Hudson looked amused, though his cheeks were faintly pink, like he was feeling a little hesitant around her, too. Annika cleared her throat and stepped off to the right, toward a nook in the wall that held a pedestal and a sculpture of a bird poised to take flight. “Anyway. Wow. This is gorgeous.” She stroked the iridescent feathers on the bird’s extended wing, as exquisitely fragile and silky-soft as if it were the real thing. She glanced up at Hudson. “Is it new?”

He was watching her admire the sculpture with a peculiar look in his eye. He blinked it away when he saw her looking. “Ah, no—no, it’s not. I made that a couple years ago. Just found it in a moving box the other day, actually.”

“Mm. The longing on its face is … haunting.”

“Longing?” Hudson walked closer to her, so they were standing side by side, their arms just a hairbreadth away from touching. She felt his warmth seep into her skin, and had to blink to focus. “You see longing there?”

“Sure.” Annika studied the bird more closely. “There’s longing in every one of its features, in the way it’s holding its wings, its posture. It’s poised, ready to take flight, but it hasn’t quite achieved what it wants yet.” She realized Hudson was watching her intently and felt her face get warm. Maybe she’d said too much. Art was an oddly intimate thing. “What?”

“Nothing.” Hudson shook his head, a faint smile at his lips. “I made that as sort of an experiment, but I wasn’t sure it would work. I tried to make the bird ambiguous in its intent—its expression, its posture, whether it’s poised for flight, as you said, or whether it’s landing. Everyone who’s looked at it so far has said something different. No one’s talked about the longing the bird feels.”

Annika’s face got even warmer. “Oh, great. So I’m weird, then, is what you’re saying.”

“Not at all.” Hudson kept looking at her until she met his eye, reluctantly. There was no trace of humor or sarcasm there.

“So what do you see?” Annika asked. She was genuinely, truly curious about what his artist’s eye saw.

Hudson looked at the bird and Annika looked at him, hoping he wouldn’t notice. She shouldn’t do it so openly, or even at all, she knew. Not after what she’d said to him in his condo the other day; she’d drawn a line then, and she intended to stick by it. But the way he shimmered and shone like a nearly opaque lake, with Annika only barely able to glimpse what was underneath, was … compelling.