“Wait, Griff.” There was a fierceness in her stare he recognized. The protectiveness of a powerful creature defending its own. “Tell me how to make our conversations easier for you.”
He didn’t want to contemplate the warmth suffusing his chest at that look.
You already make things easier, just by being yourself, he wanted to say.
Instead, he listed the basics. “It’s only a problem if I can’t see your mouth, or if you speak softly in my right ear. If that happens, I don’t want you to think I’m ignoring you.”
“I’ll make certain you can hear me.” Her eyes locked to his, she slowly bobbed her head, and it wasn’t a mere nod. It was an avowal. An oath contained in a simple gesture. “Always.”
He had no doubt. “Thank you.”
He couldn’t look away. Not until his phone chirped from her desk, a reminder of both his upcoming meeting and where he’d distractedly laid the device earlier.
Tearing his gaze from hers, he strode across the room. With a tap, the chirp fell silent. “I need to get going. I’m sorry.”
As he reclaimed his cell and slid it into his pocket, a framed photo by her laptop caught his attention. It must have been a new addition from that morning, because he hadn’t seen it before. He’d have noticed, the same way he noticed almost everything about her.
Suddenly, his concerns about lateness, about the turmoil in his head and heart, all vanished. His insatiable curiosity about Candy had reared its rampant head, and he couldn’t deny it. Couldn’t deny himself.
“Is this your sister?”
In the photo, the resemblance between the two was unmistakable. Both built like Valkyries, they stood bumping shoulders with one another, grinning as the sun reflected off their glasses. The other woman in the picture was blonder than Candy, a bit shorter, her glasses rounder, but otherwise could have been his colleague’s twin.
After a pause, Candy cleared her throat once, then a second time. “Yes. Dee. Denise.”
“You two look happy.” He finally glanced up from the photo, only to find that Candy had turned her back. She was fiddling with the Shakespeare poster, tugging its already-straight edges. “I don’t think I’ve heard you mention her before. Does she live close?”
Slowly, Candy swiveled toward him, and he knew.
He knew she was making eye contact only because she’d promised to face him during conversation, and she was a woman who kept her promises, weeping be damned.
He knew why she’d returned to school a woman diminished and gray with pain, even if he didn’t understand all the intricacies of her grief yet.
He knew her sister was gone. Recently.
“She lived in Oregon.” Candy pronounced the verb carefully, even as her voice shook, and he knew something else. She still stumbled over the tense, just as he’d done for the first few months. “She died this summer.”
No euphemisms. Candy was direct about everything but her emotions.
Like him, come to think of it.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, trying to infuse all the sincerity he felt into the simple phrase, and she made a small sound in response. A noise, more than a word. A whimper, wrenched from her resisting throat as she tried so damn hard not to sob out loud.
Shit, he couldn’t just stand there and watch her crumple. Fuck his doubts and fears. Fuck his own grief. Fuck everything but what she needed from him—from someone—right this second.
“Oh, Candy.” He reached for her with both hands, the desire to give comfort instinctive and urgent. “I—”
When she backed away from his touch, it hurt. More than it should have. He, of all people, understood how kindness could wreck someone in mourning, more thoroughly than the most vicious insult.
“It’s fine,” she told him, dashing away tears with her knuckles. “I’m fine.”
He tore his hand through his hair, helpless and frustrated. Unwilling to leave her in this state, but aware that he had no choice, not if she didn’t want him to stay.
“Don’t you have a meeting?” Her brown eyes, lashes now spiked with moisture, were pleading with him to go, to allow her some dignity. “You’ll be late.”
After one last, long look, he surrendered to the inevitable. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She dipped her trembling chin in acknowledgment, and then he left.
