Twice Shy

by Sarah Hogle

He rolls his shoulder and tries to twist himself so that I can’t see his face.

He darts me a sidelong look. “Pay attention to the art.” “I am.” (Awful, is what I am, but in my defense he walked right into that one.) His blush ...

He isn’t as precise anymore, fumbling with the paint bottles, knocking over our cup of water. He mutters and grumbles and, honestly, looks completely miserable. I have never seen him like this. I’m so startled that I don’t know what to say.

“I appreciate it. You must have taken quite a lot of pity on me and my painting abilities to help out somebody you hate.” It’s a joke. It’s mostly a joke. Wesley swivels his head, eyebrows knitting. “I don’t hate you,” he says slowly, like it’s obvious.

“Kind of thought you hated everybody,” I say. It’s another sort-of joke that falls flat. “No.” He looks hurt. “I liked Violet. I like my family.”

“I’m not any good at this.” He sounds so resigned. And sad. “What?” Not any good at this? What in the hell is he talking about? “Are you kidding? You’re amazing at this!” “No, I’m not,” he mutters under his breath, cleaning up after himself jerkily. I can tell now that staring bothers him, but it’s impossible not to. “Wesley.” I stand up.

I find him in the kitchen, standing at the sink rinsing out his paintbrushes. I can’t tell if he’s hanging his head because he’s upset or just tired, but he isn’t his usual rigid self tonight.

Wesley glances my way, eyes shuttering. We’re hungry and exhausted, a dangerous mix.

He makes his distaste for my company crystal clear by finding any excuse to exit a room right after I’ve entered it and responding to my attempts at conversation with apathetic monosyllables.

He shuts the water off, even though his hands still have paint on them, and begins to leave. He’s an incorrigible room-leaver.

I’m trying to lift the mood with a little light ribbing, but Wesley’s too distressed to realize it. “The top of the fridge isn’t all the way up there to me,” he replies tartly. I don’t think I like his tone.

“Not my problem. You should have eaten more vegetables when you were a child.” I glare at him, which he doesn’t see, because he’s refusing to look at me. After a short miracle of getting along, showing me kindness, he’s reverted back into the grouch he’s been from the start. When I get my hotel up and running, I’m putting families with small, loud children in the bedroom directly beneath his. There will be complimentary trumpets and kickballs.

“For someone as beautiful as you are, it’s a shame you’re such an insufferable ass,” I blurt out angrily. Stillness rings. “I’m not that bad, you know,” I continue. “You are constantly turning your back on me, ignoring me when I’m around like I’m a punishment to talk to, and it makes me feel like shit. You make me feel even lonelier than I already was.” I can’t believe I said that. I can’t believe I said that out loud. But if I’m shocked, he is floored.

His eyes are saucers. I’d give up the left wing of the hotel to know what’s r...

“Whatever!” I shout, embarrassment joining my anger. “I won’t bother you anymore, the...

I spin on my heel, leaving him behind. From another room, I hear him yell out: “I was just kidding about the vegetables thing! Maybell! That was a joke!” I slam the front door. A ...

“How are you and Wesley getting along?” There’s a cautious edge to her question that tells me she suspects we might not be. “We’re not,” I reply baldly. “He’s driving me nuts.” “Ah, well.” Ruth is warm. Sympathetic.

“Before Wesley, Violet hadn’t been to a doctor in years. This woman was in her late eighties, mind you. Had nobody. I don’t like thinking about it. We tried to convince her to let us clean up. Let us donate all the stuff she didn’t need. She couldn’t bring herself to part with anything, kept saying we could get rid of it after she was gone if we hated her belongings so much.

Hanging up, I walk calmly into the cabin. I’m not going to go into his bedroom. I’m not. It’s an invasion of his privacy. I grab a chair and clamber up, but only because I want to see if I can reach the cord on the ceiling. I won’t pull it.

I suck in a sharp breath, pressing a hand to my mouth. Oh my god. It’s not a bedroom. Exposed beams, exposed insulation, exposed wiring, dust motes eddying in stagnant air. A small window with a hand towel stapled to its frame to block the light that would stream in at sunrise and aim directly at the bed, which isn’t a bed at all. It’s a sleeping bag on the floor. A sleeping bag that takes up the entire floor, the bottom six inches of it curling up the wall because there’s not enough floor for it to lie completely flat.

I lock gazes with a familiar pair of blue eyes staring out of Wesley’s sleeping bag and sway, overtaken by dizziness. It’s me. I’m lying in his bed.

A TWO-DIMENSIONAL MAYBELL PARRISH PEERS out at me with colored-pencil features, wearing a sunset-colored ROCKY TOP TREE HOUSE SPLASH ZONE racer-back tank, four black hair bands like bracelets tracking up the left wrist. Glow-in-the-dark nail polish.

The hairs on my neck rise, but at the same time I flush, an extraordinary awareness pumping through me. I feel like I’ve had a mask ripped off my face. It would appear that the man who ignores my existence 99 percent of the time has an eye for my every tiny detail. He must have a photographic memory.

There are other sketches in pen, pencils, and oil pastels, of Falling Stars and the woods and flowers I don’t know by name, strewn haphazardly; I envision Wesley with the artwork on his lap, back a crescent slope, profile close to the page. The instrument in his hand races feverishly across the paper in elegant, expert slashes, capturing a flashbulb moment in time. He has to get up suddenly—maybe he checks the time and it’s almost eight in the morning, which means I’m going to be opening my bedroom door soon and coming out. If he wants to avoid bumping into me all day, he’s got to get moving. He rises. The papers go sliding everywhere.

Wesley’s eyes are unusually hollow; he watches with a drifting, faraway expression, saying nothing. “I’m sorry.” I have no excuse to be up here, so I don’t even try to come up with one. There is no talking my way out of this. He looks so lost. This looks so bad. It feels really, really bad.

When the drawing of me passes into my hands Wesley drags his face away from me to focus on the wall, forehead furrowing. He’s still standing on the ladder, gripping either side of the hatch with pale knuckles.

He begins to sink back down the ladder. “Wesley?” I hurry after him, the front door snicking closed just as my shoe hits the second-to-last rung. “Wesley!” I open the door, jumping off the porch. “Please don’t!” he calls through the dark. “Don’t follow.” His voice grows fainter, ebbing toward the manor. “Please.” There is pain in that please. I grow roots.

I have been living in Wesley’s room. I have been sleeping in Wesley’s bed.

He hesitated. Before he invited me in, he hesitated. I thought then that it was because he was reluctant to have me in his house, taking it personally when perhaps I shouldn’t have—I was a stranger, after all—but now I can see he hesitated because there was nowhere for me to go. There was only one bedroom. He’d turned Violet’s makeshift room back into a living room, which by that point I’d already seen.

I think about his lie that the cabin was a two-bedroom—that odd shadow to his features as he told it, making sure he got a head start back to the cabin while I picked my way carefully through the unfamiliar maze of Violet’s hoard. He’s a minimalist.

All I can see are the blue eyes of that drawing staring at me, in the softest strokes of colored pencil, so realistic and detailed. When I woke up this morning I thought I didn’t know anything about Wesley, but now I know even less than that. Less than nothing. He’s an artist? He sleeps in a closet and draws lovely pictures of flowers? Saves little old ladies from the monsters they built? I need to lie down, I think, while already lying down.

Now she’s seen evidence that I’m ignoring her, after her ego’s probably gotten its hopes up that I’ve been taken out by a tragic accident she can use as an excuse to bail on work for the rest of the day.

Since I can’t get within thirty feet of the man, I left an exasperated note on the grand staircase at the manor yesterday afternoon for him to find.

I’m so sorry that I went upstairs. It was wrong of me to snoop. I’ve been trying to apologize but whenever I call your name or try to walk toward you, you disappear. It’s going to be profoundly difficult to live together if one of us is always pretending the other one is invisible. The enchiladas I put in the fridge at the main house are vegetarian, by the way. I noticed you didn’t eat any, but please don’t let perfectly good food go to waste just because you’re mad at me. I promise to respect your privacy going forward and hope we can put this behind us.

Stiff and formal, but as apologies go, not too bad. An hour later, the note was gone. I thought he was going to keep ignoring me, since he didn’t ...

I’m not mad at you. I’m avoiding you because of what you saw in the loft. It’s embarrassing. I’ll be fine, I just want to be left alone. Sorry about the enchiladas. I didn’t know they were vegetarian or that you were okay with me eating them. I thought you were probably mad at me.

I’m beginning to see that he isn’t a hash-this-out sort of person. He’s an avoid-your-problems-forever sort of person. In this case, the problem is me. The I just want to be left alone is making me come out of my skin because I don’t know if I’m physically capable of leaving anyone alone when I know I’m responsible for them feeling bad.

Wesley’s slippery as a ghost, gone every time I turn the corner. I’ve never been able to stomach people’s being upset with me, needing that resolution. If he would let me get close enough to apologize...

Sure, he was grouchy, but when he avoided me it was a different sort of avoiding. Like a preference rather than a necessity. It’s as if I’ve walked in on...

“There’s no escaping me,” I tell him. It comes out sounding disturbingly ominous. He sighs. “I know. You’re inevitable.”

“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.

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.

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?

“Do you make donuts there?” “Yes.” I feel myself smile. “The best anyone’s ever had.” “That’s true in this universe, too.” It is true that I crave that validation. It is also true that praise makes me squirm.

I open one eye, chancing a peek up at Wesley. He’s writing on the paper, a small smile creeping over his face. One corner of his mouth hooks back slightly, unconsciously. I talk faster.

Wesley’s smile has gotten bigger. My thoughts run into each other, a thirty-car pileup, totally arrested by that smile. I have seen Wesley mildly amused, but I have never seen him enjoying.

“So?” I wheedle. “What do you think?” “I think,” he replies softly, “I would like to walk into that alternate universe and buy a cinnamon roll from you.” “Anytime,” I manage to reply, swallowing. “We’re open twenty-four hours.”

“Look at that.” He flourishes his hand, too. “Sweet tea just appeared on the menu.” Wesley is playing with me? My grin widens. “It did not.” “Right above the macchiatos. Don’t you see it?” He is watching me with a very serious expression. Neon pink from that revolving sign in a faraway land casts out its light all the way to here, glowing upon his cheeks. I’ve seen this expression on him before, but I didn’t know the difference between his nice serious and his intimidating serious. “The customer’s always right.”

“What’s wrong?” “You didn’t put enough sugar in this. Someone should really teach you how to make sweet tea.” Wesley is playing with me. I take the mug back, peering inside. “Looks okay.”