“But you must have noticed. You smiled at me and I couldn’t smile back.”
“Yeah, but I just figured you weren’t ... smiley.”
He sounded like an idiot.
“I mean,” he added quickly, “some people aren’t. I’m not, really, since I spent so much time as a kid trying to have this perfect, solemn face on all the time. I got used to not showing what I was really feeling.”
“You’ve smiled a lot around me.”
“I have?” That surprised him. “Seriously, people who don’t know me that well usually complain that I always look depressed.”
“That seems like kind of a rude thing to complain about.”
“Kind of, yeah. But you never looked that way, not to me. I can still tell when you’re happy. You light up, and the corners of your eyes crinkle. You ... glow. I’m really sorry that you went through all that and that you lost something so simple, that you can’t do something you probably used to do every day. That’s awful, and I can see why you miss it. But if it makes you feel better at all—I really couldn’t tell that anything was missing. Just different.”
And he had made her cry again. He was doing a really bad job with this.
Iris slid out from under his arm and rustled through the workbench supplies until she came up with a dingy shammy. She cleared her face off with it and then blew her nose.
“Sorry,” she said sheepishly, tossing the crumpled shammy in a wastebasket full of wood shavings.
“No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you cry, I’m just not good at talking to people.”
Her expression turned positively tart.
“You’re not good at talking to people,” she said.
“I know that’s no excuse, but—”
“Keith, you just reassured me about something that’s been in my head every day since the accident. I’ve spent months feeling like this was some kind of horrible consequence, like—'Oh, you want to be happy? Now you can’t even show if you’re happy or not. Now you’re going to look dignified all the time because you have no other choice. So much for your sense of joy. So much for your good time. You wanted to be happy, but now you’ll never be able to share that happiness with anybody else.’” She dug another shammy out of the drawer. “I had no idea my feelings weren’t completely locked away now. I thought people would always feel disconnected from me. And now I know that it doesn’t have to be that way.”
Keith took her hands. Her fingers were damp from where she’d been wiping away her tears.
“You’re not disconnected from me,” he said.
She let him pull her close, and he wrapped his arms around her and held her tight.
“You’re good at talking to people,” she said against his chest. He could feel her lips moving, feel the vibration of the words against his skin. “I think when it comes to me, you’re good at everything.”
