His eyes widened again. For a moment there his face was luminous with some complicated emotion.
“My chickens have names, too.”
“Okay,” she said softly.
He went quiet again.
“Avalon... why did you go up in the attic?” he asked finally. The tone wasn’t entirely gentle.
She didn’t think she could pull off “because you told me not to.” The mood of the moment somehow didn’t support glibness.
She just looked up at him wordlessly, and widened her eyes in rueful apology.
He just shook his head, slowly. “Avalon... I just...” He sighed. As if he was about to deliver a truth he was weary of repeating. “All I want is for you to be safe.”
And she realized that it was, in fact, true.
Inherent in Mac was a quality of caring that informed his actions.
Even if the words coming out of his mouth implied something else altogether.
She folded her hands together in her lap and looked down at them. Chastened and subdued and suddenly rather confused.
Neither of them spoke for a moment or two. Chick Pea panted quietly next to her.
Finally she lifted her eyes to his.
The corner of his mouth dented a little.
“Hey,” he said suddenly, softly. “You’ve brought a cobweb down with you.”
He bent a little in front of her. She could see in his eyes as though they were crystal balls. What she saw was a rapt girl, frozen as if he were a wizard casting a spell.
His hand reached out slowly toward her hair and he delicately freed the strand.
He handed it to her as if it were forensic evidence, or a strand of rare silk.
She watched herself, as if from above, take that damned cobweb like he was handing her his letterman jacket.
Their fingertips brushed when the transfer was made. And just that little brush turned her thoughts to white noise.Ssssssss.Like lightning had taken out the cable.
He had had his hands on her ankles and pretty close to the seat of alldesire, there, at the crook of her legs.
But somehow it was this tender intimacy that undid her.
She could all but feel herself unravel, as if she herself were made of something as fine as cobwebs.
She couldn’t look up at him because she was afraid he’d see the pulse thumping in her throat.
In that moment, a moment that lasted forever and just a few seconds, everything she considered herself to be, all of her achievements to date, finally, figuratively, softly collapsed like a house of cards. Inside crouched the teenage girl she once was: lustful and confused and madly, recklessly in love, heartbroken and not good enough for him.
She realized in a blinding flash that her entire life to date, from GradYouAte to overeducated Corbin, might very well be an I-told-you-so born of that long-ago moment: Mac had blown her off course.
She looked up at him and prayed that nothing of what she’d just realized was in her face.
She discovered that his face was still. He seemed a little tense about the mouth.
He finally straightened and drew in a long sharp breath.
