by Annie Harper
“I can’t keep her,” André says, “but if I could borrow her, I… her eyes do look nurturing, in a psychotic sort of way.”
Cody laughs. “She grows on you.” He needs his hands back if he’s going to hand her over or remember how to breathe, but André isn’t pulling away.
“If I’m going to borrow her, though, I will need to give her back sometime.”
Cody’s brow furrows. “That is the definition, but if you want to hold onto her—”
“No,” André cuts in. “I mean—” He licks his lips, and the question in his eyes looks almost like fear. “Is there a time when you might want me to come over… here, and give her back?” He finishes breathlessly.
“Yes,” Cody squeaks and then, more quietly, “tomorrow’s fine… if you want.”
André takes an unsteady breath, and a grin slowly spreads across his face. “Tomorrow, huh?” He raises an eyebrow, and Cody ducks his head.
“She might miss me,” he mutters, scowling down at their hands. André laughs low in his throat, as if he’s sharing a secret, and Cody finally understands why people think laughter is so gut-wrenchingly sexy. He would do anything to make André keep laughing, just like that, forever.
“And what if I need her again, some other night? What if her therapy services are required?”
“Then,” Cody answers, “we’ll need to set up some kind of shared custody.”
“Because she might miss you?”
“Exactly.” Cody nods, and sucks in a breath as André leans until his jaw grazes the side of Cody’s cheek.
“She might not be the only one,” André whispers and slowly presses his lips to the taut skin at Cody’s temple. Heat blossoms from the spot in waves, spiraling through Cody’s body and pooling deep in his stomach.
As André’s lips leave his skin, Cody lets out a soft gasp. It echoes in the silence, and no part of him cares. His face is red and his ankles are feeding mosquitoes, but this lamplight is just short of heaven. “I should really go,” he says, biting his lip. “Are you—tomorrow?”
“Yeah.” André steps back and nods, one hand rubbing at the flush creeping up his neck. He delicately plucks the model out of Cody’s open hand and turns her over between his fingers, using her little armored hand to wave goodbye. “I’ll see you,” he smiles, and as he walks away, disappearing between the streetlights, Cody knows that he will. André is going to show up at his door, and Cody’s going to be there to let him in.
As Cody walks toward his front door, he thinks about Kaelyssa and how solitude isn’t the end of her story. In the guidebooks, she has three lives sparked by three great moments of change and, in her last incarnation, she joins a team. She finds warriors whose powers rival her own, and together they take on the demons at the gate. He’d never paid much attention to that last piece, but now he feels it pushing him up the steps and past the broken screen door. He doesn’t enter alone; he has an army at his back and they’re painted in “Burgundy Wine.” His army might be loud and small, but they’re his and he’s theirs. He walks toward the light still shining in the kitchen, his shoes echoing against the tile, and for the first time all night, he’s breathing fine.
The Willow Weeps for Us
Suzey Ingold
His mother has always joked that he is the English rose of the family; his fair skin has never taken well to the intense bouts of summer sun that occasionally grace their part of England. She finds his freckles endearing, not to mention the way the tips of his ears and the rise of his cheekbones turn pink. Jack finds all this tiresome and looks forward to September, when the leaves begin to dull and turn crisp around the edges once more, and the sun will wane with them.
The same cannot be said for Tom, the once scrawny cat who somehow came to be adopted into the Harrison family when Jack was a child—he takes to basking in the sun during these warm months with a quiet enthusiasm. Today as he rises for work, Jack finds Tom splayed across the windowsill with the sun bouncing off patches where his fur is thinner. With his old age, Tom’s fur is beginning to grow in mere tufts in some places compared to his otherwise sleek coat.
Jack scratches behind Tom’s ears gently, and the cat shifts and purrs in his slumber. Tom cracks an eye open and regards Jack with a lazy gaze; a single green eye meets Jack’s hazel ones.
“It’s all right for you,” Jack comments. “You can lie there all day and not have to worry about turning the color of a tomato.”
He can already hear his mother’s voice floating up from downstairs reminding him not to be late.
“Not that the boss will mind, I suppose,” Kathryn teases as he comes downstairs. Her hand comes up instinctively to straighten the collar of his shirt.
He sighs, but makes no move to bat her hand away. His father will have been at the shop since shortly after dawn, savoring the quiet of the early morning before the town becomes busy—which it will be by the time Jack arrives.
Kathryn suggests breakfast, but Jack declines and simply pinches a freshly baked roll, plants a kiss on her cheek and makes for the door. He likes to take his time on his walk into town, to dawdle along the dirt track that runs between the trees. It’s cooler beneath the branches, too: sunlight flickers between the leaves and casts patterns against the ground. The soles of his shoes are starting to wear from the rough tree roots that edge the path, but he cannot afford to get a new pair.
The Harrison family’s small grocery has been quiet in recent weeks; vegetable patches have sprung up in the gardens behind people’s houses, new allotments farther back, and many find it more economically viable these days to tend their own greens rather than buy them, old habits be damned.
Though he is twenty-one, Jack’s parents still look on him as a child—as they do his sister, who is younger than him by six years. They make vague, threadbare excuses about the changes rippling slowly beneath the surface of their community, as if neither he nor Eliza hears the radio as it relays the news during dinner; as if they don’t know of the impending threat from the continent.
Jack sighs, idly kicking fallen branches from his way as he nears the end of the path, and crosses over the stream, a tributary of the River Cam, by means of a small bridge. He has seen this stream rage loudly over the rocks after a heavy rain; now it is shallow, barely trickling. It has been some time since it last rained.
The shop is quiet. He finds Mrs. Aitken, an elderly neighbor, eyeing a crate of tomatoes with a critical frown. She doesn’t respond to his greeting as he fastens the green apron at the small of his back, but she’s been losing her hearing for years, so Jack doesn’t take offense. The uniform is just a formality, since, for the most part, Jack’s responsibilities remain within the confines of the storage room at the back. His father’s is the face the local customers know, and that’s what keeps the Harrison family in business.
The back room is a mess. Jack’s father is many things—a great businessman among them—but organization is not his strong suit. Jack remembers stacking boxes back here as early as age six; Kathryn looked on in amusement as he tugged tirelessly at crates too large for his small stature to bear.
Jack hears voices out front, and the bell over the door jingles. He shifts a fresh crate of apples over his left shoulder and pushes the door open with his foot. His father is talking jovially with a young man. Jack faces his father’s broad back: the elder Harrison would be the last to admit it, but Jack can see that he is beginning to age. His hair is fading into a silvery gray; his shoulders show a tiredness that Jack knows didn’t used to be there. The stranger, in contrast, radiates youth, from his stance to his laugh, his vibrant eyes and the dark hair neatly swept back over his head. Jack’s mother would adore for Jack to have that kind of hair rather than the persistently fluffy chestnut curls that grow wildly on his head. This man looks sophisticated and handsome, down to his neatly pressed shirt and fitted trousers. Jack feels like a little boy in comparison, with his shirt large over his wiry frame and traces of earth beneath his fingernails.
Jack puts down the crate. The stranger’s gaze follows the movement, and a small smile plays on his lips when Jack straightens. “Apples, is it? That you’re after?” For want of something to do with his hands, Jack fumbles for a brown paper bag. There’s a reason he usually works out of the range of the public eye.
The man’s smile remains friendly, however, with no hint of the condescension Jack is used to.
“I suppose so,” the man responds and tucks one ankle behind the other. “About a pound should be fine.”
Jack nods. The intensity of the man’s gaze makes it difficult to look away. He feels the tips of his ears heat up as he weighs out the apples and puts them into the bag. The man smells clean and fresh; his scent is intoxicating over the earthy aroma of the shop.
“Anything else?” Jack asks, swinging the bag over itself to twist the ends into tight knots.
“Any recommendations?” the man asks in turn, plucking a strawberry from the opposite shelf and biting the flesh from the stalk. His tongue chases the juice, and he hands the green remains to Jack with a lopsided grin. “Don’t want to make a mess,” he shrugs and gestures to the crate. “A pound of those, too.”
Jack supposes that this highhandedness should irk him somewhat; nevertheless, the man doesn’t seem arrogant.
“I didn’t know Mr. Harrison had a son,” the stranger comments as Jack weighs the second bag. “Jack, is it?”
Jack nods absentmindedly, paying little attention to the handfuls of strawberries he places into the bag.
“Well, nice meeting you, Jack.” The man smiles again as he pays for the fruit. “Apologies for the strawberry stealing.”
Jack watches him go with the strawberry stalk still tucked into his fist. It’s only once the door swings shut that it occurs to Jack: he never learned the man’s name.
His mother is not a woman of many rules, except that dinner must always be a full family affair. This pulls Jack and his father back from the shop each evening and gets them clean, presentable and seated by seven o’clock. The radio is left on in the background these days, though Jack tries his best to tune out the talk of attacks and invasion.
His father had not served in the Great War; lingering health problems from his childhood caused him to fail his medical examination. He had taken his own father’s place running the grocery at age eighteen when Jack’s grandfather enlisted instead. The position should have been temporary, but ultimately became permanent.
Jack has known little of war, beyond children’s idle chatter and games in the schoolyard. But with each passing day, it becomes more likely that war is a reality Jack will have to discover for himself.
“Richard stopped by today,” his father tells the table, once the food has been served and grace said.
Kathryn laughs. “I take it the allotment isn’t proving as fruitful as he’d hoped?”
“Potatoes are coming on well; not much to be said for the rest. Not quite the green fingers type, as he put it.”
She titters, and her cheeks flush as she reaches up to smooth an imaginary stray strand of light brown hair. Jack assumes they must be talking about the same man as his strawberry thief—Richard. “Who needs green fingers when he puts them to far better use as it is?”
A chunk of carrot lodges in Jack’s throat; eyebrows are raised in his direction as he coughs violently.
Attention is drawn from his coughing fit and heated face, however, when his sister, Eliza, taps her fork on the edge of her plate with an excited grin and asks, “Richard who teaches piano?” Their parents nod in affirmation. “He teaches Jane and Lillian. Apparently he’s dreamy,” she coos, flicking a sidelong glance at Jack. He steadfastly ignores her gaze and stares down at his plate, his appetite lost.
“Hmm? And what did you think of him, Jack? You two seemed to be getting along rather well.” His father looks at him expectantly. The subtext is clear: A friend could do you some good. “Jack? Is he dreamy?” His father guffaws.
Jack sighs and props his head on one hand, even though he knows his mother will scowl at him for having his elbow on the dinner table. “Oh, yes. He’s a catch,” he responds dryly.
Conversation dies down after that, and the focus turns to the quiet monotone of the radio announcer. Jack ignores it, instead noting the strawberry juice stain that clings to the side of his thumbnail.
Eliza catches his arm as he retires to his bedroom after dinner. She’s got an inquisitive look in her green eyes, one Jack knows far too well. He remembers it from as far back as Eliza’s childhood, when she stole knick-knacks from his room for sport. Her curls, lighter in color than his and verging on blonde at this time of year, spring free from the clips shoved haphazardly into them and frame her face, making it look round. She grins at him, revealing the small gap between her front two teeth that makes her look so cheeky.
Jack sighs. He’s halfway through A Tale of Two Cities, the third in his stack of the Dickens collection inherited from the grandfather he did know and he’s eager to get back to it. “So?” Eliza probes, her voice low even though their parents are well out of earshot. “What’s he really like? Richard?”
Richard. “Odd,” Jack replies honestly. He can’t deny that the man has remained on his mind for the better part of the afternoon. Flashes of their brief encounter keep coming back to him: Richard’s smile, almost mischievous in hindsight; his long, elegant fingers—piano-playing fingers—plucking the strawberry from the crate; his figure disappearing out the door.
“Odd,” Eliza echoes, quirking an eyebrow. “You two ought to get on well, then.”
Jack doesn’t expect to see Richard again, even though the local community isn’t vast by any stretch of the imagination. Perhaps this is a mechanism of self-defense, something to prevent his mind from whirling off into a flurry of possibilities about a man he barely knows. He wouldn’t admit it to his parents—maybe not even to Eliza—but loneliness hits him hard, and often. They have let him know that they suspect it, but he brushes off their concern, eager to prove to them as much as to the rest of the world that he is capable of being alone.
* * *
Today is an onion day, unfortunately, and Jack spends it elbow deep in the vegetable, stacking crates. His father has been persistently humming a Coleman Hawkins number all morning, merrily driving Jack around the bend with the dancing saxophone melody. The older Harrison would say it is a tune for a summer’s day with the sun shining, as it is now, but Jack never much enjoyed jazz.
He thinks, instead, of how Eliza glanced at him yesterday across the dinner table. As if she knew something, perhaps. Eliza has known about Jack since she stumbled across her older brother sharing kisses with Billy from down the road. It was five years ago now, in the lane that runs behind their houses, on a July evening after dusk. Somehow, her ten-year-old mind had carefully wrapped around the understanding that their parents ought not to know a thing about the encounter. Eliza remains Jack’s only confidante. Billy was sent to a boarding school in Wales that autumn, and Jack never heard from him again. It was not romance so much as comfort: the sense of relief that he was different, perhaps, but nevertheless not alone.
The bell above the door jingles around midday, pulling Jack from his thoughts—though not his father from his whistling, unfortunately—and Richard enters the shop with a sheaf of papers beneath one arm. Jack’s gaze catches the markings on the pages. He recognizes it as sheet music, though he’s never played an instrument.
“Morning, Mister Harrison,” Richard calls, while his feet head toward Jack.
“Morning, Richard.” To Jack’s surprise, his father seems unperturbed that his son, rather than he, is this customer’s first point of contact.
“Morning, Jack.”
Jack notes Richard’s neatly buttoned shirt and the way it contrasts with a trace of stubble on his jaw. “Afternoon, I think, by now.” He pauses. “More strawberries? Or something different?” He proffers one of the formidable onions.
Richard laughs, tucking the papers more firmly under his arm. “No, no. I’m just here to settle a debt. It seems I underpaid you yesterday.” He pulls a few shillings from the depths of his pocket. “I paid for a pound, but it must have been closer to a pound and a quarter.”
Jack wills the red flush to remain absent from his cheekbones, for the mistake was his, not Richard’s. His own distraction is the cause for Richard’s return visit. “Oh, no. Please. Consider it a gesture of goodwill. For your struggling greens.”
Richard’s cheeks glow red now, which makes a smile tug at the corner of Jack’s mouth. “Well, thank you. That’s very generous of you. Perhaps I can repay you with a cup of tea some afternoon.”
Richard doesn’t linger today, nor does he buy anything. It’s a pattern that seems to mark the day, for they receive little business. Jack’s father dismisses him by midafternoon, saying there’s little point in him spending any more time unnecessarily shuttered away from the beautiful sunshine.
Jack considers walking to the bookshop (the Dickens is starting to prove a little tiring), but he finds himself strolling in the direction of the river instead, past a cluster of houses. He’s not been down this way often; there’s been no reason to.
He hears the ping of a bicycle bell behind him and moves closer to the curb, out of the way.
“Jack!” The bell pings again. “Fortunate that I’ve run into you—it just occurred to me that I’ve been terribly rude. I haven’t even introduced myself.” It’s Richard, his feet standing still on the pedals as he slows to Jack’s pace. “Richard Booth.”
