No, it was something more.
Something about that sense of familiarity, of being known somehow.
It had distressed him, as much as it had distressed her. She knew it had, because as she drove away she saw the gate crack open, like the door she’d held at the pool that time. Followed by the barest hint of his face, as shadowed as hers must have been, yet so clear she couldn’t mistake it.
It was the same expression he’d had then.
Only now she knew what it was.
Not anger, not irritation, not resentment.
Fear.
Then
She wasn’t sure what to expect when The Guy with the Cool Comments—who she now knew was called Caleb, thanks to Professor Dunderson doing an actual register—raised his hand to discuss the zombie story she’d written. She only knew that the sight of his hand, heavier and more weathered than anything else there, lifted almost casually, made her heart drum against her insides.
Now, she thought, was the moment.
The one where they would connect, in a way she had always hoped to with a boy. No, not a boy—a man. Because he undoubtedly was one.He’s almost thirty, I heard, Jessica had told her, when she’d accidentally mentioned him in a conversation about nothing that mattered.
But he looked older than that to her.
He had salt in his hair and his sort-of beard.
His hands were lined, his eyes tired.
As if he’d already lived a thousand lifetimes. As if something terrible had happened to him when he was a kid. And soon he would share it with her, and she would maybe find a way to comfort him, and solve his problems, in that way shewas starting to learn she was good at. In that way she now used to help her make friends.
Only maybe she wouldn’t even need it with him.
He seemed so strangely like someone who would understand her anyway.He cannot face his own need for another person, he cannot stand the vulnerability and humiliation of them knowing it; he longs for them to just see without him having to say, he had said, about a book she had stayed up all night with. Not because the reading list said she had to, but because she had loved it so passionately.
The Remains of the Day, it was.
He understoodThe Remains of the Dayin the same way she had understood it. And it wasn’t the only time that had happened. There were other things he had said that sounded the same way—like her own thoughts were coming out of someone else’s mouth. Like his heart beat the same way hers did, too big and too strong for his chest, for the world, for everything.
Then Dunderson nodded at him, and Caleb turned those beautiful, deep dark eyes on her. “I think it was sappy, honestly. It’s the middle of a zombie apocalypse and they’re falling in amazing, star-crossed love? Come on. Nobody even does that in our perfect real-world circumstances. The chances of anyone swooning all over someone else while raging undead cannibals roam around outside their fortified house are beyond zero. Zero is in the rearview mirror. It’s a dot, it’s done, it’s disappeared over the horizon,” he said. In the same manner someone might explain what they had for dinner to a doctor. Bland, and maybe just a touch annoyed at being forced to say.
Even though nobody had forced him at all.
He hadvolunteeredto take her heart in his fist and crush it. And true, he hadn’t entirely known that he could. To him, this was just criticism of some girl’s story. Yet somehow, that didn’t make it feel any better. It just made her squirm in her seat. Her cheeks heated, thinking about all her silly childish fantasies of the friendship they would forge.
More than friendship, in fact.
Oh, she thought.I really imagined more than friendship.
Then she just wanted to slide under the table. Or excuse herself and never come back. Anything but what she was doing now: sitting there, face burning a no-doubt brilliant pink, mouth stopped. While everyone around her waited for her to answer him. To be upset, she suspected, judging by their cringey faces and their big gossip-hungry eyes.
Then there were his: not even on her anymore. He was looking at his own work, neatly typed and perfectly ordered in front of him. A stream of perfect, evenly sized paragraphs, as if his writing came out of him like a printout from a machine. A receipt, for services rendered.
That is what it sounds like, after all, she thought.
Then suddenly the upset feeling was dropping. The heat was leaving her cheeks. Her heart stopped cringing away in her chest, and seemed to harden just a little. She sat up straighter, and even let out a little laugh. “Well, we can’t all write like robots who haven’t yet learnt human emotion,” she said, before she’d even thought it through. It just popped out.
But it worked.
Everybody almost immediately giggled. A little nervously at first, but then louder. And oh, those dark eyes whipped upquick from that mechanical work. They hit her with a flash of what looked like actual feeling, for a moment. Something seething, it looked like, to her.
