Twice Shy

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. She’s up close, so close that I can make out the strawberry tints in her wind-disheveled brown hair that you don’t notice unless she’s standing in the full sun. Faint reflections of trees flash in her round glasses, but she’s staring right at me with a guarded expression, and my stomach hits the floor because I know exactly what she’s thinking. I know exactly when she was thinking it, and where she was. It was the day I came to Falling Stars.

I was thinking, You look just like a lie I know.

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.

I’m kneeling on Wesley’s sleeping bag, the hard floor beneath it pinching my knee, when the top half of him emerges three feet away from me without warning. I’ll never understand how someone of his size can move without a sound.

“Oh!” I hasten to stand up, but my shoe slides on the slippery material and I knock into his stacks of clothes. Boxers and rolled-up socks topple off, which, in my panic, I pick up and put back. I am touching his underwear now. 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.

I straighten the drawings. 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.

“I . . .” My mouth opens and closes, heart accelerating so fast my chest is overheating. I’m up to my ears in broken pieces of apologies, swimming in them, but I can’t link any of them together.

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.

Within minutes, a light in a window upstairs winks on. There’s nothing for me to do now but go back inside the cabin, back into my room, which I realize the moment I cross the threshold is Wesley’s room. I have been living in Wesley’s room.

I have been sleeping in Wesley’s bed.

What a weird, surreal night to top off a long, tense day. I’m not dragging and drained anymore. I’m jumpy, my mind spinning out, heart pulsing like it’s ensnared in someone’s fist with inadequate room for expansion.

I lie back on Wesley’s bed to reevaluate my entire life.

The why takes a while to fight to the surface, bogged down with other memories trying to push their way up. I think about that first night here, when I discovered the manor was unlivable and my cabin had a man in it, who’d inherited half of everything. How I needed somewhere to sleep and absolutely had to get away from him, this person who was the unwitting face of a scam. I told him I’d sleep in the filthy manor and . . .

That’s when he invited me to stay in the cabin.

I bungle my way into the shower, consumed with figuring this out. I forget to rinse out the shampoo before massaging conditioner into my hair. I scrub my face, discovering I’m still wearing glasses.

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 don’t dry and comb my hair, leaving it wrapped in a towel. My skin’s still wet as I pull on underwear and an oversized shirt, tripping dazedly back into bed, into his bed, letting my head fall heavily onto the pillow. His pillow. His only one. I roll over, maybe but maybe not imagining that this pillow smells like him, and the comforter, too. And the floor and the walls and now, me. It’s ridiculous. I don’t know what Wesley Koehler smells like.

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.

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. Who wouldn’t be, honestly, after living with Violet? He didn’t have much to grab from his room when he beat me back there to supposedly change out her bedding. When I opened the front door, he was already ascending the ladder.

I grapple for another explanation while knowing there isn’t one.

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.

Knowing I’m in his bed is doing peculiar things to my skin. I cannot remain still.

I’m keyed up and pacing my/his room, stopping periodically, helplessly, at the window to lift the curtain. The lights in the other house have gone out. He’s got a few rooms up there clean enough to live in, and the utilities are back on, so I guess that’s that. I’m not moving in until it’s been visited by an exterminator and reinspected for mold, so if I play my cards right I’ve got the cabin to myself for the time being.

Every minute is at least two hundred seconds long. I need to lie down, I think again, hovering at the window for another half hour, waiting to see a dark shape lumbering back across the yard that never comes.

I’M GETTING LOTS OF work done at the estate now that I have absolutely no one to talk to. Gemma’s stopped texting me Where are you? and I miss you GIFs of miserable people sobbing, probably because I logged on to Facebook after a long social media hiatus and liked somebody’s post. 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.

It’s stormed hard for the past two days, just me and Wesley and the rain. I’ve spotted him hefting large bags of potting mix and topsoil as well as planters into the sunroom, which he must be planning to use as a conservatory. He’s probably also planning to padlock the door to keep my guests from enjoying it. Seems like a Wesley kind of move.

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 come find me yesterday and hash this out.

Then this morning, in the same spot where I left his note, a white sheet of sketch paper appeared.

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, the dynamic could at least return to the way it was. 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 him naked. The power balance has shifted.

I pluck a sheet of lilac stationery out of a rolltop desk and write.

Hey,

You don’t have anything to be embarrassed about. I’m grateful you let me stay in your room, putting yourself through a lot of trouble to do so. I know you’ve been sleeping at the manor for the last few days, but if you want you can have your room back and I’ll sleep on the couch. Also, I didn’t see many of your drawings when I was up there but what I saw was impressive. You don’t have to be embarrassed about those, either. I’m sorry again for snooping.

Anyway, I saw something you didn’t want me to see, so I’ll tell you about something that’s embarrassing for me, too. It’s only fair.

When I was fourteen, my mom and I stopped in at a diner in Lexington, Kentucky, right after she bought a lottery ticket. She put the ticket on the table between our plates, waiting until we were finished eating before scratching all the tiny Christmas trees off with a quarter. It was fun to pretend the ticket might land us a million dollars. We talked about what our dream home would look like. After we were done eating, she scratched the ticket and won six bucks, which she spent on two slices of apple pie.

We left the diner, never went back again, but for some reason I thought about it a lot. It cheered me up to remember sitting in that booth, hoping that the ticket to an amazing new life sat right in front of me, waiting to happen.

The first version of a café I’m always daydreaming about was based on that diner. I’ve remodeled it so many times since then, evolving the décor to suit whatever my tastes happen to be in the moment. I like to imagine all sorts of swoony romantic scenarios taking place there. The climax in every rom-com movie, basically, when the hero thinks he’s going to lose the girl and he professes his feelings with raw, desperate honesty. I daydream about fun banter, too, even mundane afternoons where all I’m doing is decorating donuts with colorful icing and sprinkles. But my favorite daydreams are those fast-paced ones where the stakes are high, when even I don’t know if the hero and heroine will get together because I get so carried away. Even though I’m the heroine in this fantasy, so I control it all.

This is something I’ve never told anybody, so now we’re even. But if you tell another soul about Maybell’s Coffee Shop AU, I will cut you.

—M

The front door closes right as I’m penning the last line. I glance at the window and there’s Wesley, taking to the woods. He skulks off into his self-made nature preserve every time the rain lets up, probably to escape all the fumes from our cleaning supplies. Or me. Probably me.

I could leave the note on the staircase for him to pick up when he returns, but my feet have other ideas. They decide they want to go on a walk, too.

Off I dash, waterlogged grass squelching under the oversized boots I saved from the dumpster. We’re teetering on the precipice of April, nearly ready to hop into May, the weather warming up. I lower the hood of my rain slicker, overhanging boughs catapulting raindrops from leaf to leaf.

He’s soundless, but the 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 this universe, too.”

It is true that I crave that validation. It is also true that praise makes me squirm. “The floor is all shiny aqua tiles that go halfway up the walls. The rest of the walls are pale, pale purple and decorated with mirrors of all shapes and sizes. Succulents in hanging baskets. Travel posters of fictional lands. There are tons of big, leafy green plants everywhere. I kill every plant I touch in real life, but here I have a green thumb.” 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.

“There are red vinyl booths and a black countertop with bar stools. An old-fashioned cash register. A jukebox. Fairy lights. A display case full of donuts.”

“What kind?” he interrupts.

I’m a pastry junkie; I could write sonnets about what kind. “Cinnamon sugar, chocolate strawberry mousse, caramel and peanut long johns. Fudge brownie with powdered sugar.”

“Nice.”

“Cinnamon rolls,” I go on. As I talk, the talking becomes easier, and why should this embarrass me, anyway? My café is spectacular. “Bear claws. Beignets. Pumpkin and cream cheese. Butterscotch pralines. Mexican hot chocolate. Donuts with every filling imaginable: raspberry, apple, lemon curd, blueberry.” I’m making myself hungry. “There’s an old rotary phone on the counter that flashes red when it’s time to go back to the real world. Beside it sits a frosted cake stand especially for Lamington donuts. Half are covered in traditional coconut, the other half chopped hazelnuts.” I realize I’m gesturing, as if he can see what I’m pointing at, and that 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. I react with a powerful expanding of pressure in my chest: my body is double-gravity heavy, immobile, never to move again. But my heart is a balloon.

“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.”

“Busy, busy.” His demeanor turns pensive. “Do you make coffee cake?”

I flourish a hand. “Look at that, it just appeared on the menu.”

“Sweet tea?”

“Sir, this is a coffee shop. Not that I ever concentrate too much on the coffee aspect of it; I guess I get preoccupied with the donut part. We offer coffee, water, chai, and hot chocolate.” I tick the options off on my fingers. Whenever I daydream, the drinks materialize out of thin air in chunky earthenware mugs. I don’t travel lovingly through the entire process like I do with baked goods. A girl’s got to have priorities.

“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.”

“So they are. Go ahead and have your sweet tea.” I hear a clink as the mug is put down on the counter. The jukebox comes alive, unspooling nature sounds: whistling birds, a babbling creek.

“Thank you. Oh, wait. Ohh.”

I look at Wesley. He’s on the opposite side of the counter in my dreamland, seated atop a stool. He’s high in a tree, smiling down at me. Either scenario is equally confounding, and both are true. “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.”

“Why do you even have it on your menu if it’s going to taste like this? Honestly.”

“Ah, I see what’s happened. I mixed up the tea with that big jug in the back with the skull and crossbones on it. Three big X’s.” I make slashes in midair. “Whoops.”

“I’ll leave you a positive review with my dying breath. For capitalism.”

“See, that’s really me, though. Whenever I eat out at restaurants, they could serve me a bowl of rocks and I’d say, ‘Thank you so much!’ People in the food industry don’t get paid enough for all they put up with. I’m not about to make their job worse. Give me rocks, I’ll tip twenty percent.”

He shudders. “Restaurants.”

“You’ve mentioned that before. You don’t like them.” I study his face, his gaze locked on mine with the faintest trace of trepidation. “Any reason why?”

“I like the part about eating food I didn’t have to cook,” he replies. “Not having to wash any dishes? Great. But then they destroyed the idea by letting people in.”

Something about the quick cadence of his words, how easily they roll off his tongue, tells me he’s leaned on them at least once before. A rehearsed justification. But I’m delighted, anyway, laughing, and it shakes the leaves. We both tip our heads back. It’s raining again, fat drops jumping across the canopy far above in a frenzy. Wesley meets my eyes, his smile still warm. The aroma of cinnamon and cocoa powder drifts on beyond reach, pink neon chinks of light magicking back into sunbeams of an eerie golden green. The color of the sky before a storm.

“Time to head back, looks like,” I say reluctantly. I should try to dampen how disappointed I sound, but I don’t have the heart to.

“Watch out,” he replies. My limbs are rusty, the bottom of my jeans cold from sitting on the ground. I scramble away right in time for him to jump out of the tree and land with a hard thud beside me.

We race across the stone bridge, rain pelting faster, while I don’t pay a single crumb of attention to where we’re going. Wesley could probably navigate this wood blindfolded; he doesn’t second-guess his steps, taking one turn, then another, hand hovering over the small of my back as though I might get lost otherwise. We’re soaked and shivering when we make it back to the manor, but at least I’ve got my rain slicker. Wesley isn’t wearing a jacket. His hair is dripping, shirt clinging to his skin. It’s glorious.

“I’ll light the fireplace,” he says, which is completely unnecessary because we’ve got gas heating.

“Ooohh, good idea.”

He hurries into the living room. I peel off my jacket, comb my fingers through my shaggy hair, and kick off my boots. I’m following after him when he passes me, threading back into the kitchen. He grabs a broom.

“What do you need that for?”

“Sweeping?” He jerks his head toward the ceiling. “Heading back up. Break time’s over.”

I don’t know what I was hoping—actually, yes I do. I was hoping he’d light the fireplace and we’d talk more. I want to see him smile again. I want the unexpected warmth of talking to Wesley, and Wesley talking to me, just as much as I want warmth from a fire. I’ve only gotten a taste of it.

“Oh.”

His arm brushes mine, just barely, a microscopic touching of skin cells, as he exits the room—Unintentional, Maybell, that was definitely, probably unintentional—but unintentional or not, I am stock-still for the next twenty seconds, forgetting where I am and what I’m doing. What am I doing?

I amble into the living room, trying not to be disappointed. That’s when I see the letter I wrote him, which was last seen up in a tree. He’s scribbled on it.

Not a scribble. A sketch.

Scratchy lines for shading, no border, one of the table booths interrupted by words: AU? The enchiladas were good. Thank you. A freehand sign with my name on it, and a half-eaten donut on a countertop. A vintage telephone. It’s my coffee shop. He’s drawn my coffee shop.

And inside it, two people. A chill steals through me—not at all an unpleasant one—when I recognize that he’s positioned us exactly the way I envisioned. I’m behind the counter; he’s seated opposite, in the second-to-last stool. We’re leaning toward each other slightly, enough to notice. He’s exaggerated the messiness of his hair while downplaying his broadness and height, as though he views himself as smaller and slighter than he actually is.

I can’t stop staring at miniature illustrated Maybell. She’s a quick sketch, not detailed like the photorealistic drawing I found in the loft, but I like the friendly touch he’s imbued me with. The twin spots on my smiling cheeks, the rogue wave in my hair on one side that doesn’t match the other. I told him about Maybell’s Coffee Shop AU to restore the balance, to send us back to where we were before. I think we might have accidentally turned down a different fork in the path. Let’s See Where This Goes Road.

SOMEWHERE FAR ABOVE THE clouds, glittering in stars and nebulae, a neon sign spins leisurely outside a cheerful little haven where everything always goes according to plan and nothing unexpected ever happens.

With no one around to watch, the sign buzzes brighter, brighter, brighter, sparks flying. The walls tremble. A giant white oak tree surges out of the prefabricated floor, dead center in the middle of the café. Its great roots unfurl, wending their way up the walls, clamping down between framed mirrors. Each facet of glass reflects a pair of questioning brown eyes, an in-spite-of-itself smile, an open, outstretched hand.