“It really wasn’t.”
“You’re making your important face.”
She put her hand up instinctively to see if she could feel what that was like, but had to stop midway. He was looking, and sort of smiling at the gesture. And though it wasn’t a bad smile—though it was filled with the sort of familiarity she’d always wanted to have with another person—she was too embarrassed to keep going.
Instead she settled for just asking, like a real person.
“I am? What does my important face look like?”
“It’s sort of the same as yourtrying to make pastaface. You get this line down the center of your forehead, and your eyes take on a kind of haunted sheen.”
“In my defense, that pasta was evil. I’m convinced it was evil.”
“I don’t disagree. Pretty sure most pasta does not explode and then disintegrate.”
She wanted to protest here, but found she couldn’t. Her memory of the previous night’s dinner was identical to his no matter how ridiculous it sounded out loud. Her pasta had exploded, and then disintegrated. They’d had to eat it with spoons.
There was nothing she could say.
She just had to steer him away from this whole topic.
“I’m really not feeling that way, though. The exploding-pasta way, I mean. I was just... I was just...”
She wished she knew what came afterjust. Or at least, she wished she knew itfaster. That one maddening eyebrow of his was already starting to rise. Pretty soon it would be all the way up to his hairline, after which her entire lying house of cards would come tumbling down.
She needed a word. Any word. Any explanation.
“I was wondering if you wanted to watch a movie tonight,” she managed finally, and came close to patting herself on the back.
It was premature though, of course. Her triumph was always premature.
“You were making your important face over the potential watching of a movie?”
Part of her really loved his incredulity. He never forced it out the way some people did, in big guffawing waves. And it always came with that dimple in his left cheek—the one she could just about see beneath stubble that was close to turning into a beard. He was almost adorable when he was being all skeptical.
But right now it was killing her.
“Well, no,” she said, and she was actually sweating as she did so. Every ounce of effort was going toward a valid explanation, and when one finally came to her it was like the heavens opening. “I was just worried what you would think.”
“Of what?” he asked, clearly thinking there wasn’t an answer.
But there was, ah sweet relief therewas.
“Of my secret movie basement.”
“You have a secret movie basement?”
“I don’t know. It depends on what you think.”
“I think it’s weird that I’ve been here a week and you didn’t tell me about it. We watched reruns ofEverybody Loves Raymondyesterday. I came close to going out for rentals—and would have, if I wasn’t deathly afraid of returning to find an old lady who tells me you’ve been dead for ten years.”
She had the almighty urge to apologize here—not only for subjecting him to unnecessary viewings of terrible sitcoms, but also for hiding something from him for no good reason. Or at least, no reason that made any sense to anyone but her. He was never going to be bothered by her weird stuff, quite clearly. There was no need to keep it all compartmentalized, and he deserved a sorry for the assumption.
Yet somehow a laugh came out instead.
God, he made the craziest things sound sane. He made them light and fun and cool, instead of the dark mess she always found herself mired in. She imagined dead husbands and stepping off her porch onto nothing, and he turned it into a B movie from the eighties that she sort of wanted to watch.
More than sort of, in truth.
