Tell her, something in him said.Tell her about the letters.Tell her you're a coward with a lion's heart. Tell her you're a big-nosed letter writer who wants to quote Neruda. Tell her you moved the cart because of her and you couldn't make yourself leave.
The words were somewhere in his chest; real and specific and entirely available. He just had to?—
Her phone rang.
The sound was catastrophically ordinary. A bright, cheerful tone that had no business existing in this particular moment, on this particular street, in this particular rain.
Wren blinked. The open expression closed. She refocused and looked down at her coat pocket and then back up at him. The moment had passed with the completeness of a door swinging shut.
Was it her best friend again? Or worse; her ex-fiancé.
She was already pulling the phone out, looking at the screen. Something in her face shifted. It wasn't the wince of an unwanted caller, but something softer.
"It's Dylan," she said.
He nodded.
"I should… " She gestured toward the phone, toward the shop door ten feet away, toward the ordinary ending of the evening.
"Of course," he said.
She looked at him for one more second. Just a second; the length of something that wasn't quite a question and wasn'tquite a statement and would have required another word or two to become either.
Then she took the call."Dylan, hang on, two seconds." She looked back at Freddie and held out the umbrella.
He shook his head. "Keep it until you're inside."
She lingered longer than two seconds, keeping her brother waiting while she worried her lower lip. Then she did as Freddie bade, and went inside.
Freddie stood on the wet pavement and watched her push through the door of Pages & Prose. The warm amber light swallowed her up, and her voice carried back to him —yes, I'm fine, I'm just at the shop, no, Dylan, I'm not going to—, and then the door closed and she was gone.
Freddie turned and walked home in the rain. He didn't mind the rain generally. He had grown up in Seattle, which had given him a functional relationship with precipitation that most people in drier climates couldn't understand. Rain was simply weather. It was neutral. It had no opinion about you.
Tonight it fell on his shoulders and his hair and the back of his neck. He walked the six minutes home at a pace that was neither fast nor slow, and he thought about the weight of a hip that had changed the entire direction of a life, and a woman who had stood in the lamplight and said his words were beautiful.
He let himself into the apartment, hung up his jacket and pulled a can of root beer from the fridge. He sat at the kitchen table and looked at the blank page of his notebook for a long time, the rain tracing slow lines down the dark window beside him.
He did not write anything. The evening was already written somewhere he couldn't reach; in the quality of amber light on wet cobblestones, in the four inches between her shoulder and his arm, in the moment before her phone rang when the wordshad been right there, available, waiting, and he had been one breath away from being a different kind of man.
He closed the notebook. He was more in trouble, he thought, with the calm clarity of someone diagnosing a condition they'd been watching develop for months, than he had been this morning.
