Page 25 of Will You (Not) Marry Me

Finn kept his eyes on his food. Tobias was probably the only other person he’d met who understood, innately, that his was a difficult position to be in, not solely a privileged one. He didn’t know how to respond to Eva, so he didn’t say anything at all. She’d spent enough time not answering questions that he figured he was allowed a turn.

“Try and have a vacation while you’re here,” she said after another few bites. “Just a little bit. Or else your head might explode.”

“And you’d care?” teased Finn. “If my head exploded?”

“Well yeah, I’d be the one to have to clean it up.”

Finn laughed and felt just a fraction of the weight on his shoulders slide right off.

CHAPTER12

EVA

“You’re coming outside with me,” Eva said firmly. “So put your coat on.”

Finn looked up at her from his position on the sofa like she’d just started speaking Spanish. “Why?”

“I’m going to give you a photography lesson.”

Now he looked suspicious. “Why?” he repeated.

“You’re the one who suggested I show you how to take a photo sometime, weren’t you?”

He grinned at that. “Indeed, I was. I remember being rebuffed quite rudely.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, sniffing for dramatic effect and making him laugh. “Now come on. Put your boots on, and I’ll give you a lesson.”

Finn practically leaped off the couch and went to find his shoes and coat, like a kid that had been promised a trip to the park or something.

The truth was he just seemed solonely,and Eva knew how that felt. Seeing him like that, it dug at the old wound in her own chest, and she couldn’t take it anymore. She’d treated him like garbage through no fault of his own, and the least she could do was be nice to him for a little bit.

They hiked out of the cabin, coming to a stop in a clearing that Eva had photographed before when she’d gone storming out on her own.

“Right,” she said, standing beside Finn and showing him the controls on the back of the camera. “I’ll show you the important bits. This is your f-stop. That’s your shutter speed, and that there is your ISO. So those are the three things that sort of decide what a photo is going to end up looking like.”

Eva looked up from the camera to Finn, who was staring at her blankly like she really was speaking a foreign language.

“You know what? To start off, we’ll just set it to Automatic,” she said. “Just point it at something and press the button. That’s all there really is to it.”

She handed him the camera, and Finn held onto it tight, clearly terrified he might drop it.

“Don’t worry,” Eva said. “It’s not going to bite you. Just find something you think is beautiful or interesting and take a photo.”

Finn appeared to think about it for a second while Eva tried to get her hair out of her face, before raising the camera to point directly at her, his finger pressing the shutter button with a click.

She raised an eyebrow at Finn, who was grinning ear to ear, very pleased with himself.

“Very cute,” she said. “I meant like a tree or something.”

“Those are spindly and scary looking,” he said.

“You can be spindly, scaryandbeautiful.”

He blinked. “Well, yes. That’s very true.”

He looked around for a couple of minutes, and Eva left him to it, not interrupting, just letting him find something that he wanted to take a photo of. He settled on some icicles hanging from a branch and lined up a shot, clicking the shutter with a determined finger.

They continued like that, not really bothering with the whole lesson part. Eva just let Finn run wild with her camera, maybe showing him an interesting angle here or there, but mostly just letting him havefun. It seemed like a foreign concept to him.

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