“Did you do all of these?” She gestured to the dozens of birds perched on the ledges that lined the shed. Bright yellow larks, tanagers perched for flight; a hawk stretched forward as if it eyed a mouse scurrying across the floor.
He crossed his arms. “Most.”
“They’re so full of life.” She ran a hand over the back of the meadowlark, petting the painted feathers. “This one looks like it might stand up in my hand and fly away.”
His palm itched to seize the carving and return it to its proper perch but he didn’t dare move. He felt more stripped bare than he had been all day.
“So this is why you take photos of birds.” She gestured to the prints hanging from a rope stretched across the back of the shed. “You catch them perched or in flight and then carve their likeness.”
“Sometimes.”
“You are a man of many talents, Logan.”
“It’s a hobby.”
He was being terse, but it was past time Jenny got the hint. She didn’t deserve his ire, but neither did he want to tell her why he spent hours carving feather-grooves in knots of wood, or sanding away the rough edges, or working with three-strand brushes to paint the feathers right. They were sex-buddies, right? They were supposed to spend every waking hour of the next week in a cycle of desire, sexual engagement, post-coital bliss, and sleep. Best to keep conversations light, and discover nothing deeper about one another than what physically roused them. Yet he knew his stubborn silence was speaking louder than words.
He picked his words like he was tweezing stitches out of a wound. “It’s an interest I picked up on my travels.”
“South America.”
“Brazil, specifically.”
She nodded. “For me it’s Sudoku. Crossword puzzles.”
“That’s for the mind. This—” he jerked his chin toward the shelves “—keeps my hands busy during down time.”
“More than that, I think.”
Don’t think, Jenny. But she was thinking. He saw it in the way a little fan of lines deepened beside her left eye as she tilted her head. He’d seen that look before, caught it when he’d come down to her lab to find her contemplating the secrets of the universe, her gaze fixed on air. Her gaze wasn’t now fixed on air, or him, but he felt like the singular subject of her thinking anyway.
“As a kid,” she murmured, running a fingertip across the unpainted wing of a red-tailed hawk, “I took piano lessons for a while. I played music to—how did you put it?—to ‘keep my hands busy during down time.’ I was in boarding school at the time, and the work of my hands, and my mind, distracted me from other troubles. Like missing my grandmother. Or finding friends when my French was less than adequate.”
He shifted his stance, uneasy with the parallels.
“At the time, I was determined to be at least half as good as my father—he’d planned to be a concert pianist. But then I was born, so he turned to medicine.”
“Heck of a family you’ve got there.”
She dropped her head. “Unfortunately, I didn’t have my father’s talent.”
“You wouldn’t admit it, even if you did.”
“Probably not,” she conceded. “I could manage passable Tchaikovsky, but Beethoven became the bane of my young existence.” She gripped the edge of the stool between her legs, hunching her shoulders. “It was my first and most devastating failure.”
He frowned. He couldn’t imagine this woman failing at anything she put that brilliant mind to. “I’d love to hear you play anyway.”
A strange little smile flittered across her face before she found interest in the dirty floor. Yeah, he shouldn’t have suggested that. Because there was no piano in the cabin. Because to hear her play—to want to hear her play—meant extending this relationship beyond the boundary of this cabin, far beyond the next week.
“So,” she said, breezing past that awkwardness, “this isn’t the kind of work you spontaneously pick up. Who taught you?”
She had a hell of a left hook.
“A colleague,” he said, measuring his words. “A doctor from Ecuador.”
“And you met this man where…?”
“In a clinic set up by Doctors Without Borders.” A gust rattled the shed door on his hinges, and brought in the first spray of rain. “He ran the unit in a remote area in the Amazon River Basin. I was one of his assigned doctors.”
She nodded, waiting for more. He frowned, resisting the pull of her interest, and the vacuum of the growing silence between them. He’d felt the same urge last October at the college reunion with Dylan and Garrick, when they’d all met in the darkness of a cool evening. But he’d known Dylan and Garrick for years. Jenny was still a stranger in all but the Biblical sense. It didn’t make sense to crack open his chest and reveal everything. She’d be unnerved, maybe even repulsed.
He looked away from her, running his gaze everywhere but where she waited in patient expectation. He could limit his confession to the carvings, describe to her the long afternoons he’d spent with the doctor who’d suffered his first attempts. Curcio didn’t mind when Logan joined him on walks through the rainforest to seek out seasoned wood. The practice of long walks and carving proved to be a meditative distraction from the work he’d volunteered to take on. It took his mind off the darkness of human nature.
He pushed away from the doorjamb where he’d been leaning. He couldn’t tell her any of this.
“Let’s close this shed up,” he said, swiping moisture off his arm, “and get back to the house before the skies open.”
“You don’t have to close up, Logan.”
He gestured to the unfinished carvings. “Rain will ruin the wood.”
“I’m not talking
