Total pages in book: 126
Estimated words: 117408 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 587(@200wpm)___ 470(@250wpm)___ 391(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 117408 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 587(@200wpm)___ 470(@250wpm)___ 391(@300wpm)
“So… what am I supposed to be looking for? Which birds are the coolest?” His question brought me back down to earth, and brought a laugh with it as well.
“Right, bird-watching.” I tried to push aside all the bullshit and focus on the “now.” Jonah was here and I had promised I’d teach him, over the course of an evening that happened to feel very close to being a date.
Of course, it wasn’t. It couldn’t be, but fuck did it start to feel like one.
“Okay,” I said, slowing down our pace, listening to the different calls that filled the air, trying to pick apart the different tones. “So birding, it’s, uhm, more of a…” My thoughts were chaotic. I kept thinking about how close our fingers were to each other as we walked. I hated myself for feeling so pulled toward a man who should have been off-limits for me.
“Still thinking about the case?” Jonah asked, noting something was off.
“Yeah, sorry.”
“It’s all right. Maybe we should call it a day, then.”
“No, no.” I waved a hand in the air. “Let’s get back to birding. I don’t think you’ll be earning your black belt in birding tonight, but we can start the work.”
Jonah chuckled at that. “All right, so you were saying, birding is more of a ‘something.’”
“Right,” I said, picking up my abandoned train of thought. “It’s more of an auditory experience at first than a visual one, so bird ‘watching’ is kind of misleading.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, listen.” I dropped my voice. “Really listen to all the birds that are out there, and try to focus in on the ones closest to us.” I put an arm out, stopping us in the center of the trail. When we stopped, I dropped my arm, our hands landing knuckle to knuckle. I couldn’t resist. I reached out, both of us totally silent, and I took his hand in mine. Fingers locked together like a natural instinct. Heat spread from my palm, filling me up. No one else was around, and we were so deep in the park that there were no sounds of the city to be heard. Instead, all that was around us was a chorus of birdcalls, all different in their own little ways. It tended to be background noise for most people, but if you tuned your focus and turned the background into the foreground, then all of a sudden, a brand-new world opened up to you.
Jonah seemed to be realizing that. He looked around, taking it in, his eyes pointed toward the sea of branches above us, the smile on his face growing as he listened, the chorus of birds filling me with joy.
Or was that our hand-holding?
I let go of his hand, putting mine back in my pocket. The moment was brief, but damn did it leave my body tingling from crown to sole.
“You hear all those birdcalls, right?”
“Yeah, I do,” he said, sounding a little breathless.
Weird, bird-watching never took my breath away.
“Okay,” I said, keeping my voice low so I didn’t scare away any of the birds. I’d already spotted a black-bellied plover and what looked to be a ruddy quail-dove but what sounded more like a white-throated swift. “So you hear the birdcalls, now you have to track them. There’s one right over there.” I lifted a pointed finger. Jonah leaned in, causing my senses to flip into overdrive as his cologne drifted over me.
“That one?” Jonah asked in a whisper, pointing as well. But his finger was off. I grabbed his hand in mine and slowly adjusted it, lining it up with the tiny green-and-white bird, its beautiful emerald-green feathers catching the last bits of sun that managed to break through the tree cover.
“Oh, I see it,” Jonah whispered. “What is it?”
“A violet-green swallow. Want a closer look?” I offered him the binoculars. He took them and looked through, enthusiasm in his smile as he watched. The swallow made a few chee-chee calls before flying away, going deeper into the trees.
The rest of the evening continued like that, us making our way slowly down the trail and stopping whenever I spotted or heard an interesting bird. Jonah was always so excited to look for them and even began pointing out birds I had previously missed. He asked a ton of questions and also made plenty of jokes, making the time fly by us.
Before I knew it, the day was turning to night and the birds were finding places to rest.
We continued to walk, the park’s path turning around and leading back toward where we had come from. The birdcalls were growing more and more sparse until there wasn’t much to watch.
There was a section of the path that veered off, and I knew what we would find if we followed it. I nudged Jonah to the side, and we walked down the pebbled pathway, shaded from the setting sun by an overgrowth of palm trees. And there, at the end of the path, tucked away from seemingly the rest of the world, was a stone bench, smooth from years and years of use, a couple of phrases etched into the legs. A couple of large bushes grew behind the bench, framing the scene with a blast of colorful pink and blue flowers that bloomed from the bushes.