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It gave her permission to go further.
To relax her hands on his face, until she was almost cupping that impossibly large jaw and those weirdly pretty pink cheeks of his and that aggressively furry beard—the one that looked like it would feel wiry and rough, but actually didn’t. It was soft as sea foam and so luxurious she came fairly close to commenting on it.
To saying something mad likeOh, that feels good on my fingers.
Though really, how mad was it, when he was so clearly expressing the same sort of sentiment? His eyes were now wholly unscrunched; his teeth were pretty close to sinking into his lower lip. And when she finally got around to stroking some soaked cotton wool over his eyelids, he seemed to actually make some kind of sound. A kind of strangely long and low and guttural kind of breath, she wanted to call it.
But only because calling it anything else felt impossible.
It wasn’t a groan, she told herself, over and over.
He did not groan because I rubbed his face with cotton wool.
And then he did again.
Louder, this time. Much louder, and so gruff she actually feltit through the hand she had on his face. It ran right up her arm, and kind of rattled around inside her bones, and then somehow, she was blushing. She was really blushing—and without a single good explanation for it. After all, nothing much was actually happening. The fact that he had relaxed didn’t mean anything. His groan wasn’t that unusual.
And the air in the room definitely hadn’t gotten thicker, or hotter.
She was just wearing too many layers, that was the thing.
Plus, what she was doing was very complicated.
It took a lot of effort.
Of course she was sweating.
And if he was sweating too, well.
Maybe he just naturally did that. While sitting down. In totally normal non-stressful situations.Yeah, she thought.That makes all the sense in the world.And it honestly did, too. Right up to the point where she stopped with the cotton, and asked him how that felt now, and he opened those angry eyes.
Only they weren’t angry anymore.
They were completely unguarded, in a way that made him look strange and different.Calm,her brain threw up, but that wasn’t quite right and she knew it. He looked younger, was the thing. He looked ten years younger suddenly, and all the things that came with it.Vulnerable,she thought,and almost innocent.
And Mabel just did not know how to cope with that realization.
Though apparently neither did he. The very second he seemed to register that he was doing something a bit weird, he immediately jumped up. And he did it so fast and so violently that he moved the table in front of him. It slid across the cheap linoleum, screeching as it went and sending water sloshing over the sides of the bowl.
Now who’s the clumsy one, she wanted to say. But she knew why she held her tongue, in the end. He looked stressed enough as it was. She didn’t want to make it worse. She just wanted himto do whatever he needed to, to not be bothered by his own accidentally pleased response to a bit of soft contact.
She just didn’t expect thatleavingwould be the thing. That he would exit the kitchen, and head for the door without so much as another word.
But he did exactly that.
He marched right to it.
Went right through it.
He didn’t even say goodbye.
She went to the top of the stairs outside her flat, just in time to see him disappearing down them two at a time. And kind of thought, as he did,Well, that’s that. He’d swung away from whatever madness had gripped him when he’d decided that actually she was the one he wanted to work with.
Most likely she would never see or hear from him again.
Then he stopped at the bottom of the stairs, halfway out into the night. He looked up at her.
And he said, “So you’ll come round mine tomorrow at ten, then. For the book.”
