Twice Shy

by Sarah Hogle

Wesley needs a goddamn bell around his neck.

“Pay attention to the art.” “I am.” (Awful, is what I am, but in my defense he walked right into that one.) His blush is furious. You could fry an egg with it. “Look at my brush, please. You’re missing important techniques here.”

Petrichor and the smoke of a candle blown out. Blue Head & Shoulders shampoo that stings your eyes when it runs down your face in the shower. That’s what he smells like. I am ridiculous.

“Christmas is a state of mind, Wesley.”

I’ve seen these hands halve an apple without a knife, and they’re the same ones that paint miniature pirate ships.

My default recording plays itself, lacking air. “I had red hair . . .” I wheeze. “When I was born.” “Oh, really?” He should be stepping away, but he doesn’t know it.

Every time it’s my turn to take a swig, I get the world’s most pathetic thrill out of knowing our mouths have both touched the same spot.

I tilt my head back to see that the wind is moving closer. It has such gentleness for its size, soft as down, still waters running deeper than you’d think. It hides in trees to be alone and yet prolongs treasure hunts so as not to be alone. It gave its bedroom to a stranger and lets her wear its pendant, doodling her make-believe café with a few inaccuracies that have since grown to be canon.

I start dreaming of Wesley under a waterfall resembling the one in our mural; I don’t know what he looks like in the nude, so I conjure up Michelangelo’s David for a baseline, southern region hidden by a grape cluster of bath bubbles popping one by one.

He should hiss and make the sign of the cross, but he doesn’t.

“Wesley, you don’t need to be smooth. It’s a good thing you aren’t, actually. I wouldn’t survive it. You’re already too wonderful for your own good.”

I scan his person for the invisible scissors he must be using to snip at my moral fibers.

“A bruise. You hurt yourself?” On the door, while imagining him naked. It’s what I deserve. “No,” I reply quickly. “That’s probably just a shadow.”

“Maybell, I can draw you from memory. With my eyes closed.”

For once—once—that anticipation, that tingling on the nape of my neck, that intoxicating awareness injected straight into my veins, isn’t vicarious. It doesn’t belong to an imaginary Maybell in a fantasy, a guess at what she might feel. It’s mine. And I think: At what point did my happy place stop being a dream and start being the person in front of me?

Rain is the perfect weather condition for a love story, so naturally, it must be raining at the conclusion of it. There could be no other way.

“When guests start arriving, I’ll tell them you’re a ghost of a logger who died in the nineteenth century and that’s why you don’t ever seem to see or hear them when they speak to you. You’ve been groundskeeping at Falling Stars since it was first built.”