This Is How I'd Love You Read Online Free Page A

eyebrows had gone white and she couldn’t say when this had happened.
    He placed a hand lightly on her back. “Go on,” he said. “Let’s see how I’ve fared.”
    The paper was brown and thick and there was a single purple ribbon coiled into a circle and placed on top. She removed this, smoothing it into her lap. When she pulled off the paper, there was a gorgeous black sewing machine. With a formidable hand crank and gleaming metal components. Hensley touched the crank with her fingers. It felt cool and heavy.
    “Daddy,” she said. “It’s perfect.”
    “Aha. Type number three. I couldn’t be happier.”
    “Where did you find it?”
    “A little storefront on Broadway. Your mother used to tell me of walking by and admiring their machines.” He took off his glasses and cleaned the lenses with his handkerchief.
    The room grew quiet. Noise from the street below filled their silence. Shouts from a newsie selling the evening paper, vendors’ wheels cutting loudly into the cobblestones, engines and horns navigating traffic.
    “So, a happy birthday, Hennie?” her father asked, standing and replacing his glasses on his nose.
    “It is. Thank you.”
    “You’re quite welcome. Now, let the sewing begin,” he said and she smiled at him.
    “On an empty stomach?” Hensley asked and her father bowed his head.
    “Such cruelty you endure. Shame. Shall we go out for dinner, the first of your fifteenth year?”
    Hensley stomped her foot again. She liked the way it felt now, like a grown woman imitating her long-gone childhood self. “To Polly’s.”
    He stomped his own foot, mimicking her. “At once.”
    Since then, Hensley had used the Willcox & Gibbs every day, at once losing and finding herself in the cutting, measuring, pinning, pulling, constructing of clothes. And how remarkably different their relationship had become, each of them enjoying the other’s idiosyncrasies with less judgment.
    The night she remembers now, as the train rocks her head back and forth, she wore clothes of her own design, sewn on the Willcox & Gibbs: a black skirt cut close at her hips and flaring in thick pleats around her calves and a linen dress shirt of her father’s refashioned into a pin-tucked blouse that hung in a jaunty, uneven hem around her waist. She wrapped herself into one of her mother’s wool coats adorned with a tuft of fur she’d removed from a sweater she’d outgrown. She found her umbrella and left her father to his game. He said the same thing he said each time she left the apartment: “Be good, Hennie.”
    For a man who spent his days searching for specificity, it was a perfectly obtuse instruction. She hardly even heard it anymore. Though she never intended to be anything but.
     • • • 
    S tanding on the stage, one by one, each girl recited her monologue while the others waited in the cold passageway outside. Under the bright lights, it was nearly impossible to make out the face of the director, but the gossip in the hall was that he was young and handsome. A relative of one of the school’s trustees with London stage experience.
    When Hensley finished her soliloquy, he said merely, “Well done. I suppose Tennyson is a favorite of every starry-eyed seventeen-year-old girl.”
    Hensley blushed brightly. “Oh. I’m sorry. Has there been an awful lot of it today?”
    The theater was quiet. For a moment she thought he hadn’t heard her. Then, with his deep, articulated voice, he said, “Only yours.”
     • • • 
    T he final cast list contained no surprises. Hensley shrugged as she read over the names. Her own disappointment at not seeing her own was lessened almost immediately by the image of Lily Benton dressed as a man, her golden curls slicked back and tucked beneath a top hat. It was a girls’ school, after all, and since the play had been penned by one of their own, it was, inevitably, a romance, and the semblance of men would be required.
    Despite her fair complexion and slim figure,