Page 29 of Caution to the Wind

When I finally looked up, it was ’cause the garbage truck was groanin’ outside, clankin’ as they collected our trash.

I blinked once, twice, hungover from the high of creatin’.

The pencil fell from my suddenly numb fingers, thumpin’ against the page where I’d drawn Mei’s nickname in traditional Chinese, the characters thick as brushstrokes even though I’d only done them with the hard press of a lead pencil.

I blinked again, sluggish and groggy.

Somethin’ touched my hand, smoothin’ over my fingers with firm strokes, massagin’ the tension out of them.

When I looked up at Mei, her face was softer than I’d seen it in years.

“Hey,” she whispered into the heavy, velvet silence that had stretched between us.

“Hi,” I croaked.

It had been a while since we last spoke.

“Three hours,” she supplied as if readin’ my mind, pullin’ hard at my fingers in a way that made me want to moan. “I think you needed that. For a man like you, I think drawing is as close to therapy as you’ll get.”

My mouth twisted in a wry grin. “Kept you up late. You should’ve stopped me.”

“No,” she said easily. “Usually, you refuse anyone’s help. I was glad to be able to do this for you.” Her dimple popped. “You stubborn goat.”

I laughed rough as a cough. “Go to bed, Mei.”

“Go to bed, Henning,” she returned, sass creepin’ back into her voice. It was never gone for long.

She stood up, reachin’ for her sketchbook as she did. “I’m keeping these. The cost for services rendered.”

I snorted as I rubbed a hand over my face.

There was a long moment of silence. I dropped my hands to see her arrested mid-step, slightly off-balance, eyes riveted to the page beside the Chinese characters for her name.

I’d run out of pieces of Mei to draw and settled on sketchin’ symbols I associated with her instead.

The Chinese dragon took up the entire nine-by-twelve-inch page, corner to corner. It curled as if in midflight ’cause Chinese dragons were wingless and undulated through the air like a serpent through still waters. This one was fierce, yes, but also lovely, a softness in the ridges along its spine, a grace to the flow of its immense, muscled form. The number of claws on a Chinese dragon was contentious throughout its history, but I’d given Mei’s dragon five ’cause it was considered the most sacred.

And whatever Rocky was to me, it was sacred.

“Is this how you see me?” she whispered, the words raw as if she’d carved them out of her body and handed them to me still bleedin’.

I swallowed around the stone in my throat, suddenly aware of how vulnerable it was for her to have those sketches. They were mindless in that I hadn’t filtered the instincts of my pen. As Lin would have said, they were soul-drawn, and now Mei had a piece of my soul in her hands.

In the end, I didn’t say anythin’, but I didn’t have to ’cause Mei looked up at me finally and read the answer in my reluctant expression. In the hand that had fisted unconsciously on the tabletop.

Her fingers lightly traced the twist of the dragon over the page, her entire face suffused with somethin’ that made my chest ache.

“It’s strange,” she whispered, almost to herself, and I held very still, suddenly afraid to startle her out of revealin’ her mysteries. “That you could look at me and see everything I’ve ever wanted to be.” She closed the book and hugged it to her chest, eyes dark and fathomless as they raised to me. “It feels just as good as it does bad. To be seen like that.” Her lips flattened. “Like being flayed alive.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“No,” she agreed. “You didn’t, not really. I guess it’s one thing to want to be known and another to actually have someone see you even when you try to hide.” Her laughter was coarse, but her smile was oddly shy as she lifted the book to her forehead in a mock salute and then turned on her heel to push through the door into the hall.

“Rocky, thank you,” I called lightly, though my throat ached. “For seein’ me, too.”

Only a faint hitch in her stride belayed the fact that she’d heard me at all, and then she was gone down the hall, and I was sittin’ in the kitchen with a sore side, a sorer hand, and the biggest ache of all somewhere deep inside my chest.

MEI