three cheers for three junes

Three Junes by Julia Glass

From chapter six...
"This is Felicity", he said. "Felicity, this is Fenno. I think you'll like him. He's very classy."
The bird regarded me intently. She tilted her head in that quizzically avian way, and I heard a faint clicking in her throat, a cantankerous tut-tut-tutting. She was, on closer inspection, not entirely red but had a deep blue-violet belly and gray feet that looked as if they were covered with crocodile skin. Her beak and eyes were the soft black of stones pummeled smooth by the sea.
I will admit that I was half-besotted, there and then. I had never owned a bird, although I admired the beauty of birds in the wild, and I had never laid eyes on a creature like this one.

From chapter seventeen...
Like her, he is an agonizer. Like her, he feels the atmosphere about him too acutely: the stealthiest shifts in wind direction, ozone level, barometric pressure. Sometimes it's almost too much to bear.