“I'm not going to answer it.”
“You can answer it if you want.”
“I don't want to.”
Gram is fifteen feet away, pack of rescue dogs at her feet, beady eyes missing nothing of our conversation. I put my hand on the back of Megan's neck and leave it there, massaging gently.
She leans into it. Let everyone see that she’s mine.
Winnie catches me by the coolers later, and her merry expression turns serious for a moment.
“Her ex did that for years,” she says. “Kept her waiting. She deserves better than that, Harris.”
“I know.”
She looks at me a while longer, then hands me a bottle of beer. “Okay. Good.”
But later that night, doubt clouds my brain.
The month Megan came for is nearly used up, and she’s stopped talking about the time she has left.
She used to say it; when I go back… before I leave.
She has a life in the city and an apartment five hours from here.
What can I offer her? I'm a recluse of a man who lives alone up a mountain with a fox for company.
She falls asleep against my shoulder with her hand curled on my chest, and I lie there with the window open listening to the wind in the pines. I let myself have her a while longer without saying anything at all.