Read Online Byrd by Kim Church - Free Book Online Page B

“One night he played in a bar,” she says, delicately lifting her teacup from its saucer. “I was at a table with his friends and they were telling me how he was the most natural, open, out-there person they’d ever met, and I wanted to say to them, Really? How do you know? Because I’m never sure what he’s thinking.”
    â€œHis friends have a different configuration with him than you do. They experience him on a more surface level. On that level he’s very direct. But you have a deeper connection, more of a soul-mate connection. Soulful playmates.”
    â€œHe’s been calling me. He forgets the time difference and calls in the middle of the night, when I’m asleep. We don’t always talk. Sometimes he just plays his guitar and I listen. He’s amazing, even when he’s wasted.”
    â€œHe affects people in powerful ways,” Warren says, “though he may not realize it. His Gemini energy makes him so scattered that he’s a bit of a mystery even to himself. Capricorn in his seventh house: he needs somebody solid, responsible. He doesn’t have much of that in his own life so he has to get it from somebody else.”
    â€œLike me.”
    â€œYour moon is falling in the fourth house, the house of security and family and rootedness, so yes, you’d be providing that part of the relationship.”
    â€œWhile he’s off somewhere being mysterious.”
    Her wistfulness makes him want to lay his hand on hers. But that would be a breach of ethics.
    â€œYou’ve got Libra on your seventh house cusp,” he continues. “Neptune’s there, too, which means you’re also a great romantic idealist. But you tend to delude yourself by projecting your ideals onto a particular person when in fact that idealism is something more magical about life itself. The more you tap the mystery in yourself, the less weightiness your relationships will have.”
    He studies her for some sign that his reading is touching on the truth. Almost always, the answers people come to him for are truths they carry inside themselves. His job is to help them uncover what they already know. When a reading rings true, it registers visibly—a change in posture, a flicker in the eyes. Some people get hungry.
    Addie is nodding. She has folded her arms across her waist and is rocking back and forth.
    â€œAre you okay?” Warren asks.
    â€œI’m sorry,” she says. “I’m feeling a little sick. I think I need your bathroom.”

Up on the Roof
    Roland is making a picnic. He has never made a picnic for anyone. It’s not even a word he uses: picnic .
    On his counter, blueberry smoothies and crinkle-cut fries from his favorite stand on the beach, plus everything from his kitchen: a can of peaches, half a bottle of white Zinfandel, and two hard-boiled eggs, which he peels and mashes into a bowl with salt and pepper. Then there’s the barbecue Addie brought with her from North Carolina: hickory-smoked shoulder meat sliced thin, packed on dry ice in her little travel cooler. Slaw, too, and sauce, the thin red tomatoey kind they grew up on. You can’t get sauce like this in California.
    So much food. A feast, a corn-you-fucking-copia. That’s how Addie makes him feel. Rich, generous, overflowing. Like that Bible story where all of a sudden there’s plenty of fish and bread to go around. One day he’s racking his brain over how to scrape up rent, even thinking he should move Elle back in, the next he’s making a picnic.
    Loaves and fishes, baby.
    It’s a warm, gusty February afternoon and they’re going to spend it on the roof because Addie has never eaten on a roof. They’re going to sit in the sun and eat their picnic and drink their wine and look down on the ocean. When the time comes he will kiss her. She likes being kissed, gives him her mouth full and open, like a flower, one he remembers from home but