He catches me watching him. He smiles. It doesn't reach his eyes because his eyes are too busy deciding whether to ask me something else.
"Stop it," I say.
"I'm eating."
"You're calculating."
"Both." He shrugs and goes back to the pot roast.
The dinner goes on. My dad tells a story about a client, something about planning permission and a neighbor with opinions, and it's funny in the slow-build way of Ronan Callaghan stories. Nobody tells a story like my dad. He'll take fourteen minutes to get to a punchline that deserves three, and somehow the extra eleven minutes make it funnier. Declan listens. I watch him listen without appearing to watch him listen.
When Cian starts up a third theory about our neighbors, I use it as cover. I push back my chair and slip into the kitchen to refill the gravy.
I need twelve seconds alone or I'm going to do something with my face that Cian will absolutely notice.
The kitchen is small and runs warm because of the old radiator on the exterior wall. My mom used to call it a different climate. I did a lot of homework in here. It smells like the gravy and whatever candle my dad has decided to burn this month and the general accumulated smell of a house that has been a house for a long time.
Declan is already there.
Same idea at the same moment. The dish is halfway between us, he's reached for it from one side and I've come in from the other, and we both stop. Not dramatically. Just the small arrested movement of two people who have misjudged a shared space.
His hand is six inches from mine on the ceramic rim.
I would like to report that I handle this with the cool composure of a woman who has been professionally on camera for eighteen months. I do not. My brain goes completely offline for approximately two seconds and my entire body becomes aware that this kitchen is very small and very warm and Declan Maguire is very close and it’s giving me thoughts that would get me disowned from this family if anyone could read minds.
Declan picks up the dish and holds it out to me.
"Thanks," I say.
My voice comes out ordinary. Academy Award-worthy, honestly. Somebody give me a trophy.
He doesn't leave the kitchen immediately. Turns to the counter, refills his glass from the open bottle, and in the ordinary choreography there are about four seconds where we're both in this small warm room and neither of us is looking at the other. Dad and Cian talking in the other room, muffled through the wall.
He picks up his glass. He looks at me.
The thing about Declan Maguire's full attention is you feel it before it arrives. Some shift in the room, some quality of contraction, and then he's looking at you and there's no gap in it. No part of him somewhere else. Just all of him, pointed at you, like a weather system that has decided where it's going.
One second. Two.
"We're waiting on the gravy," he says.
"Right," I say. "Yeah."
He leaves.
I stand in the kitchen with the serving dish and red cheeks.
This is fine. I'm fine. Everything is fine.
***
Dessert is a pie from the bakery on Main, which my dad picks up every third Sunday. We're mostly through it when my dad asks Declan how the week was and Declan says fine, quiet, but that he's been having trouble sleeping lately.
"Bad patches," Declan says. Nothing more.
My dad makes a sound of sympathy. "Have you tried decaf—"
"Yes."
