Sweetest in the Gale - Olivia Dade Page 0,60

you a sunburn.”

Her eyes didn’t leave his, not even when the paper hit the desk.

“Why, Mr. Burnham.” She was grinning at him again, delighted. “What a poetical turn of phrase. Thank you.”

“No need to thank me. You earned every word.” Now, onto the scary part of this conversation. “We need to, um…”

He rolled his shoulders. Widened his stance slightly. Closed his eyes and swallowed.

“Simon?”

Decades of avoiding vulnerability and risk ended today. Now.

The possibility of Poppy, of entirely illogical transformation, of more—it was worth the risk. He had to trust her, and he had to trust his own heart.

When he blinked his eyes open, she was waiting for him, forehead puckered in that endearing, familiar way. Her hazel eyes were cautious, concerned, but so very soft.

She could wreck him. Maybe she already had.

“You may need to find another mentor.” He wanted to draw a soothing rectangular prism on his legal pad, but instead he held her gaze. “I’m not familiar with the rules governing the mentor-mentee relationship, at least not the ones that apply to our particular situation.”

Quickly, he corrected himself. “I mean, the ones I want to apply.”

Her brows drew together in confusion. “I’m sorry?”

However embarrassingly inept, his picture would literally tell her more than a thousand words. With a tremor in his hands, he flipped over his drawing and slid it across the table, until she could see it clearly.

He understood his artistic limits, and he hadn’t tried to achieve realism.

The stick figures boasted neat labels above their circular heads: POPPY and SIMON. Her figure stood by a table, whose very straight edges he’d achieved with a ruler. There was a little house atop the table. Another tiny stick figure lay beside the house, each of its eyes indicated with an X. A corpse, as best Simon could indicate one.

His stick figure was sitting—awkwardly, with limbs of an odd length—in a chair. The small table next to the chair had a paper on it, marked with an A+.

Poppy’s figure leaned toward his. Simon’s figure leaned toward hers. Their eyes were hearts. Between them, he’d drawn more hearts.

In his vision, in his dreams, Poppy crafted her dioramas and sang at her workroom desk while he graded nearby, and they—

Well, he’d known his drawing abilities couldn’t convey a passionate kiss.

“Simon.” The word was a sigh. A caress. “Dearest.”

He dared to look up from the drawing, and she was still studying it. Her finger traced one of the hearts that hung in the air between their stick figures, and she was biting her lower lip, eyes glassy with tears.

Dearest was good. He knew that much. But the tears?

“Poppy, is this…” He gulped a breath. Another. “Is this okay? Is this—is this what you want too?”

She touched her forefinger to her puckered lips, then set it gently on his stick figure. A kiss, offered to his penciled counterpart as she blinked back those gut-wrenching tears.

Before he could reach for her, she was speaking, and he listened with every ounce of his being. Every atom.

“If you left my classroom today without kissing me,” she said, “I was going to make a diorama of myself, dead of a broken heart, with you as the culprit. It was going to be overly dramatic and much too blunt, but…”

Her eyes lifted to his, and her smile trembled. “I can’t be blamed. I make murder dioramas. Overly dramatic is kind of my thing.”

On the table, her capable hand was shaking too. He covered it with his own, and she immediately parted her fingers so he could slide his in between, and it felt like a buoy to a man lost at sea for years.

“I understand now.” He stepped to her side, so close the scent of turpentine and soap filled his lungs. “The importance of process over result. The relief of expression. If you hadn’t already taught me, this drawing would have.”

“Good.” The corners of her lips indented as her smile turned mischievous. “I only have one complaint about this picture, Mr. Burnham.”

“What’s that, Ms. Wick?” Fuck, he loved that expression on her.

“Well, unless you count the corpse on the table…” Bending at the waist, she studied his drawing. “There’s no crime here.”

He bumped into her, hip to hip, and it wasn’t an accident.

“On the contrary. A crime has most definitely occurred.” Holding out his free arm, he displayed the pencil smudges on his pristine button-down. “Sartorial assault. Attempted murder of my shirt.”

Her giggle rang through him, vibrating and joyful as a chime.

“I’ve changed my mind.” She turned