He opens and closes, no words arriving.
I keep my voice level. ‘I’m saying I memorised it too. We came here because reading it wasn’t enough.’
He looks at me like I’ve just spoken in a foreign language he doesn’t understand.
‘You chose this place,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘You chose the bar. You chose the time. You bought a coffee you haven’t touched. You got here early.’ Observational, not combative. ‘That’s not a rejection.’
He swallows, the movement tight, something he doesn’t want me to see.
‘I came to establish boundaries.’
‘Boundaries. Yeah.’ I lean back. Cross my arms, the performance of space. ‘You’ve been establishing them for weeks. How’s that going?’
His face sets.
Silence. The bar fills it with music, the hiss of the espresso machine, and someone laughing near the window. None of it reaches me.
I have never, in eighteen years, pushed a man this hard. I’ve pushed cheeky, I’ve pushed flirty, I’ve pushed dirty, I’ve pushedcome outside with me. I have not, until this morning, pushedyou to tell me the truth about what’s happening to you. The shift in register is one I barely recognise as the source of.
‘Are you scared?’
He blinks. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Scared.’ My voice stays level, my posture unchanged. ‘Of what you feel when you look at me.’
The spoon is still.
‘Don’t,’ he starts. Doesn’t finish.
Thedon’tsits between us for longer than a word that short should be able to. It lands with the particular weight of a word he was not planning to say, in a sentence he had not finished drafting, out loud, in public, to an eighteen-year-old student he is not meant to be this close to on a Saturday morning.
Don’t.
Don’t know. Don’t ask me. Don’t look at me. Don’t say it. Don’t make me hear it. Don’t put me in a position where I have to lie to your face. All six readings are available. I let all six sit.
‘Because everything you just said was true. The policy, the age, the risk. All of it.’ I hold steady. ‘And none of it is why you’re here.’
He’s very still—the stillness I’ve seen before, in his office, when my fingers touched his back.
I move across the table. Slowly. Place my hand over his.
His skin is warm, warmer than I expected.
My thumb is against the inside of his wrist, against the vein. Just resting. The café carries on around us exactly as it had been carrying on a minute before, the milk frother, the chatter, a child at the next table working through a babyccino with murder in her eye, and all of it continues in a key that has nothing to do with the fact that my palm is over a man’s hand for the first time since he became the only man I want to put a hand on.
‘Don’t lie,’ I say. Quiet.
He looks. The whole structure of his control, suspended.
Three seconds. Five. I can feel his pulse through his wrist. Fast. Faster than he’s willing to show.
His hand is trembling under mine. A faint, constant tremor he is not strong enough to stop. I think, with a clarity that almost knocks me backwards,I have done this to him. This is what it looks like when a man who has been keeping himself in aparticular shape for six weeks stops, for a second, being able to keep himself in it.
I don’t press. I don’t move. I am learning something about the specific mercy of holding still.
