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“What were they, then?” she asked. And he didn’t even flinch.
Or take a second to think.
“Any with Sandy in it.”
“Because you fancied her.”
“I just liked the warmth she brought to everything.” He paused. But then saw her raised eyebrow, and broke. “And yeah, all right, I wouldn’t have said no if she had decided I needed to help her infiltrate a beauty pageant by giving her a snog.”
“Pretty sure that’s not the plot of it.”
“Well, it was in my head after I watched it.”
She nodded. “The actual one is pretty janky, to be fair.”
“A lot of them are. But fun. And full of love.”
“So that’s what you like about them, then. That they’re full of love.”
She bit her lip when she said it. So he would know that she was teasing him.
But weirdly, he didn’t seem to react to that. He didn’t tell her to fuck off.
He just looked away at nothing. Like he was really considering the question.
Because none of this was a joke to him, not really.
It was lighter to talk about. But it meant the same.
And he was full of a million things about it that he’d never been able to say.
So he did now. Slowly, a little hesitantly. But he did. “I like them because sometimes things are really bad in them. Things are bad and wrong and so lonely your heart could crack in two over it. But even when they are, you know all of it is gonna turn out all right. That Sandy will be okay, in the end, that she will be all right and someone will take care of her and she will be loved, she will be deeply loved in a way that just never happens in real life. Real life is the other way around. You hope to be loved like that, and then no matter what you do you’re just left on your own.”
And when he was done, he let the silence spool out.
Until he seemed to realize said silence was going on for a long time.
He seemed to register that she was quiet, very quiet, and he looked at her.
Then saw what she was doing before she could hide it.
“Mabel, what you crying for?”
“I’m not crying. My eyes are just annoyed.”
“Well, tell them not to be before I panic because emotions are happening.”
“There’s no need to panic. They’re going to stop in a minute.”
They were, too, she was going to make them. Because she hadn’t meant for this to happen—she’d just wanted to talk about something familiar and fun. And now it wasn’t familiar and fun, it was this: her with tears streaming down her face for reasons she couldn’t understand, while he didn’t seem to know what to do.
And then he did seem to know. He got up.
He started coming toward her.
Which was undoubtedly worse.
No, she thought at him.No no no.
