Twice Shy by Sarah Hogle (ebook offline reader .TXT) 📕

“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