His voice was low. Not the controlled even register of the committee room—something under that, something that had not been smoothed.
Wren blinked. "You have nothing to apologize for."
"I—"
"Freddie." She waited until he looked at her directly. "I kissed you."
He looked at her. She looked at him. The information sat between them, accurate and undecorated.
Neither of them said anything.
She became aware, slowly, that she had no idea what came next. That she was standing on a cold pavement having kissed the grumpy man from the coffee cart who had turned out to be the person she trusted most in Valor City, and she was alsopossibly in love with a man who put letters through her door, and these two facts were sitting side by side in her chest without any obvious resolution between them, and her brain, which was usually quite reliable, had apparently clocked out for the evening.
"It's getting late," she said finally. "I should head in."
Something moved across his face. It was too quick to catch; there and then rearranged into stillness. He nodded once. His hand dropped from her waist.
She looked at him for one more moment, at this man who had walked her home and moved to the street side and caught her when she wobbled, and then she leaned in and pressed her lips to his cheek. The left one; the one closer to her. Brief and deliberate—and felt him go absolutely still again beneath it.
"Goodnight, Freddie," she said.
He looked at her. Just looked in that way he had, taking in more than he showed.
"Goodnight, Wren," he said.
She turned and walked the last stretch to Pages & Prose, her key already in her hand because she always had her key ready; this was just a fact about her, and she did not look back. The door opened. The warm darkness of the shop received her. She locked the door behind her and leaned against it for a moment in the amber nightlight glow, with Heathcliff materializing from the armchair to wind around her ankles.
"Not now," she said. This was not unkind. He wound around her ankles once more and then departed, satisfied, to his shelf.
She went upstairs.
She washed her face and put on her pajamas and got into bed and pulled the blankets up and lay in the dark looking at the ceiling with her hands folded on her chest like a woman in a painting, except that the woman in the painting was presumablynot thinking about the heat of a palm at her waist through two layers of wool.
She was not going to sleep. She knew this within approximately four minutes. She lay there anyway. It seemed like the correct thing to do, the sensible thing, to be horizontal in the dark and allow the hour to pass. She was very aware of her heart, which was behaving strangely. Not badly. Nothing was wrong with it. It was simply beating in a way she could feel, a quick and slightly uneven rhythm, the kind that skipped occasionally on the upbeat the way a song did when the melody arrived somewhere unexpected.
She pressed two fingers to her pulse and felt it. Fast. Slightly uneven. Unmistakably, inconveniently alive.
She thought about the letters in the shoebox under the register—ten of them, folded in their tissue paper—and the man who had written them, and the fact that she still did not know who that was, and the further fact that at this precise moment, lying in the dark with her pulse doing its irregular work, she was thinking about neither the letters nor their author but about gray eyes in lamplight and a cheek under her lips and the specific stillness of a man who had not expected to be kissed and had kissed her back anyway.
She turned onto her side. She looked at the wall. Her heart continued its unsteady, quickened, entirely unreasonable work.
"Right," she said, to the dark and to no one.
Sleep did not come for a very long time.
