Emma's POV
I have my sketchbook spread open on the table, and I am sitting next to the window in the Hometown Café and now my pencil is doing … well, it's sketching and I feel it beginning, sketching and there's nothing I can do to put an end to that. The light in the late afternoon pours in through the glass, turning the wooden tables to gold and snaring dust motes in a lazy waltz. New York hums outside — taxis honking, heels clicking — but in here, it's quieter, just the clink of coffee cups and the gentle murmur of strangers' lives. My kind of music.
I run my finger and eye along the line of a man's according-to-Hoyle jaw, down the page, some guy standing at the counter, wearing his fedora like that. I don't, but I love to imagine its story." Maybe he's a poet, a spy, or just a man who can't remember his lines in the crush of the city. I'm good at drawing strangers — seizing them, their outlines, their mysteries — before they disappear into the crowd. It's easier to look at than my own.
I cough — a splintering, unwelcome tickle in my throat. I swallow it up, I just hold it in with my lips, and I just keep drawing. The pencil is louder than me, louder than the hurting in my chest. I'm fine. I'm always fine. That's what I tell Lila when she worries herself into worry eyes and wine nights. That's what I tell myself when the mirror bounces a stranger back to me, shadows under my hazel gaze. You're too young for shadows at 28, but here we are.
The door to the café jingles, and this guy comes in, this guitar case over his shoulder like it's part of him. The dark hair, a bit of a mop, falls in the eyes, which are on the room with a sort of soft focus. He's not like my fedora man — too real, too alive. His jacket is frayed, his boots scraped and he could use a shave, but he moves with a spark, like he's carrying a song no one's heard yet. Such an expression doesn't exist in English.) I flip to a fresh page, my hand itching to put him down on paper.
He commands in the low, soft voice, and stretches over the counter and looks around the room again. My picture emerges: His jawline, the line of his shoulder, the way his fingers beat a rhythm on the case of his guitar. I'm gazing at it when a napkin takes off from his tray and falls to the floor like a leaf. He doesn't notice, but I do. It falls to earth next to my table, a tiny insurrection against gravity.
I should ignore it. Keep sketching, keep hiding. But something — the light, the coffee buzz — makes me stoop down and pick it up. But then my cough escapes, short and stubborn, and I freeze, hoping no one heard. The man's eyes look into mine, and oh, they're softer than I'd realized, like a wood after rain. He smiles, a duhs-half-curve of a smile that feels like a puzzle, and heat fills my cheeks.
"Yours?" I lift the napkin, nerve- steadier than I actually am.
He laughs, his voice warm as gravel. "I guess it wanted to see you first." He comes nearer, and I notice the calluses on his fingers, the kind of calluses you get from strings and stories. "Thanks, uh…"
"Emma," I mutter, too fast, as though I were 16 again. I grabbed the napkin and shuffed it under his hand with my sketchbook open to his unfinished-side stare.
"Alex," he reads from the page. His smile only widens at that, and now I want to crawl under the carpet. "You're good. That guy is 2/3 as cool a me."
I laugh, genuinely laugh, before I even have time to stop it. "Close," I goad, shutting the book too slowly. My cough threatens another takeover, but I swallow it back, hard. Not now. Certainly not when he gazes at me as if I'm anything but a shadow.
"You an artist, Emma?" he says, resting his arms on a chair in front of me, as if he's got no place else to be." His guitar case is pressed against his leg and I wonder what songs it holds, what scars.
"Maybe something like that," and I tucked some hair behind my ear. "You a musician?"
"More or less, yeah," he says, his eyes wrinkling as he smiles. " Played here tonight, as a matter of fact. You should stick around."
I should say no. I ought to go home, take my pills, lie down like Dr. Carter's been after my wool to. But the glow in the café, the smudge on my thumb from the pencil, the fact that Alex's voice is a melody I've been chasing—it's stay. Just this once.
"Maybe," I say, my heart a bit braver than the mushy mess in my skull. "What's the song lineup?"
He chuckles, as though this were the universe: A chair. "Depends. What's your request, artist girl?"
I'm about to answer when a second cough paws at my throat, sharper this time. I avert my gaze, and feign adjusting my scarf, as blue as the sky I painted just last week. There is not a lot of trembling in my hands, but I hold the pencil more tightly. Alex doesn't notice, thank God, but his eyes linger longer than they should, as if he sees more than I want him to.
"Not something that's souled," I manage, and now it's a whisper. "No sappy stuff."
"We have a deal," he says, and that is a vow. He takes his coffee, napkin under tray, and walks with it to a table in the back corner of the restaurant, glancing back for a moment. That smile, after all, a glint in the gloaming.
I grab my sketchbook and pencil an outline of his shape — guitar, eyes, that half-smile. The cough lingers, a reminder of the clock I can't beat. But for now the cafe's warm, the music's here, and Alex's song is ready to burst forth. I don't know what will be tomorrow's lot — hospital rooms, Lila's worried texts, the stories I will never write. But tonight I'm just Emma and I'm the girl in blue, sketching a stranger who could change everything.