Total pages in book: 26
Estimated words: 24637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 123(@200wpm)___ 99(@250wpm)___ 82(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 24637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 123(@200wpm)___ 99(@250wpm)___ 82(@300wpm)
“You do that a lot,” Devon observes mildly, the first whole sentence he’s offered me all afternoon, a man who clearly considers most words an extravagance. “Talk to the birds.”
It catches me out, being seen doing it, and I cover the small lurch of it with a shrug. “They don’t ask anything back.”
The corner of his hard mouth moves, which Harry has told me, in a reverent whisper, is the equivalent of any other man turning a cartwheel.
“Loukas says you run a raptor place out in the Hill Country.” He turns his glass slowly in one big sun-browned hand. “Best in the state, he says. Says you’re too proud to let it be saved properly.”
Something in me trips and catches.
It’s a small thing, learning Loukas has talked about me to a friend, unguarded, the loose careless talk of men who think it doesn’t count, and worse, that what he said was the best in the state. I tuck it away to be angry about later, anger being far safer than what I am right now, which is warm in a spot I keep locked.
“Loukas talks too much,” I manage.
“No.” Devon doesn’t elaborate. He doesn’t need to, a man who’s never spent a syllable he didn’t mean, and the single bare no does more work than a paragraph would.
It’s Harry who fills the quiet, since filling quiet is what she does, nervous and fond at once.
“He told me he’d never love me,” she says, and her voice goes soft and certain, a sureness the rest of her never quite manages. “The day we married. Looked me dead in the eye and said it wasn’t in him, that I oughtn’t go hoping.” She isn’t pink now. That’s what stops me, that for once she isn’t apologizing. “He was wrong. He’ll tell you himself he was wrong, if you can get three words out of him on a good day.”
Devon says nothing at all. But his enormous hand turns over under both of her small ones and folds them in, and he lets her tell it, this granite man who lets nothing show, lets his wife lay their private history out on a train table in front of a stranger, and does the one thing he can do about it, which is hold on.
And I read it the way I read everything, off the small tells rather than the words, and the truth of it goes into me clean and cold and unwelcome.
A man who swears he can’t love you is most often a man already terrified that he does. I learned it just now off the set of a hard mouth and what those silent fingers did, and the trouble is I can’t make it stay over here, safely, with Devon. It keeps drifting two cars down and trying on a worn pair of boots.
I’m still sitting with that, undone by it, when Harry leans in, gathering herself with all that visible effort. “You look how I felt that first month,” she says gently. “Like you’ve already decided how it ends so it can’t surprise you. I just hate to think of you bracing for the worst, when it might be the best.”
I’m still hunting for one single word to give this impossibly sweet younger woman when I feel him, the change in the room, the air pulling tight the instant before weather breaks.
“Blythe.” Loukas is in the doorway, and something in his voice has gone low and rough and not at all rehearsed. “A word.”
I find him on the rear platform, the little railed-in shelf at the very back of the train where the tracks come unspooling behind us in two bright ribbons running clean to the horizon, the wind enormous and warm and loud enough to swallow everything, so a person could say almost anything out here and the world would never catch it.
He’s got both hands locked on the brass rail, his knuckles pale, a man holding hard to something, and I’ve just time to think oh no before he turns around.
“That story you told at dinner,” he says gruffly. “The proposal. The arguing forever.”
“It was a good story. They bought it.”
“You weren’t inventing it.” He says it like an accusation, like I’ve done him an injury. “I’ve spent two days trying to work out how you knew. How you reached into my head and pulled out the one proposal I’d ever have made, and then I understood.” He takes a step toward me, and the wind throws itself between us and loses. “You weren’t in my head at all, Blythe. You were in your own. You’d marry a man for the promise of arguing forever. You’d marry me.”
“You’re out of your mind,” I breathe, and I don’t step back, which is the whole trouble. I never step back. I’ve never once in eighteen years had the sense to step back from this man.