Plus she noticed he wasn’t looking at her.
He stared straight ahead, at those two mugs.
None of which helped her decide what to say.
“You can if you want. But I wouldn’t usually.”
“Then you’d just want to talk some more.”
“Sure. That would probably be a part of coming in for coffee.”
“And the other parts would be what? What would you do then?”
Watch you tear off all my clothes, she thought.Or tear off all of yours. And only caught herself by the skin of her teeth. “I don’t know. You could put on a movie, maybe. Something you like, to show her who you are as a person. And all the better if it’s something soft and romantic.”
She gestured at his small, boxy, old-fashioned television, propped atop a couple of milk crates in this oddly familiar way. Then expected him to hesitate a little. Like he had when she first got him to admit what kind of movies he liked.
Only he didn’t.
He glanced at his overflowing collection, and almost immediately launched into a suggestion. “Okay, I think I got just thething. It’s about a guy, and he meets this girl. And he thinks she’s ordinary. But actually, she’s got a secret. A big secret that makes her kind of weird, and means that she doesn’t know how to do simple human things. Only, see, he doesn’t care about that, he loves her anyway. In fact, she drives him nuts. He can’t keep his hands off her. Like, it doesn’t even matter, he just wants to touch her,” he said, so engrossed in this description that he didn’t even notice her melting beside him. He spelled it out to the air in front of himself, all animated and adamant about it, while she slowly, slowly realized which movie he was talking about.Splash, she thought. That was absolutelySplash.
He was talking about a man falling in love with a mermaid.
Though it was more than that, and she knew it. It was about him. It was about his love for something that said in no uncertain terms:You can be weird, and someone will still love you. They’ll still find you attractive, and want to touch you, and be touched by you.
It was the reason she put a hand over his.
Half fearful about it, but she did. And in answer, he went very still. Then his gaze dropped to that small bit of bodily contact. “Is this also something that happens with the coffee?” he asked after a long and pretty agonizing silence. Gaze on her small hand over his the whole time.
In fact, he didn’t even look up on those words.
Like the shock of her touch held him in place.
“If you mean hand-holding, then I guess, yeah.”
“And you don’t mind doing that with me.”
“I don’t see why I would.”
“Well, maybe if I turned mine like this…” he said, and as he trailed off he did as he was suggesting. He slid his hand around until she wasn’t touching the back anymore. She was touching the palm. And his fingers were almost gripping hers.
“That would also be good with me. That would be pretty normal,” she said.
While thinking about how not normal it was making her feel.
Her heart felt like trapped thunder in her chest.
“Okay, so what else would be, though?” he asked. “Normal, I mean.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Putting your arm around me, maybe.”
“And I’m just supposed to do that? Without even yawning first?”
Like some teenager would do in a movie, she thought.Everything he knows is from movies. Though all that idea did was make everything seem even sweeter. Not to mention even more filled with crackling tension than it already was. She felt as if she was bursting with suggestions that seemed too greedy and lustful to make.
Instead of the small and more reasonable things she knew she should go with.
“I mean, you could yawn if you wanted to. But I don’t think you have to.”
