Her eyelids fluttered and then those big brown eyes opened. When she first saw me, before the fear could set in, she blinked a couple of times, and then she smiled. Not one of her small, tense, fake smiles but a real, genuinely pleased one, and, God help me, I smiled right back at her.
As our eyes held, the most bizarre sensation swept over me. A kind of deep acknowledgement passed between us. A recognition. I felt a sense of huge relief, as if I’d found something I hadn’t even known I’d been looking for. Everything seemed to shift in that moment.
The universe realigned, leaving Clara and me in the centre.
Together.
But then I watched as the uncertainty crept back into her eyes, and the anxiety settled back over her features. So it was no surprise when she sat up quickly, forcing her glasses to slip even further down her nose. She pushed them back up with jerky movements and tucked her hair behind her ears, a gesture I’d noticed Clara used in moments of discomfort.
“Sorry, sorry,” she muttered, and I gritted my teeth. If I never heard another sorry from this woman for the rest of my life, I would be a very happy man.
“Right, well, if we could get this over with, that would be great,” I clipped, annoyed by the loss of that smile but even more so by the loss of her trusting, unguarded expression from a moment ago. “As you know, I’m extremely time-poor, and this is a major inconvenience so… Clara? Are you listening?”
She was looking beyond me out of the window at something across the street. I flicked a glance behind me, but I couldn’t see anything other than a random teenager loitering outside the pub and a family coming out of the Tesco Express opposite her block of flats. Her face, once rosy from sleep, had now drained of all colour. I frowned.
“Clara?”
“Sorry,” she whispered, her gaze still focused out of my window. She blinked a couple of times, then looked back at me. “Of course, you’re busy. I-I-I’ll just grab my things and be out of your hair.” With that, she spun round, grabbed at the door, and tried to open it, but my automatic locks were still on.
“Hey,” I said softly, leaning over on instinct and putting my hand over hers on the handle, my body caging her in on the seat. She took a deep, shuddering breath in and let it out slowly. “I’ll take you up, okay?”
She shivered. I was close enough to breathe in her lavender scent. I affected her, but I already knew that. I’d seen the way she looked at me. The way her pupils dilated when I was close. The way she tracked my movements. The fact that little mousy Clara had a crush on me shouldn’t have made me feel so lightheaded, shouldn’t have made my stomach tighten in need, but it did.
For a moment I had a vision of the sleepy Clara from earlier in my bed with her light brown hair splayed across my pillow. I cleared my throat and shook my head as if to clear it. If I pounced on her now, I’d scare her to death.
“Y-you don’t have to come in with me,” she said in a shaky voice. I pulled back and settled back into my seat.
“Clara, I told you I would go and check the flatwith you, and I meant it. If it’s true about the security situation, which from this vantage point seems extremely likely, then we need to contact the landlord.”
“Oh, right. Look, Lily might have exaggerated a bit there. It’s just a… slight problem I’ve had… in the past. But it’s all resolved now.”
“A slight problem?” I said, levelling her with a long look. She shrugged and I sighed.
No amount of digging had turned up the source of what Clara termed aslight problem. If it were a violent ex-boyfriend, then he’d covered his tracks well.
“Clara, I’m taking you inside. And that’s the end of it.”
Her eyes flashed for a moment and the colour came back into her cheeks.
“Fine,” she snapped. “I just don’t want you to feelinconvenienced.”
I finally unlocked the car and she yanked the door open to jump out onto the pavement. When she retrieved her sad little backpack from the backseat, she didn’t spare me a glance before she jogged up the front steps to her building. I caught up with her easily. She was right – every one of my strides matched two of hers. I frowned in disapproval as she simply pushed open the door. No key code, no security.
The first thing that hit me in the entranceway was the smell of urine. Good God, how did people live like this? Clara turned down the corridor and then we were outside the door to her flat. I looked at the stairs behind us and then back at her door.
“I thought you fell down a flight of stairs… at your home,” I said slowly.
“Er… yes, that’s right,” Clara said in an uncertain voice as she unlocked the door and pushed it open.
I gritted my teeth in frustration. “Clara, you live in aground-floorflat.”
“Y-y-yes,” she stammered, moving through the doorway into her space. I followed her and almost lost my footing when the scent of lavender and pure Clara hit me. Christ, this obsession with her was getting ridiculous.
“So why, if you live on the ground floor, did you fall down the stairs?”
There was a long pause. We were both standing in the middle of her space now, facing each other. There was a small, bright blue sofa by the window, numerous colourful rugs covering most of the well-worn carpet. A tiny table and chair, an equally tiny kitchen and the bed, all in the same room, all of which could have fitted in my guest bathroom. I mean, Clara was small, but this place was built for a hobbit, and a tiny one at that.
Again, did teachers really earn so little?
