Oskar’s Journal
After unloading
my third haul of cherries,
I head to the back of the orchard.
My clothes stick to me, damp from the morning rain.
The sun stretches its muscles, growing warmer by the minute
so I peel off my shirt and tuck it in my back pocket.
I’ve waited months for winter to get out of my face,
so I could feel sunlight on my skin.
But most importantly,
so I could get back to work on the lighthouse.
It is the only remaining place
I feel their presence
rather than their absence.
Today makes five years since the accident.
It still pounds my ears
like the torturous
drum beat
of memory.
And if I think hard enough,
glass shatters through a dizzy spiral
of crumpling metal.
But I sneak around the thoughts,
sly as a thief.
My broken strings echo
louder
and louder
and louder
when
I
sink
into a pit of painful recollection.
Not that I really talk to anyone besides Agnes,
and she pretends not to notice
when I trip over syllables
and fall flat on my face.
But lately, she notices other things.
She peeks out the window, shamelessly spying on me.
I wonder if she knows
I’ve been bringing her cherries
from the Aisling tree.
I prop the ladder up and climb it,
one rung at a time,
in case she’s watching.
I get to the top, set my bucket down and stop.
Someone hums.
A feminine melody
braids itself into the breeze.
There’s a splotch of red on the ground, bunched in a pile.
A crimson hat points in her direction.
My hands grip the ladder a little harder when I see her.
She crouches beneath my tree,
twirling a long-handled brush
between paint-dappled fingers.
The hint of a smile
tugs at the periphery
of her humming mouth
as she stares forward at a canvas.
Her complexion absorbs the sunlight,
and long dark hair
cascades
down
her back.
She’s like rainforest royalty,
displaced on top of the world.
A series of rapid blinks
won’t reduce her
to something imagined.
Splatters of color freckle her clothes
as if to announce
she’s here to impress
nobody at all.
The light touches her angular face,
accents the bottom lip
she chews without apology.
I lean forward to feed my curiosity
and knock the bucket
off the top of the ladder,
spilling a tidal wave of cherries on the ground.
CHAPTER FIVE
Evie
Clanging metal startled Evie from her daze.
Her feet launched into autopilot, catapulting her vertical. Brown paint splashed across her naked toes and she dropped her brushes next to a pile of pilfered cherries. Trespassing was probably a crime in Iceland too, and an artist’s hunger always made a terrible defense. Glancing down at her disheveled pajamas—Por Dios, she was wearing her pajamas—she gulped a panicked breath.
Chilly wind squeezed water into her eyes as she spun, searching for the source of the sound. She scanned the beautiful emptiness until, all at once, the void dissipated. Through rivulets of sunbeams, a tall boy stood beneath the knobby knuckles of a low-hanging branch. Four steps and a golden glare separated them.
Making a tentative move forward, Evie shielded her eyes from the sun.
Loco shirtless natives think this is warm weather, she thought in the split second it took her to recognize the lines in his stomach—ones she’d painted with painstaking precision only moments ago. Like a road map, she followed those lines north. Well-used arms hung at his sides, one with a familiar tattoo. His damp hair stuck to his face, like he’d come straight from the shower. Or a rainstorm. Or a humid borough of lumberjack heaven. Because damn.
He wore water-splattered jeans and a curious smile, one exaggerated dimple pitting his left cheek. She opened her mouth to speak, but his thundercloud eyes rendered her mute as Mozart—or was that Beethoven?—despite the symphony playing in her head.
Maybe she was still asleep. She squeezed her lashes shut, slowly peeking through them after a few moments. Still there. His blond brows pushed a wrinkle of skin together on his forehead.
“Is it okay if I work here?” Evie finally managed to croak, throat scratchy as sand. “My name is Evelyn. I’ll leave if it’s a problem. I’m just painting.”
He didn’t respond but kept chomping on the piece of gum in his mouth, dimples flickering as he chewed. He narrowed his eyes as he studied her with a trace of something—irritation?
She’d read online that Icelanders were shy and reserved, and here she was, face-to-face with one, not only imposing, but looking her absolute worst. She hadn’t even brushed her teeth this morning. She hoped he couldn’t smell her breath. Oh, don’t mind me, the pajama-rama color monster creeping your orchard. She crossed her arms, trying and failing to hide all the skid marks of paint.
“I’m staying at Fryst Paradis for the summer.” She nodded over her shoulder toward the hill separating the guesthouses from the orchard, hoping he’d look at anything but her. “It’s really pretty over here. I just came to try and capture the beauty.”
She watched in horror as his gaze traveled to the painting behind her, propped against the fencepost in a pool of sunlight. Like a spotlight of humiliation.
Capture the beauty might’ve been a poor choice of words, she realized, as he gawked at the painting. His mouth dropped into fly-catcher mode for a split second before he snapped it shut again, a glimpse of green gum frozen on the center of his tongue. Though she could’ve done a leaping swan dive and landed on top of the painting, it was way too late for such acrobatics. He’d seen it, and judging by his startled expression, he wasn’t at all impressed with her stage-five clinger vibe.
“I can explain…”
He took a slow step backward, cocking his head to the side the way someone facing a wild animal might.
“Wait.” She held her hands up. “It’s not what it looks like.” Maybe he couldn’t tell the boy in the painting resembled him a scary lot. She took a peripheral glance at it, then back to him. Crap. Of course the one time it would’ve suited her to paint something all wrong, it didn’t happen. The exactness of the tattoo made it impossible to dismiss as coincidence.
“Okay, maybe it is what it looks like, but I definitely wasn’t like, stalking you. I can explain.” But could she, really? She wore her awkwardness like a feather boa and tried to imagine his face if she told him she got her inspiration from a dream. That would only level-up her freak status.
He glanced at the pile of cherry pits on the ground next to her palette. Double crap. Now she was a stalker and a thief. “I’m sorry,” she pleaded. “My papá bought some incredible cherry pie from the store yesterday. It made me want to see this place. Can you just tell the owner that I’ll buy something? I have money. I didn’t mean to cause trouble.”