She caught me at it. “You’re staring.”
“I can’t help it.” And I couldn’t. “You’re stunning. You’re stunning sitting still doing nothing, and then you go and smile and it’s not fair to the rest of the room. You’ve got the most beautiful smile I’ve ever sat across from. And when you laugh, your eyes do this thing — they go all the way to mischief, like you’ve just got away with something.” I shook my head. “I’m a grown man. I should have more dignity than this.”
She didn’t have a thing to say back. For once in the whole bright run of the night she had nothing — just sat there in the candlelight with her hand gone still in mine and her eyes on mine, and let me look, and looked back.
And I thought, plain as a tool in my hand: I’m gone for her. Done. Past the point where a man talks himself back across a road. Three weeks I’d known her, and I was further under than I’d ever been for anyone in my life, and I hadn’t so much as kissed her yet.
I drove her home in the dark, her hand resting on the bench seat in the foot of space between us — the first time any part of her had ever been inside my reach with nothing but air to cross — and I left it exactly where it was and didn’t fill the quiet, and by the time I cut the engine at her curb the not-filling had stopped being a thing she had to manage.
I walked her up to her door. The porch light was off and the streetlamp at the head of the block had thrown everything bourbon, the pickets pale, the street holding its breath, the day let go of it at last.
“I’d like to do this again,” I said. “Soon..”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
She was a step up from me on the threshold, which put her face almost level with mine, and neither of us moved, and the small space between us pulled tight as a held breath. I could feel the thing between us going back and forth like current down a line, the air practically humming with it, and from the way her hand had gone still on the rail, I knew she felt it too.
The wind came up off the street and blew a loose strand of her hair across her mouth.
I reached up and tucked it back behind her ear — slow, the backs of my fingers along her cheek and gone. Her breath caught on it. Her eyes dropped to my mouth and stayed there a beat too long to be an accident, then came back up to mine, and we just stood in it, both of us, on the right side of a line I’d decided hours ago I wasn’t crossing tonight.
“Thank you,” she said. “For all of it. That was the best night I’ve had in…” she stopped, recalculated, gave up on the number. “A long time. Yes. I’d like to go out with you again.”
So, I leaned in and kissed her on the forehead — and let it linger there, longer than a friend’s, my hand light at the side of her neck, her hair against my jaw — and then I stepped back down to the path before the wanting could talk me onto the wrong rung.
“Go inside,” I said. “I want to hear the locks.”
That got me a sound that was half breath, half laugh. “You’re bossy.”
“You have no idea.”
“Goodnight, Caleb.” And there it was — Caleb, two syllables, the name she gave me that the world didn’t get — and she went in, and pulled the door, and I stood on her path in the dark and waited.
The deadbolt went first. Then the chain. A woman making good and sure the bossy man on her step heard every turn of them. Then I crossed the road to my own side of it.
I let myself into my own dark house and stood in it a minute without turning on a light.
Tonight I'd watched her guard come down. Not all at once — it took the whole night. But, by the time the plates were cleared she'd let it all go: talking with both hands, her mouth loose and unguarded, loud across a table without seeming to know she'd stopped holding back.
That made me as sure of something as I am of weather: nobody had had that version of her in a long while, maybe ever, and tonight she'd handed it across a table without seeming to know it was a thing she was giving away.
I wanted her, too. I'd stopped pretending otherwise somewhere around the rib-eye. And under the wanting was something older and quieter, and a good deal harder to say out loud: I wanted to be the reason nothing ever got near her again.
I went up to bed.
And for the first time in longer than I'd let myself count — no frame to stand over, no variable loose in the dark, the woman across the road bolted safe behind a door she'd locked to humor me — I slept like the dead.
9
Sophia
The date had been perfect, and that was the problem.
I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling as the clock ticked past one o’clock, then two, and again a three, running the evening back like a tape I couldn’t eject — and there was no bad frame in it. He’d been easy, funny in the dry way that creeps up on you an hour later. He’d put his hand flat on the small of my back to steer me through a doorway and taken it away again before I’d finished deciding how I felt about it, and he’d looked at me across the table like I was the answer to a question he’d been carrying a long way. Somewhere in all that warm, easy, no-bad-frame evening, a wire had tripped in me, and I could not find the end of it.
I can locate a bleed in a body in under ten seconds. I could not locate this. So I lay in the dark and put it to the ceiling — what is the matter with you, what exactly is the emergency, the man has done nothing in four weeks but be kind and steady, so what is this — and the ceiling, my closest confidant across a long list of bad nights, kept its own counsel.
