Page 23 of The Claiming of the Shrew
“Can I stand without them?” Leah asked, settling her hands on the grips and her forearms in the wrist loops.
“Yeah.”
“Not very well.” She thrust out a leg. “It’s a congenital deformity. You’ve been very kind about not asking, but I’m sure you’d like to know. I was born this way, and I’ve had a number of surgeries to get my legs more or less straight and the same length, but they still just don’t support my weight very well. I used to wear leg braces as a kid, and that helped with getting them to grow straight, but they’re restrictive and also wearing them weakened the muscles a lot. Now I walk without them pretty much all the time. I still have the braces for bad leg days, but I don’t have those much anymore.”
“You do get around just fine,” Fawkes said. He hesitantly placed a hand in the curve of her back, and she leaned into him a bit. It was still so incredibly new, so amazing, being able to do this. “In fact, well, like I said, I didn’t really notice at first.”
“I still can’t believe that. What were you looking at instead?”
Your eyes, your lips, your everything.“Your face,” Fawkes said, gazing down at it.
“Oh,” she whispered.
They kissed again, softer now, without the earlier fervent energy and with more of a gentle undertone to it. Leah played with the hair above his ear.
“Do you mind if we—don’t really do anything else yet?” she asked. “I think I’d like to walk a bit more. And do more of this, of course. But I’m also curious where this path goes.”
“Doing more of this and walking on this path with you sounds like a perfectly amazing afternoon.”
They set off again, but close together, and every now and then her hand brushed his. The path was wide enough in places to walk two abreast. Elsewhere, one or the other of them took the lead.
“So tell me about you,” Fawkes said. He felt giddy, overwhelmed with joy, still living on the intoxication of her kisses and her warmth and her nearness. “What do you like, what’s your favorite movie, where did you go to school—I don’t even know what you do for a living.”
“Didn’t I?”
“You just said it was gig work.”
“Oh, goodness. Well, I’m working in call centers right now. I’d love to do theater full-time, but it’s a volunteer thing, not a job. I wasn’t a good enough student to get scholarships to college, and in fact, I don’t really click with studying in general. I like to use my hands. I’m still figuring out exactly what I want to do what.”
They went on chatting about movies (she liked superheroes and comedies with animals), food (Leah unsurprisingly had a major sweet tooth) and family. She came from a mixed-religion household (Jewish mom, Protestant dad) but she said it hadn’t affected her upbringing all that much.
“Joy and I lost our parents when we were young,” Leah said. She paused occasionally to concentrate on her footing, as they were currently navigating a steep stretch in the trail. “She basically raised me.” That would explain the shovel talk, Fawkes thought. “Okay, now that I’ve gone on endlessly about myself, what about you? Parents, siblings, et cetera.”
“None to speak of. I was a foster kid, in and out of different homes. Eventually my granddad got custody and raised me.”
That was a pleasant memory, the point when his childhood really turned around. He remembered with warmth and fondness the farm and the old man, who had been estranged from his own now-gone children; the two of them relearning how to be a family, Fawkes young and angry, his granddad awkward and struggling with simple expressions of affection. They had done it, though, in the end.
“Oh, we’re both orphans,” Leah said. “I didn’t guess that. Is your granddad, um—still?—”
“Oh yeah, he’s fine. Getting up there, but he still lives and works on the farm where he’s spent his entire life.” Fawkes smiled. “I think he’d like you.”
“I would love to meet him,” Leah said. “The way your face gets when you talk about him?—”
Fawkes became abruptly self-conscious about his face. “What’s that mean?”
“Oh, I just meant—soft. You get soft.”
“Uh, thanks?”
Leah laughed. She stopped, turned around swiftly, and kissed him. “You know, kissing is a great invention forsmoothing over awkward moments. I can see why people came up with it.” She resumed climbing. Over her shoulder, she said, “Joy and I don’t have any close relatives besides each other. It has always just been us. I’m looking forward to meeting your grandpa. So tell me more about you. What got you into being a private detective?”
“Terminal nosiness,” Fawkes said, and was rewarded with a peal of her bright laughter. “No, mostly I bounced around between different jobs like you did. Farm work was what I knew, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do as a career. Granddad would’ve scraped and saved to send me to college if I wanted it, but I didn’t want that either, and I felt like I wouldn’t get along well in the military. So I did different things, slung crates in the back of a convenience store, did night security at a warehouse, learned to type and file so I could do office work. I ended up working for Sam as an assistant and found out that I liked it.”
“Sam?”
“My partner in the private investigator business. At the time, he was doing the P.I. thing on the side while working full-time at an insurance company. He needed a stable income because he’s a single dad. His daughter’s a teenager now. But he hated the work, and we ended up going into business together. It’s worked out well for both of us.”
“Huh,” Leah said. She had turned around completely on the path to watch his face, taking a step backward now and then. “You look happy when you talk about him, too. You’re close to him?”
