“Hm,” he answered, plucking his own glass from the table and swirling around the red liquid within. “How do you know this isn’t me without any mask at all?”
She gave an indelicate snort, turning and dropping the gift box from Vix on the table’s edge. “Because,” she said, “in all the time I’ve had to observe you rather than speak to you, I’ve gathered quite a lot of knowledge about the masks you wear.”
He watched her, raising the wine to his lips to sip at it, his gaze steady and piercing. He took his time savoring the taste as he looked for elaboration in her eyes.
She sighed, snatching up her own glass and tipping back a gulp. “It is obvious after a time,” she said, irritated that her tone wasjust as transparent as she was accusing him of being. “When your friends are looking at you, you are ever the house cat, smiling and lounging and batting at them with your claws out, but as soon as they turn their backs, it often falls away.”
“Is that so?” he replied, soft and thoughtful. “Perhaps I should have been watching for your back as well.”
“Perhaps you should have,” she agreed. “Your determination to ignore me is the only reason I was able to see it.”
“Mae,” he said, suddenly serious as he set the glass aside in favor of the knife and fork. “I have never ignored you.”
She snorted again but followed suit.
It clearly amused him, a tiny smile playing on his lips as he cut into his dinner, a flaky pastry baked around a succulent cut of beef drowned in a glistening wine reduction, but he kept his eyes on his task, the knife moving in quick, efficient strokes, rather than looking up at her to argue against her skepticism.
It reminded her, suddenly, that she had been at a loss for things to ask him, just an hour or two ago.
She sawed off a corner of her own dinner and popped it in her mouth, leaning back in the chair to watch him at his careful, elegant dissection as she chewed. She waited until he had arranged his plate in a new and artful preparation for consumption and had lifted the first curated forkful to his tongue before she spoke, perhaps only to goad him with the knowledge that he could not immediately slip into glib rejoinder with a mouth full of beef.
“Two years,” she said, the instant his lips closed over the fork, dimpling at the way his eyes narrowed. “All that time andwe could have been getting to know one another in earnest. Forming—at the very least—a friendship. It seems such a waste to me, you know. I am relieved that it is over, and yet, in the wake of that conversation at the church, I cannot help but wonder … what exactly changed? What could I have done earlier that I’ve done presently to have not suffered your indifference for so very long?”
He continued to glare through his chewing and swallowing and took his time sipping his wine afterward before attempting to answer.
He took a deep breath and shook his head, extending one finger and tipping the thimble onto its side. “Many things,” he said, “have changed.”
“Have they?” she pressed. “In truth, between the two of us?”
“I have been working in your clinic,” he reminded her. “It is not the same as the occasional social event putting us within proximity now and then.”
“Perhaps not,” she allowed, “but we met under similar circumstances, did we not?”
He hesitated, looking like he wasn’t certain whether to be amused or annoyed. He tapped the tip of his knife against his plate and shook his head, his hair catching the candlelight as he did. “That was the trouble. That first meeting was so damned odd and I felt so … hm. I’m not certain what the right word for it is. When that shoreman bit me, it was as though … as if …”
Mae pressed her lips together for a moment, her fingers tightening on the stem of her wineglass. “You felt exposed,” she guessed. “Embarrassed?”
“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “Maybe. I felt thrown off-kilter, in any event, and I didn’t like it.”
“I doubt anyone would like it,” she said softly. “Being bitten by that man.”
He paused, flashing her a little sheepish grin. “Not just him,” he said, opening his hands and lifting his shoulders one more time. “You too. I wasn’t expecting you. I was off balance from the second I walked in that room, and I didn’t want to feel off balance again, so I avoided you. Until I couldn’t anymore.”
“Well, now, wait a moment,” she said, plucking a tiny roasted potato from her plate and biting the end off it. “You still managed to avoid me when you came to work here, even when you were standing shoulder to shoulder with me in the same room. I don’t know how you managed that, but you did. You avoided me expertly until …”
“Until?” he prompted, watching closely as she licked a fleck of salt from her thumb. “Until when, Mae?”
It was her turn to look sheepish, her cheeks warming. “Until I showed up at your father’s doorstep?” she guessed, winning a curling at the corners of his mouth. “In my defense, Sybil arrived here and invited me directly.”
“A defense?” he returned, leaning forward and lacing his hands together on the table. “I thought the point of this entire subject was that if you had known the trigger, you would have pulled it some two years earlier.”
“Oh,” she said, faltering for a moment. “Well, that isn’t exactly what I meant. Unless you are saying that that specific sequence of happenings were required.”
He smiled. “Who can say? All we can know for certain is that they were effective as they occurred.”
“As they occurred,” she echoed, gesturing down to the tipped-over thimble. “Including that.”
His smile slipped, a little sigh escaping as his eyes fell to it, his fingers unlacing like they were tempted to reach out and toy with it. “Ah,” he said. “Vix’s meddling. Yes, I suppose so.”
