6. Heidi
When Logan’s text came through on my phone, I felt a thrill of satisfaction I had never experienced. At least, not in my adult life. It was stupid, really, to let my day be brightened by a coffee order from a hot guy. As I stood in line, I realized I probably should have told him no. I scoffed at myself. He’d probably never heard it before.
Yet, when I checked the text, there was no coffee order. Just a note from him.
I’m so glad you called this morning. I learned something about you. You have the best laugh I have ever heard. I just thought you should know.
A second text came through while my heart was melting over the first.
Please, for the love of God, don’t forget the turpentine. That text took almost fifteen tries to even be understandable!
I chuckled and sent back a reminder that I needed his coffee order. I received a one-word reply.
Black
I doubted that was true. It was more likely he was just tired of trying to type. When I ordered his large, black coffee, I asked for cream and sugar on the side, so he could add it if he rethought his choice. My order was called, and I collected the pastries and coffees and headed to the park.
I parked in the visitor’s parking instead of the employees, so no one would see the car and come looking for me on a day off. I dropped a twenty-dollar bill in the fee box and winked at Roz, one of the older ladies who worked the fee booth as a volunteer a couple of days a week to help with our pay freeze.
The park was quieter than it had been the day before. I had the trail to myself as I carried breakfast and cleaning supplies up the hill toward the narrow, winding river Logan said he was working next to. The Neches River was already low, and if the drought continued, I was worried that Logan wouldn’t have any animals to photograph. The downside to working this park and loving it so much was the fear you felt anytime things happened in nature that you knew would hurt the fauna and flora, and you couldn’t do anything about it.
“Hey, there, tall, dark, and sappy, how ya doin’?” I asked as I walked up to the most pathetic model of self-pity I’d ever seen.
“I asked for black coffee,” he said.
I nodded.
He sighed. “That was the sap talking.”
I laughed and reached into the bag from the coffee shop, holding up sugar and a little cup of real cream they’d given me.
“I’m probably going to marry you someday.”
“Oh. Um, okay,” I stammered. I knew he was kidding, but for someone like me, just hearing him say that and knowing it wasn’t true was jarring. “I’ll still need you to pay me back for the turpentine,” I deadpanned, and he laughed.
“I saw that look, by the way,” he chided me. “Don’t assume I’m not serious. I’ve been looking all my life for a woman who’s obviously smarter than me but keeps me because she likes my hair.”
“I do like your hair. I’m jealous, in fact. What does your mother think of it, though?”
He scoffed and shook his head. “She hasn’t seen me in three months because she said if I don’t get it cut, she’ll take her garden shears to it and just snip it off at the hair tie.”
I snickered and offered him a choice between a donut and a raspberry Danish.
“Cruel woman. I can’t touch those with my hands like this!”
“Of course, you can. It’s sap, not poison. You could eat it if you had to. But I wouldn’t recommend it. I mean, smell it. That would be disgusting.” I ripped a piece off the donut and stuffed it into his mouth before he could speak again. “You know, my mother is the reason for my hair being this length, too,” I mentioned casually.
“Mmm. You want your hair longer?”
“No. I’d prefer to cut it. But my mom wants me to be pretty, and so I keep it long for her, and then I braid it every day, so it still isn’t pretty.”
Logan reached out, then turned his hand so his sticky fingers wouldn’t touch it and stroked it with the back of his hand. “I think it’s pretty.”
“Thanks. She means pretty like the women you would want to take pictures of.” I shrugged my shoulders and managed a half smile. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I’d love to take your picture. But the setting I have in mind would require us to know each other a little better.”
I arched an eyebrow at him. “Isn’t that a little cliché?”
“No. It is red-blooded male. You hot, me Tarzan, all the way. I mean, I’d love to take your picture right now, with the breeze on your face, and that glitter of anger/lust in your eyes…” His voice trailed off.
I laughed. “You are something else.”
He nodded, and I fed him another piece of donut. “You need to finish this, because turpentine smells awful, and I can’t risk it spilling anywhere out here. So, your place or mine?”
“My place is two hours away.”
I sighed. “My place then. But, no tour. No bedroom, no funny business,” I warned him.
He crossed his heart and clasped his hands together in thanks, only to cry out in real pain when he tried to pull them apart and they were stuck together. “I’ll even change clothes in my tent and carry the sticky ones with us, so they don’t ruin your things.”
I agreed and we walked the long way around to use the bridge to cross, instead of fording it like he had before. I waited outside while he changed, giggling to myself every time he roared in frustration or pain. He didn’t ask for help though, and I didn’t offer. As hot as he was. I was sure the naked truth was only harder to resist, if he offered. And if he didn’t, then my ego would feel it for sure.
I drove him back to my townhouse, and as he stepped inside, I remembered the prints over my bed. I ushered Logan to the couch and rushed to my bedroom, shut the door, and stood in front of it, glancing around for any other prints I might have forgotten.
“This will go better in the bathroom. Give me your sticky clothes, and I’ll get you enough to wash your hands.” The clothes went into a washtub on the back patio, and I poured the turpentine over them. Meanwhile, I could hear Logan as he finished inside. I walked back into the house, coughing from the overwhelming smell of turpentine, and he held up his hands.
“It isn’t me,” he assured me, sniffing his hands. “Well, most of it isn’t.” He wandered around the living room, taking his time with each piece of art I’d hung on my walls, every knick-knack on the shelves.
“Should I be ashamed of my choices?” I asked.
He shook his head. “You have beautiful pieces,” he assured me. “But none of you, anywhere. None of my work, either. I will remedy that once I think I can guess what you’d like best.”
I thought of the art above my bed and cringed. “I have pictures of me, I just don’t put them out,” I blurted. I rushed to the credenza and took out an old album. “The pictures are my story, but they’re… they’re not beautiful, and they’re certainly not art.”
“I’d like to see them.”
I handed him the album, and he opened to the first pictures of a happy bald baby, then a toddler with her first reddish brown curls and tiny, perfect teeth. He turned the page, to a little girl of four, sitting up in a hospital bed, IV and machines connected to her through tubes in her arms.
“My earliest memories are of sitting in the hospital with my mom or my dad by my side. I remember that it hurt, but mostly, I remember how sad and scared they were.”
He turned the page, and there I was, bald again, at eleven. “You were so thin,” he whispered.
“I didn’t get to play outside because my immune system was compromised. No sports, and no friends. Children were cruel because their parents treated me like I was contagious.”
He turned the page again, and I was fifteen, standing in front of my high school. I was in my blue and silver track uniform, standing next to a trophy almost as tall as I was.
“You look great here. God, you were already so beautiful,” he said. “And look at that badass trophy.”
I nodded and sighed. “I won that for taking state. I even broke a record in the 400m.” I glanced at him. “I wonder if anyone ever broke my new time.”
“You never went back?”
I laughed and closed the book, hiding away that one happy moment in a lifetime of birthdays spent in treatment, or sick and trying to recover from chemo. “I was going to have a party once; it would have been my first birthday party. I was going to be sixteen, and I was finally allowed to go to public school.” I cleared my throat. “I had started to run and to carefully control what I ate, convinced I could keep the cancer away. The track coach timed me when I was running one day and demanded I join the team. I went to state. I won, everything. When I got home, the kids I thought had become my friends tricked me to get me alone. They beat me and shaved my head. They said they wanted to see the “real” me.”
I didn’t cry when I told him. I’d run out of tears so long before that I couldn’t remember the last time those memories had soaked my pillow.
“It occurred to me that you must be strong to stay at a job where someone is unkind to you. I take it back.”
I flinched and stiffened. “Okay.”
“I take it back because you aren’t just a strong person. I think you might be the strongest person I ever met.”
“Your brother got blown up in Afghanistan and still saved his platoon.”
“Yeah, he’s a pretty strong guy. He’d be impressed by you.”
I took the album from him and put it away. “You don’t smell so bad, anymore. I kind of miss the pine scent. Much better when it’s real than those fake pine trees for cars.”
Logan laughed and followed me into the kitchen.
“Can I offer you a drink?”
He closed the distance between us and ran his finger along my jaw. “You should know, I want to kiss you, very, very much. But, I’m not going to.”
I stammered, unsure of what I was supposed to say after being told by a man he refused to kiss me. “Okay,” I finally said, giving him a wry smile. “I’ve waited this long to be kissed; I think I’ll survive waiting a little longer.”
“Oh, God. Telling me that when I touch you, it will be for the first time, does not help me keep my distance.”
I chuckled. “You want me to believe I’m that irresistible?”
“No. That’s sort of the point. I’m going to prove to you that I deserve what you have to offer, and that you want to give it to me.”
“That’s a lot, considering everything else you have going on,” I said drily.
He laughed and rubbed his thumb over my jawline again. “I’ll make it a priority.” He pulled me into his arms and hugged me so tight, I couldn’t tell if it was for me or for him. I felt the hard line of his body pressed against me, and my heart beat so hard I was afraid he’d feel it inside his own ribcage.
“You sure know how to make a girl like you, even if you do have long hair and you can’t be trusted with your own coffee order.” I pulled away, even though I felt a keen ache as I did. “I’m learning, that maybe it’s not that all people are bad. I just have to start spending time with the right ones.”
“I think that’s exactly what you need. I even have a couple of family members I’d be willing to share with you. They’re even animal people like you. Especially my sister-in-law.”
I coughed and nodded quickly. I wasn’t ready to tell him I’d already met one sister-in-law. It seemed too serendipitous to not come across as stalking.
“Are you ready to put up more cameras?” I asked, a little desperate to change the subject.
“No. But after a little brunch, I will be. I owe you for the coffee.”
“You certainly do, Mr. Famous Photographer Hargrave. At the very least. And maybe we can talk about you for a bit while we’re at it. Now that I’ve bared my soul to you.”
“You did not,” he laughed, which I knew was the truth. “But, I will bare mine to you. If you think you have the kind of stamina to listen to a story that puts others to sleep, then I have all the time in the world to tell you. That’s what people do on stake-outs, right?”
I arched an eyebrow at him. Two days ago, I was living my boring life, where the most important part of my day was avoiding my boss because he was mad at me for not dating him. Suddenly, I was about to be alone in the woods for who knew how long with the most ridiculously sexy man I’d ever seen in person.
“God works in mysterious ways,” my mom liked to say. I wasn’t a religious person, but I’d learned the power of faith. Faith that I could be healed. Faith that I could overcome brutality. I wasn’t ready for faith in love. But I felt something click with him. The way I had with his sister-in-law, Callie. It felt good, being around people for the first time in a long time. And if being alone with Logan helped me feel less isolated, I was going to give him all the time he wanted.