“Okay. Right. But you’ve been with someone, though. In the carnal sense,” she said, before she could stop herself. And it went down about as well as she should have imagined it would.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. I just told you that discussing your body in explicit detail is too much. But now you think I’m gonna be able to talk about that? In front of alady? A sweet, wholesome lady? No way. No, ma’am.”
“I can’t decide if that means verynot everor veryyou have a ton.”
“It means none of what I’ve done is anything I want to assault your ears with,” he said, and she breathed out for the first time in what felt like half an hour. He’d done stuff. He wasn’t a virgin. Things weren’t that harrowing for him.
They were just harrowing in another way.
The somehow-talking-about-sex-with-him way.
“But you’ve read the books I gave you. You can’t think I’d be scandalized,” she somehow found herself saying. Like this was a good issue to press. And not one that exposed her completely.
“You blush every time you mention them. Pretty sure you would be.”
“So then what good am I going to be to you, a man who doesn’t blush about these things and is probably really experienced in that way. I mean, maybe you’ve not been to dinners but you’ve obviously been to other things.”
Orgies, her brain decided to shout at her in the middle of all this.
And right before he sighed, heavily enough that she peeped around the door just as he launched into his explanation. “Because I’m worth the other things but not the dinners. And I want to be worth the dinners, too. I want to be worth the dinners more than I want to be worth the other stuff. I don’t want to pick people up in bars, or get persuaded into stuff I don’t want to do, or have to get a grain of affection by some trash cans in an alley. If you like that stuff that’s okay, that’s cool, but I don’t. I just unfortunately look like I do. And have had life experiences that make it seem like I should. Instead of any of the life experiences I long to have,” he said, like it was just obvious. Something to be spelled out matter-of-factly, the way a person might act if they were trying to describe a slight promotion they wanted at work. He shrugged, rolled his eyes. On the end of it he leaned back against the dresser by the window. Shook his head. Started searching for his cigarettes.
No big deal, she thought.
Only somehow, somehow, her eyes were stinging.
Her face was suddenly wet. She had to try to swipe at it, surreptitiously, while he was frowning at the empty packet he came up with from the depths of his back pocket. “I should quit anyway,” he was saying as she finished up.
But she didn’t make it in time.
Because he looked up from under one cocked eyebrow. Then almost seemed to do a double take. Like he’d expected to see something close to amusement, and had to look again long andhard when he encountered the opposite. And once it was confirmed, his eyes went wide. He stood abruptly.
“Oh jeez, I’ve made you cry. How have I made you cry? That was about me, that was about me and what a screw-up I am, I wasn’t trying to be angry with you or anything. Kid, I’m sorry, please—” he tried to say. He even took a step toward her when he said it. Held a hand out.
But she had to stop him before it went any further.
“Don’t say please; I’m okay, it’s not your fault.”
“But it started happening when I was talking.”
“Because it breaks my heart to hear you say that stuff. And I don’t know how to tell you it does without seeming soppy or like I pity you or something, even though I don’t, I don’t, I just wish things were not like this or that I could reassure you that you’re lovely and kind and cool just the way you are somehow, I don’t know.”
“You’re doing all of that already. You’re doing great.”
“God, don’t try to make me feel better. Here, let’s just find you clothes, let’s just look for things you can wear on a lovely date with someone nice. She’s nice, isn’t she, this girl you like? She’s really nice and will be good to you?” she asked, even though it kind of broke her heart to do it. Because, god, what she wouldn’t have given to be that nice girl in that moment. To be good to him, the way she hoped someone else would be. And so much so that when he went very still, and spoke very soft and quiet into the fraught air between them, she didn’t know what to do with it.
“She’s the very best. There is no one in the known universe above her,” he said, like… she didn’t know what. She couldn’t explain the weight of those words, how he looked at her as he said them. There was so much pointed eye contact that for a second she didn’t just believe he possibly meant her.
She knew he did.
He wastellingher he did.
But the second she let that idea take hold, it happened. Another weird thing, like the weird stuff in the shop. Like when he’d made her think that before. The lights flickered—in fact, they didn’t just flicker. They went weirdly bright, and then snapped off. Like a circuit breaker had burst.
And the darkness, when it came, was so total she almost screamed. She came close to reaching out, to grabbing hold of him and all his safe, reassuring solidness. But she forced herself to be calm. To think rationally. To hold on to the idea of electrical problems, instead of going down that bad path.
The one that said this darkness was very like the one she used to experience all the time. In the middle of random afternoons, when things should have been bright as day, but suddenly they weren’t. Suddenly everything was so pitch-black she could almost feel it brushing against her. And only hiding in the closet had ever made it go away. Getting right down in there, the way she almost wanted to right now.
Though she managed to resist, at first.
