And then he turned too abruptly, and suddenly it was she who was tense enough to see through a brick wall. Her spine practically snapped to attention, and she knew her eyes had gone all big. She could feel them trying to consume her face no matter how hard she worked on making them smaller—and she did work hard.
She had to, if she wanted to convince him this was an innocent non-intrusion. He was already staring at her in this accusatory way. Looking relaxed was imperative, but somehow all she could manage was a narrowing of her eyes and a weird slump. It probably made her seem more suspicious, though if it did he didn’t say.
He was too busy trying to convince her ofhisinnocence to do that.
“Phone’s dead,” he said, in a voice that aimed for cheery and missed by a million miles. If she’d been asked to label it, she would have gone withwind whistling through a giant hole—and that was before she’d gotten to the lying part.
Oh he was lying so hard it pained her. He had to know she’d seen. He clearly understood that his lie was meaningless. Yet he felt he had to offer it anyway just to...just to what? Hide the fact that he wanted out of this now? Suggest that his real life was calling, far sweeter than it had seemed before the awkward moment in the closet?
That sounded pretty accurate to her, until she remembered what he’d just said. He wasn’t telling her he’d gotten some important calls and needed to run right out the door this very second. He was pretending he could no longer receive them. That for all intents and purposes, all communication with the people in his world had ceased. They were gone. They were dead.
He wanted to stay.
Even though she’d bungled things and reacted weirdly to affection and thought of him as her dead husband, he wanted to stay. And now he was just waiting for her to tell him that it was okay—as though it was possible that she wouldn’t. He really thought she might question him about the lie, or suggest he find out what people wanted. She could see it in every little guilty glance he made in the phone’s direction, then even clearer in the desperate look he gave her.
Don’t make me go back there, that look said.
But that only made it easier to ask what she’d been afraid to before.
“What do you want for dinner?” she tried.
And then reveled in every inch of his obvious relief.
* * * * *
It was clear that the next step was up to her. The only problem was...she didn’t really know what that step should be. So far she’d muddled her way through the first stages of friendship without accidentally killing him, but who knew what would happen if she tried anything else? She might make assumptions, terrible assumptions—like the one she’d almost made the night before.
He’d followed her to her door when she had said she was going to bed, and for one thrilling second she’d thought he intended to come in. That he’d tired of the couch and didn’t think it a big deal to do things this way instead. But then just as she’d gone to shyly offer, he’d kissed her on the cheek and disappeared back down the stairs.
It was mortifying and maddening in equal measures—so much so that she was thinking of just asking. She could make it sound matter-of-fact, like the day before yesterday when she’d unwrapped him a spare toothbrush instead of letting him carry on cleaning his teeth with his finger.Yours is blue because you’re a boy, she’d said, and he’d laughed and she’d laughed and both of them had pretended that he wasn’t taking a bigger step here than most people did after five months of intensive dating.
It wasn’t like that.
Their relationship wasn’t like that.
Dear God, they had arelationship.
Shehadto try the asking thing.
“Bernie?”
“Yeah?”
She loved the way he saidyeah. He always sounded so super-interested in whatever she was about to say—though here it was something of an issue. He glanced up from a book he was currently reading, locking every bit of his attention on her, and suddenly she couldn’t say.
It seemed lame anyway.
Do you think we’re dating?
What kind of person said something like that? Only a person who knew absolutely nothing about human interaction. Other normal people would simply understand when dating was happening or otherwise, and the only reason she didn’t was because she was a gigantic idiot.
“Never mind.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah...”
“Because it sounds like it might have been important.”
