Clay is staring at me. He’s waiting and he’s not smiling anymore. He must have been watching the entire time I was looking at the book, gauging my reactions while he showed me his soul. No matter how proud he may be, I know that showing me his work still has to be like ripping off his clothes, spinning around in front of me na**d and waiting for judgment. I used to feel the same way when I played anything I had composed.

“So?”

I pull a spiral notebook out of my backpack. The first of two pre-school warning bells just blasted through the hall and I have to get to class. Time and place? I write and hand it to him just as Yearbook Michelle comes running up and grabs his arm, pulling him away.

“Come on! We’re gonna be late!” I don’t think she even noticed that he was talking to me.

“Find me at lunch!” he yells over his shoulder as I walk off in the opposite direction, haunted by my own face.

***

“To the right. Just a little. Back more. Forget it. The light in here sucks. Let’s go back downstairs. The kitchen is the only room in this house with enough decent natural light.” Clay picks up his sketchpad, charcoal pencils and some other art crap, and I follow him back down the stairs of the townhouse I’ve spent the past three days in. He’s obsessed. I can’t blame him. I recognize it. I know the overwhelming need to create something. I watch him draw and hate him a little bit for it. I don’t feel bad about it. I feel justified. I miss it. I want it back so badly that I would break my hand apart all over again just to give myself something else to feel. Sometimes the wanting almost kills me again.

It’s a little bit devastating being surrounded by people who can do what you can’t anymore. People who create. People whose souls don’t live in their bodies anymore because they’ve leached so much of themselves into their work. Josh. Clay. My mother. I want to steal from them to let myself live.

“Back downstairs?” Maddie Whitaker has been here every day that I’ve come. She works doing data entry from home, so Clay says she’s always around. He sees his dad on the weekends on the other side of town which is why he’s been having me sit for him during the week.

“Crap light,” he says, and it’s enough of an answer for her.

I sit for the next hour, watching Clay, charcoal in hand, with his eyebrows pulled together the way they get when he’s concentrating. He hasn’t let me see anything he’s done yet. I don’t even know how many he’s drawn. I thought I was agreeing to one picture, maybe two, but we seem to have gone beyond that. By like eighty.

He finally takes pity on me and lets me up to use the bathroom.

“How many more?” I write down on a pad of sticky notes I find on the kitchen counter, because I’m stalling before I have to sit again.

“I don’t know. I’ll know when I’ve got them all, but I won’t know how many that is until I’m done.”

“Cryptic, much?” I scribble back. Because if I’m going to be spending this much time with him, I have to at least be able to communicate a little. Plus, Clay won’t sell me out.

“Not trying to be. Some people I can capture in one picture. For most, it’s two or three. For you, it’s more.”

Now he’s got me. I’m in. Why does it take so many pictures to capture one face?

“I’m not trying to capture one face. I’m trying to capture all the faces.” He stops to see if I’m getting this. “Most people have more than one. You have more than most.”

He tears apart faces and puts them back together whole, like I would a piece of music. I could play it a hundred ways, imbue it with a different emotion every time and try to find the truth of it. He does that with faces, except he’s not putting the truth in, he’s drawing it out. He’s looking for the truth of me. I wonder if he’ll find it, and if he does, maybe he can show me where it is again.

CHAPTER 21

Josh

My router is acting up for the second night in a row. I thought I had it back in working order last night, but now it’s pissing me off again. I wanted to finish this chair by the end of the week because I have three more projects waiting that all should have taken priority over this. But I wanted to build the chair and I couldn’t get it out of my head. So now I’m behind and I’ll be living out here for the next couple of weeks, trying to get back to even. I don’t mind. There are worse places to be.

The quiet out here is strange. It shouldn’t be. I’m used to the quiet, but it only took me two days without her, to feel it. It’s unsettling. Years of working out here by myself undone by less than two months of her company. And now she hasn’t been here for days. Maybe it’s a good thing, because I obviously need a reality check. I try to work with the garage door down as much as possible, just so I know that I can. I’m not going to let myself get used to anyone again. She can come here. She can sit in my garage, hand me tools, ask me questions. She can use me to get the talking out of her system. I can handle the company as long as I don’t come to expect it too much. And I won’t. I don’t know when she’s coming back but I wonder how long I can keep the garage closed before I start to suffocate.

***

Nastya

I’ve been clocking more miles this week than I have for the past several. A lot of my running time has been being spent in a certain garage and I’m trying to rein it in. But I miss him. It’s not like going without seeing a friend for a few days. He’s the be all and end all of my friends right now. I have Drew, and I seem to have acquired Clay somewhere along the way, but Josh is my escape. He’s my hiding place.

It’s been days since I’ve been to Josh’s house. I’ve spent the whole week sitting in a chair at Clay’s, feeling antsy and ridiculous and just wanting to get up and move. I hate the sitting still. When you spend months in a bed, letting your body heal and then sitting in a chair, trying to make your hand work, you get sick of it fast and you want to run away. So every day when I get done at Clay’s, I have to run. It’s the only thing that keeps the frayed edges of my sanity intact. And since Margot caved a few weeks back and let me get a portable punching bag, I have something to hit now and I spend a good amount of time doing that, too.

By Friday night, I can’t help it. I don’t even know if he’ll be home, but my feet take me there anyway. I wonder if he missed me, too. I slow myself down before I reach the driveway. He’s in the back, adjusting one of his saws and he’s turned away from me. I look around for someplace to climb up on the counter, but there isn’t one. Every inch of space on the workbench is occupied. Piles of wood scraps, random tools and boxes covering the whole thing. It’s never this overrun in here. Josh is meticulous, which means this is on purpose and I wonder if it’s a message. Maybe he realized how much he enjoyed not having me all over his space. He got reacquainted with his solitude and found that he’d missed it.

I’m not ready to walk out yet. If I’m going to be rejected, I’d like it to come complete with humiliation. I’m hoping he’ll come out from behind that stupid saw and say something to me, but he doesn’t look like he’s rushing to do so. Out of the corner of my eye, in front of the side door where the workbench ends, is the chair I’d seen him working on last week. I recognize the legs on it, the design he had painstakingly routed on all four of them. He must have finished it this week and I wonder if he made it on order or if he did it for himself. It’s exquisite, and every time I see something he’s made, I hate him a little more for it. My jealousy is a living thing. Shifting, changing, growing. Like my rage and my mother’s regret.

I run my hands along the arc of the backrest and kneel down to examine the legs. The armrests are wide and curved to match the lines of the back. I wonder if he’s started another one yet, because it should be part of a matching set. My fingers are still tracing their way down the other side, and before I’ve thought better of it, I slide into the seat, and that’s when the perfection of it strikes me. Because this chair should not be comfortable, but I may never want to leave it. My arms are resting on the sides and I lean back and look up to find Josh watching me. It’s unnerving the way he’s staring, no matter how much I may have gotten used to him and I kind of wish he wasn’t so damn good-looking because it makes it hard to look away.

The expression on his face is almost anxious but there’s something like mischief in it as well. It’s the same look Clay had when he showed me the picture he’d drawn of me. He’s waiting for a reaction, for approval. I look down at the chair I’m sitting in and back up at him, but he’s not looking at me anymore. He’s gone back to adjusting the saw as if everything has returned to the way it should be and that’s when it hits me. That he had done all of this on purpose. He made sure there was no place for me to sit on the counter so I’d be forced to notice it. Because the chair was meant for me.

The realization is enough to propel my ass straight up and out of that chair. He looks up, jarred by the sudden movement and for a moment we just stare at one other. I must look like a crazed animal, ready to bolt like the first night I walked in here. I can say what I’m thinking but I don’t need to. He already knows.

“It’s only a chair.” He’s talking me down off a ledge.

“I can’t take it.” I try to make it sound like he’s the unreasonable one for giving it to me.

“Why not?”

“You should sell it.”

“I don’t need to.”

“I won’t take it. Give it to someone else.”

“You need someplace to sit. I’m tired of you moving everything around and getting in my way whenever I’m working. Now you have a place to sit. So sit.” He motions me down into the chair with a tilt of his head and I sit and it feels more perfect than it did a few moments ago. He leans over me and places his hands on top of mine on the armrests and looks straight into my eyes, which flays me a little bit.

“It’s a chair. Stop overanalyzing it. I’m not selling it and I’m not giving it to someone else. I made it for you. It’s yours.” He pulls away and stands up straight. When his hands are gone from mine, I realize that it’s the first time he’s ever really touched me, and I wish he’d put them back. “Besides, it already has your name on it.”

“Where?”

“Look underneath. I was going to put it on the back where you could actually see it but it didn’t work.”

I slide down out of the chair and get as low as I can to the ground so I can twist my head around and see what he’s talking about. And I do and it’s unmistakable. There, on the underside of the seat, is an engraving of the sun.

I know at that moment what he’s given me and it’s not a chair. It’s an invitation, a welcome, the knowledge that I am accepted here. He hasn’t given me a place to sit. He’s given me a place to belong.

CHAPTER 22

Nastya

It amazes me how people are so afraid of what can happen in the dark, but they don’t give a second thought about their safety during the day; as if the sun offers some sort of ultimate protection from all the evil in the world. It doesn’t. All it does is whisper to you, lulling you with its warmth before it shoves you face down into the dirt. Daylight won’t protect you from anything. Bad things happen all the time; they don’t wait until after dinner.

***

I’ve never been to Josh’s house during the day. It looks different in the afternoon. I wouldn’t be here now if my car battery hadn’t been unjumpably dead when I left school today. I live close enough to the campus to walk, but I don’t walk anywhere in the afternoon. Mornings I can deal with, but there’s a period of hours in the afternoon when I hate being outside. Even nighttime doesn’t bother me so much. The dark doesn’t breed fear in me the way the daytime does. The afternoon sun has a way of following me, burning memories onto my back. Josh always offers me rides home from his house. He thinks it should make me nervous, running alone at night, and it does. I’m not stupid enough to think I’m ever safe outside, anywhere, at any time of day. It’s just that I’m more nervous during the daytime.