Twice Shy, Sarah Hogle [100 books to read in a lifetime .txt] 📗

footprints give him away. They lead me to the trickle of water, a creek cutting through heavy green foliage. There are signs along the paths, wooden slabs nailed to tree trunks I was too distracted to notice the last time I was in the woods. Their edges are sharpened into pointing arrows, hand-painted with monikers like I Spy Something Blue Trail and Say Goodbye to the Sky Lane.

The path he’s chosen, You Are Here, isn’t one I’ve explored before—my heightened fear of being mauled by bears has prevented me from getting too adventurous—with an old stone bridge that I think used to be part of a road but is now overgrown with moss. I stop to remove my glasses, lenses steamed up with my breath from the exercise.

Wesley’s trail of footprints ends here.

I glance uneasily over the sides of the bridge. The water’s high from all the rain we’ve been getting, pouring swiftly between rocks, over dips, gurgling and eddying. He wouldn’t jump in, would he? The water’s too cold for swimming. Sunlight takes a while to reach the ground here, moist stones dappled with soft green, atmosphere cool and peaceful. Otherworldly. I peruse beds of fallen pine needles for a shoe-shaped disturbance but find nothing. It’s as if Wesley sauntered across this bridge and straight through an invisible portal. He’s in a medieval forest right now, taming a wild unicorn, and I’m standing here studying pine needles like they’re a Rorschach test.

A bird’s nearby trill jerks my head up. It’s a very helpful bird, giving away the location of another creature up in the branches, and if looks could kill it would be roasted on a plate with carrots and potatoes.

“Ahh. There you are.”

“No, I’m not.”

Wesley’s lounging in a white oak towering directly over me that’s got to be hundreds of years old, one of the thick, lichen-scaled boughs bending like a hammock to fit him perfectly. Its roots burrow into the bridge like clamping fingers, tendons, and bone. From my position on the ground he’s about eight feet up, watching me with Oh, no written all over his face.

“There’s no escaping me,” I tell him. It comes out sounding disturbingly ominous.

He sighs. “I know. You’re inevitable.”

I don’t know quite what he means by that, but now that I’ve got him good and trapped I’m going to make him read my letter and restore the balance. “Here.” I wave the lilac paper. “This is for you.”

“What is it?”

“Oh, come on. It won’t bite.”

I reach up on tiptoe, he reaches down, and in that flicker of brief contact with both our hands on the paper, his eyes meet mine and something very like fear seizes them. But when he blinks, it’s gone.

The base of the tree has a springy cushion of moss around it, which I decide to plant myself down on while awaiting my I forgive you, you are thus absolved.

Suppressing the urge to stare at him with laser eyes while he reads is killing me, especially given that he’s reading about something private. My instinct is to distract him from this new information he’s likely going to use to make fun of me by chattering, lessening the impact, toning it down into nothing at all, just having a laugh. As if there are several levels at which one could process the letter, and if I can bring him down to the shallowest tier he’ll know it, but he’ll know it less. Which probably does not make sense.

I have to look.

He’s still reading, and wouldn’t you know it, he’s frowning. This isn’t one of his signature frowns, so I don’t know how to decipher it. I review my selection of modes, slamming the one that says panic.

Oh god! Why didn’t I share a less personal story? I’ve got loads of embarrassing stories in me, high-resolution reels that play behind my eyes every time I lie down to sleep. I could have told him about the time I set off a firework upside down. Or the time I bought a hot dog at Chickamauga Lake and got attacked by a seagull. Or when I strangled myself with a dress that didn’t fit in a dressing room at Target and wore myself out trying to wrench myself free for close to an hour before another lady helped me pull the ripped dress over my head and, while doing so, commented that I wasn’t wearing the right underwear for that kind of dress.

The nose of a purple airplane swats me on the forehead. I blink.

“Sorry.”

New writing in black ink spreads over one of the airplane’s wings. I unfold it. He wrote back?

He wrote back.

AU?

The enchiladas were good. Thank you.

That’s all he has to say? I squint up at him. “You have a pen on you?”

“I always have a pen on me.” His arm dangles over the edge, pen slipping from his fingers, letting it tumble down into my lap. Well, all right then.

AU = Alternate universe, I write back.

He reads it, then responds aloud, “What’s it like?”

“My coffee shop?”

“Yeah.”

I can’t get a read on whether he’s only asking for details so he can laugh at them, or if he’s sincerely curious. Not that it matters. It doesn’t matter what he thinks of me.

I close my eyes to visualize my café, but for a split second, I see the cabin loft. I think it’s safe now to admit that I low-key, secretly, sort of care what he thinks. I think maybe he cares what I think about him, too. And isn’t that something?

“What the café looks like on the outside is hazy, but there’s a big pink neon sign,” I tell him, eyes still closed. In my mind, I push open the door. “The door chimes when you open it. A wave of cool air hits you, like when you’ve been out in the rain and walk into an air-conditioned building. It smells like cocoa powder and cinnamon.”

“Do you make donuts there?”

“Yes.” I feel myself smile. “The best anyone’s ever had.”

“That’s true in