Page 69 of Little Bird
He nods tersely. “And if you see her there, tell her I want my fucking truck back.”
I won’t tell her anything of the sort, because I’m on Sammy’s side. But I don’t say so. Because I’m too busy planning what I’m going to say to Taryn about leaving town without fucking telling me.
I storm into the house and right into the shop. I wasn’t planning to come here first—I want to find Taryn and give her a piece of my mind—but I had an idea on the way home and I want to get it down on paper. I pull down the huge roll of paper I use for brainstorming, spread it across one of the worktables, and start sketching. On the way home, I was thinking about the tree I saw on the back lot yesterday, a sweet old oak, and realized that the trunk reminded me of an eagle with its wings spread. Not an eagle in flight, but one on the ground, having just caught something. Looking down at its feet. Beak open as it screams in victory.
I’ll lose it if I don’t sketch it immediately.
I’m in the middle of the rough strokes version when a pair of shoes appears on the other side of the table and I realize I’m not alone.
“Am I interrupting?” she asks.
Taryn.
I look up, trying to gather my mind back together and remember what the real world is like. “You left me in town,” I say, knowing I sound like a spoiled child. “You didn’t even tell me you were coming home.”
She gives me a look that says she doubts whether I have a brain in my head. “You told me to finish my shopping by myself and walked away from me, and you think I’m going to tell you where I’m going and what I’m doing?”
I hiss at that. “I wanted to talk to my friends! That doesn’t mean you can just go off and do whatever you want.”
She slams her palms down on the table and leans toward me, and her face is all sharp lines and sparking eyes. “You walked away from me like I didn’t fucking matter, and you’re upset that I didn’t keep you updated on my plans? Really? Because it looked to me like you didn’t give a single fuck what I was going to do with my afternoon, or how I was going to get home.”
The statement slaps me across the face, and I nearly stagger with it. She thinks I don’t care about her? I would lie down and die for this girl, and she’s over there thinking I didn’t care how she got home?
Then I remember the afternoon.
I did tell her to finish her shopping on her own.
I did walk away from her.
Even when I knew I was hurting her.
Shit.
Instead of admitting that I might have been wrong, I look down at her hands, and the paper she’s slammed onto the table. “What’s that?”
I feel her temper rising, the air around us practically crackling with the heat of it, and for a moment I think I might be safer leaving. But then she starts talking.
“A marketing plan,” she says quietly. “I know your business is in trouble. I know your father isn’t doing anything about it. But I have ideas for how you can save it. A better online presence. Rebranding. We take what you do—all that personal design—and make it your brand. Focus on who you two are as people. What you do. Where the wood comes from. This kind of thing is so perfect for social media. We could build a channel for you and people would come flocking to it, not only for the furniture, but for the stories. The personal aspect.”
I glance at the paper, which holds some sort of flow chart, and then up at her. “No one is going to look at a bunch of pictures of furniture, Little Bird.”
She slides the paper toward me, though, her face lighting up. “Maybe not, but they will look at pictures of you. You chopping wood. You in here sketching. On a tree, measuring how it will all look. Your drawings. Your father at his desk, deep in thought. We make you two the focus, don’t you see? We make you the sexy lumberjack that people want to follow. Your father the professor who also builds tables. People might not follow the furniture, but they will follow that.”
She’s talking so fast that I can barely keep up, but my mind has snagged on one word. She flew past it so fast I’m sure she thought I missed it, but I didn’t.
“Sexy lumberjack? You think I’m a sexy lumberjack?”
She looks like a deer in the headlights at my question. Like a prey animal who was just caught outside the forest and doesn’t know how to get back to shelter before it’s destroyed by the hunter.
Then she pulls herself together.
“Of course not,” she says primly. “But if we set you up to look like one, people will believe it. And women love a sexy lumberjack.”
I place my palms down on the table and lean forward until we’re only inches apart and I can see her pupils blowing out with desire. Fuck me, this girl is everything. Smart and sexy and so fucking sassy. My best friend. The girl I’ve always wanted.
And evidently, she likes sexy lumberjacks.
Maybe I should start chopping wood in front of her more often.
