I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(6)

“Nine: he sings all the time, even though he has a horrific voice.”

“Lovely,” my mother pronounced.

“Really?” I said. “Not a little—flimsy?”

“He’s at home in his own skin,” said my mother. “Nothing flimsy about that.”

I knew what she meant, but I also knew if I were honest with myself—and when it came to Zach it seemed I could be somewhat less than absolutely honest—including his singing on my list mostly qualified as wishful thinking. I might have declared it the exception that proved the rule, although I’ve never been sure enough about the meaning of that phrase to employ it with confidence. In any case, despite his goodness and goldenness and aforementioned obvious marriageability, Zach had never struck me as comfortable being Zach. Taut, edgy, a man of fidgeting hands and rustling energy, he was the kind of person who said something and then watched for your reaction, ready to revise, rephrase, backtrack, but so deftly that you might not even notice.

“And that’s where I got stuck,” I said. “Hence the iris.”

“A good, solid list nonetheless,” declared my mother.

“I know,” I said. And good and solid was, well, good. Also solid. What it wasn’t was luminous. Or transcendent. But I didn’t say this out loud.

“It’s true that nine isn’t ten,” observed Cornelia, “but it almost is.”

“Oh!” My mother pointed at me with both fingers. “The book thing!”

A shiver crept over my arms. I knew exactly what she meant.

“The thing he does with the books!” expanded my mother. “The thing you told me about.”

“Zach does something with books, and you forgot to put it on your list?” said Cornelia. “That’s doesn’t sound like you, Clare.”

“I didn’t forget,” I said.

“No?” My mother tipped her blond head to the side and eyed me.

“Whenever he sees me reading a book,” I said, slowly, “he buys it and reads it, too.”

“So you can talk about it together!” said my mother. “Share in the experience.”

But one glance at Cornelia’s face told me she understood.

“Every book?” she asked, quietly. “When you don’t ask him to?”

I nodded and watched the same shiver that had crawled up my arms ripple over her scalp. She slid her fingers through her boy-cropped hair.

“What?” said my mother.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s hard to explain.”

“The inside of a book is a private space,” said Cornelia. “Someone barging in uninvited is—” She shivered again. “Every book? Really?”

“Sometimes, I hide them from him,” I confessed. “I stick them in the trunk of my car, in the spare tire compartment, and go get them only when he’s not around.”

“Of course you do,” she said, waggling the ruined iris contemplatively. “And he wants to talk to you about them afterward? All of them?”

“I don’t have the heart to tell him no,” I said. “He’s just so, um, eager.” Dogged is what I’d almost said. Obsessive. “Not so much to tell me what he thinks or to argue but to know what I think. In detail. He asks question after question. Sometimes—”

“Sometimes, what?” asked my mother.

“Sometimes, I think he won’t be satisfied until he climbs inside my head and lives there.” My laugh after I said it sounded limping and fake even to me, and when I got my nerve up to look at Cornelia and my mother, I could tell they weren’t fooled, either. Worry bracketed my mother’s eyes and mouth, while Cornelia’s expression bordered on horrified.

“You know what, though?” my mother said at last. “I’ll bet he has no idea that he’s barging into your inner life and leaving his footprints all over it. I’ll bet he’s just trying to be nice. Trying too hard, obviously, or going about it the wrong way, but still truly trying.”

And—whoosh—there it was. Number ten, bursting out of the darkness. Hallelujah.

“That’s it!” I cried and threw my arms into the air in a V for Victory.

“Number ten?” said my mother.

“It’s an essential fact of Zach,” I said. “Which is maybe why I overlooked it the first time around; it’s too obvious. I mean, I’d never claim to know what the central essential fact of another person was because that’s overstepping, but if I ever did decide to make a claim like that, I’d say his is this: he tries so hard to be good.”

A tiny pause riddled with birdsong. Then:

“Ah!” said my mother. “Well, there you go!”

“Good is good!” said Cornelia. “List complete!”

They were the very picture of cheerful supportiveness, their inflection, the corners of Cornelia’s twinkling cat’s eyes and of my mother’s crescent moon smile all tipping appropriately upward. But I knew their faces. If I had a list of faces I knew best in the world, theirs would make the top five. And what I read in them now was concern.

“Okay,” I said, sighing. “Just say it.”

“It’s only that, well—” said Cornelia. “Does he have to try very hard?”