Gizelle’s puzzled gaze, almost hurt, got him partway there.
Thinking about music, about never hearing the songs that he’d loved, that nearly did it.
Realizing that he would never be able to hear the sounds he longed to make her utter was better than the coldest shower he’d ever taken.
He rolled out of bed and dressed swiftly. “I would love to see it,” he said sincerely.
Chapter 19
Gizelle scouted ahead of Conall to her cottage. “Scarlet gave this to me,” she told him, then remembered that he wouldn’t be able to hear her that way. She turned backwards and repeated herself.
Continuing to walk backwards, confident of her path, she added, “Graham let the plants grow up, so no guests will accidentally come see me.”
They were at the very edge of the resort, where the jungle whispered its desire to spread roots and trail vines in to take it over again. It wouldn’t, of course. It respected the resort boundaries that Scarlet enforced. But here, the white gravel path was allowed to overgrow, and Gizelle showed Conall where to duck under just the right branches.
He was bigger than she was, wonderfully bigger, and it was a tight squeeze, but he didn’t complain, following her willingly to her house.
It was one of the little cottages, not a big one like his, but it still had a pretty deck and shining windows.
Conall started to go to the door, but Gizelle stopped him. “I never go in,” she said. “It’s too echoing inside. Too much space. And the door shuts too tightly.”
Instead, she led him around back to the outside shower. It was under the eaves of the house, walled on three sides, with a wide door that she never shut.
Conall did not fit in it very well, especially since he was trying very hard not to accidentally touch her. When she sat down, he sat opposite from her. He had very nice pants that probably weren’t good for sitting in the dirt, but he didn’t complain.
“This is where I come when it’s too noisy for me but not noisy enough for my gazelle,” she told him.
She was glad that Conall didn’t ask her to explain that. He just nodded sagely. Maybe his elk was the same way, she thought hopefully.
She showed him her treasures; the brochures she picked up from the lawn, and the sea shells that guests sometimes left near the pool. She rarely went to the beach herself—the sand was too soft to run in.
There was a flower she had picked, and hidden from Graham. It was wilted now, but still velvety soft. Scarlet had given her a book, but that was before Gizelle had known that water was bad for books; it was now sadly wrinkled and some of the ink had run.
Scarlet hadn’t scolded her, but she also hadn’t let Gizelle take any more books.
Gizelle put everything on the ground between them, not wanting to accidentally brush Conall’s fingers. If he touched her, she wasn’t sure what would happen, but she knew that just the idea of it made her breathe harder, like she did before panic choked her and she had to run.
And she didn’t want to run.
Conall treated everything with grave admiration, though Gizelle knew that some of it was worthless.
“This is my favorite thing,” she said, putting her last treasure between them.
“What is it?” Conall asked, picking it up. It was a twisted and broken bar of steel with dangling elec
trical wires, bent like it had been torn with a great force.
“It was the lock on Neal’s cage. He gave it to me,” Gizelle told him, remembering.
She didn’t want to remember that.
Neal had left.
“No one will ever put you in a cage again,” Conall said, and he said it like Neal had, fiercely.
Gizelle realized that she had backed up against the shower wall. “Give it back,” she said faintly, but he was looking at the lock, not at her.
He didn’t hear her, she told herself. It wasn’t that he was ignoring her. He wouldn’t ignore her. He wouldn’t leave her.