Page 93 of Maybe You

Sutton plucks my sketchpad out of my hands while I’m busy smiling at him like an unhinged lunatic and starts leafing through the pages. He doesn’t say anything, just slowly works his way through the book, concentrating on each page with the focus of a scientist who just found an important document.

And while he’s studying my sketches, I have time to study him. For a person who, by his own admission, has been taking some time off, possibly on a yacht, he looks tired. Almost like he hasn’t slept properly in a few days. There are shadows beneath his eyes, and his gaze lacks its usual sharp humor.

Once he’s through the book, he closes it and moves his fingertips over the cover almost reverently.

“You’re very good,” he says.

My cheeks heat, and I start to wave him off, but then I remember the lesson about compliments.

“Thank you,” I say.

He grins. Still tired, but sort of happy, too.

Maybe he’s glad to see me?

I do my best to push the thought away as soon as it jumps into my head, but here’s the thing with thoughts: you can’t pretend they weren’t there when your own brain cooked them up in the first place.

“This is the scarlet tanager?” he asks when he’s flipped to the sketch I was working on earlier.

“A summer tanager. It’s similar to the scarlet tanager, but the males are bright red all over, and they’re a bit bigger than scarlet tanagers. They’re the only completely red bird in North America. They’re sort of fascinating, too. See, they eat bees and wasps, and they’re pretty vicious about it. They catch the bee midflight, and first they’ll beat them against a branch, then they’ll rub them against the branch to get the stinger off. There are a few of them here, up high in the trees. Do you hear those sort of slurred whistles that come in series? It has these short, melodic units it repeats in a constant stream.”

He nods, then leans back and drops his head back, eyes on the branches above us, legs stretched out, fingers linked on his chest.

“That one?” he asks after another sequence of whistled notes.

“Yeah.”

“That’s cool.”

His eyelids turn heavy after a little bit. I watch him for a moment before I turn so I’m sitting sideways. I put my left foot on the bench, knee bent, and open my sketchpad to a blank page before I take the pencil and start to draw.

He jerks awake after about twenty minutes and looks around with a dazed expression until his gaze lands on me.

I quirk my brow at him.

“Tired?”

He sits up straighter and rubs his eyes.

“Slept like shit the last few days,” he says through a yawn.

“How come?”

He closes his eyes again.

“Family stuff,” he mumbles.

I still. These are scraps, but I’m picking each one up greedily.

“You went to see your family?” I ask.

He doesn’t say anything at first, but then…

“My mother and her husband.”

“Your parents are divorced?”

He nods. “For years already. She remarried about ten years ago. Her husband is very nice, so basically the polar opposite of her first husband.”

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