“Well, if it’s any comfort: I don’t. Not really. I just want you to be comfortable.”
“I am. This is comfortable, for me.” He paused, gaze on the road he had just started towards, but mind clearly turning over his next words. Weighing them, she thought. Measuring them out.“I know it doesn’t seem like it.”
“It seems lovely. All of this is amazingly lovely.”
“And by all of this you mean the lessons.”
“By all of this I mean all of this. This conversation, your car, the smell of leather and cinnamon, the books you have on the backseat, the—”
She only just managed to pull back, before the rest came out.
Though, really it didn’t matter that she had.
Hemight not know what she had wanted to say.
But she did.Sheknew it now. It was still there on the tip of her tongue:
The way you look in the moonlight. The way you lookall the time.
He was handsome, she realized, in the same way people suddenly become aware of how beautiful a sunrise is, after spending their whole lives sleeping through it.I slept through my own attraction to him,she thought, and as crazy as it sounded, it also seemed true. She could see him now, as clear as anything. That thick black hair, as glossy as the leaves on rubber trees. The jaw like an underline beneath a gorgeous sentence; those heavy-lidded eyes; his mouth forever promising a kiss he probably never thought of giving.
Likely as not, he didn’t even know he was attractive.
Though the idea seemed silly until he spoke.
“I don’t think any of that is evidence of loveliness,” he said.
As if nothing about him could ever be.
“Maybe not. But those romance novels sure are nice to see.”
“They pass the time, when I need it to be passed.”
“Yeah, I can imagine they do.”
“Was that innuendo?”
He asked the question with a certain lightness.
But god, she cringed to hear it.
She hadn’t meant it that way.
She was sure she hadn’t.
“No, of course not,” she said.
Then wished it sounded more convincing.
“I don’t read them for the sex.”
“Honestly, that was the last thing I thought.”
“So, you think I read them for the love, then.”
“Well, everything about you suggests not,” she said, then tried to laugh. Only somehow, he wasn’t having any of it. His eyes stayed on the road, and his voice remained neutral, but his words were still insistent.
“But something else suggests I do.”
