Eleven

He first sees her sitting on the steps of a local library. He notices her hair, a dark brown, short, tucked behind her ears while she devours a slim volume, her hazel eyes making the soft movements of a reader hallucinating a universe into which they’ve fallen. Enraptured, she turns the page with a deliberate and rapid flick, falling back into the tale before the spell is broken. She wears a beflowered summer dress, her knees almost showing above the smooth skin of her shins, her feet tucked into sensible sandals, heels pressed up against the step she’s taken as a perch.

“Good day for it” he says before he can stop himself, and she looks up to meet his eyes, smiles though confused, his stomach twisting as she returns to her prize.

The next he sees her she’s standing just outside his doorway, leaning slightly to look into the gloom of his workshop, her hand resting against the open doorframe, that same summer dress covering her shoulders, with little else showing past the block of the frame. He’s looked up from taking a chisel to rail of a cabinet door, only to see her make a small wave and ask, “Are you the carpenter?”

“Me? Ahhh… yes? Yes! Yes I’m the carpenter here,” he says, smoothing his hair slightly, it refusing his fingers in a raucous mass, dust and shavings making their escape and falling about him, motes reflecting the light of the doorway, “how can I help you Miss?”

She smiles that same smile, an anxiety falling from her shoulders as she steps more fully into the doorway, stopping short of entering the premises without an invitation. “I heard you’re taking on work?”

“Of course!” he replies, cleaning his hands on his apron, “Should we step out into the Courtyard?”

The third time, she sees him as he stoops to look behind some rubbish at the corner of a marketplace. He’s a bent a little sideways looking down to see behind the junk, and glances in her direction by chance. She smiles and waves again, causing him to drop the rubbish with a guilty look before slowly sidling over to where she stands near a hawker’s stand.

There’s little more to say from there. A romance in an uneven cascade of moments; sometimes intense, foreheads pressed together, sweat and breath mingling; sometimes light, sudden laughter at a shared joke, or backs pressed together, each reading a small book or pamphlet. In time he realises he loves her, her back tucked up to his chest, them both hiding beneath a pile of scratchy blankets in his sparse room, the afternoon light fading into evening.

“It’s so cold”, she observes, breathing a small amount of steam, “surely even a carpenter can afford the Black Wood…”