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“Water, I guess?”
“Because you’ve brushed your teeth?”
“Yeah.” That made him return her smile.
“Don’t want a glass of water with some wine on the side?”
“Maybe,” she said.
“I’ll take that ‘maybe’ and raise it,” he said, moving into the kitchen.
She watched him go but dragged her eyes off the way his muscled back looked in the dim light of that side of the apartment, directing her attention to the view. To that black horizon.
“Did you always want to be a medic?” she asked.
“No,” he said, taking down two water glasses, placing them on the counter. “I wanted to be an actor.”
She barely contained a chuckle, that statement was such a surprise.
“An actor?”
He had never been in a single school play.
“Yeah, but I get stage fright. Couldn’t shake it,” he shrugged.
Oh.
He’d brought down two wine glasses, opened the fridge to grab a water bottle and a wine bottle, shutting the door by hipping it. The move was simple, but it did things to her stomach, making it drop in ways that made her feel deliriously excited. He was hers. She could touch him if she wanted. She could initiate. If she wanted. But her fingers were going numb, and she could barely even think about what it would do to her if he was closer than he was. If he grabbed her again, pulled her to step closer.
This, she thought, must be what stage fright feels like.
“I get that,” she offered, thinking she’d stayed quiet much too long. She kept pausing, kept staring at him, kept rediscovering the fact that they were bonded.
How hadn’t she dreamt of it when she was in her teens, after he pulled away from her, and she couldn’t figure out what she’d done to make him distance himself. She’d dreamed of him climbing the tree outside her window to get onto the slanted roof outside, that he’d knock on her windowpane, that he’d take that risk just to speak to her. Explain himself. And even when he showed up at the bus stop and offered to drive her home one afternoon, she’d never had the guts to ask him for that explanation.
“Did you ever try getting on the stage, though?” she inquired, watching him pop open a bottle of red, the muscles of his arms tensing in alluring ways.
She took her eyes off him again, focusing solely on the view. On that distant, invisible horizon.
“I did,” he laughed. “I ran right off again,” he added, coming up to the couch with the wine glasses, leaving the water glasses behind on the counter.
She smiled to herself more than at him. Was he trying to get her to chill out? Or was it a real remedy, a consolation for the stressful situation they were facing?
“I was eight,” he said.
“I don’t remember that.”
“I didn’t want any friends there, no family, I did it in secret,” he said, another laugh at the back of his throat.
“Your first rebellion?”
“It wasn’t even that,” he said but looked suddenly thoughtful. “No, I suppose you might be right,” he admitted. “I was looking for ways out early on.”
“You don’t have to tell me, but what happened?”
This time the question wasn’t a demand, and she hoped that would serve to soften it in his eyes. That it wouldn’t hit any buttons but would rather be an offering of a way for them to open up to each other. They hadn’t talked like this since they were kids, and even then they had never really talked like this. They’d talked like kids do, about what games to play and sometimes how things were at home, but it had never cut deeper than that. Neither of them had really wanted to be disloyal to their overbearing fathers, feeling it a betrayal of their overly doting mothers as well. At least that’s what she’d concluded once she was a little older, a little wiser.
Not that she’d ever really wizened up.
