I noticed. I filed it away in the folder in my brain labeledThings That Are Making This Worse,which was growing faster than the folder labeledReasons To Be Cautious,which was supposed to be the bigger folder.
And on the walk through the park, with the snow falling into his dark hair and his hands stuffed in his jacket pockets because he'd forgotten his gloves — he was always forgetting his gloves, this man who ran into burning buildings for a living could not remember to bring gloves — he'd said:
"I like walking with you. You don't talk just to fill the space."
Which was ironic, because at that exact moment I was running a silent internal monologue at roughly three hundred words per minute about whether the gap between us constituted "friendly distance" or "someone who's going to kiss me distance" and whether my nose was red in a cute way or a Rudolf way.
I said: "I like silence."
I didn't like silence. Silence terrified me. Silence was the space where someone might look at you too long and see through the whole production.
But he smiled — that structural-damage smile with the laugh lines — and I thought,okay, I can be a girl who likes silence. I can be that. I can be whatever this moment needs me to be.
The first kiss was an accident.
Or at least, that's what we both pretended. Date four, leaving a screening at Cinéma du Parc — some French film about a woman who moves to the countryside and befriends a goat, which turned out to be more emotional than it sounds and left us both pretending we hadn't gotten misty-eyed over livestock. We were standing on the sidewalk saying the specific kind ofgoodbye that meansI don't want to leave but I'm not sure I'm allowed to stay,and he'd leaned in to — hug? Adjust my scarf? Check something on my face? — and I'd turned my head at exactly the wrong angle, and suddenly there were lips.
Brief. Off-center. His nose was cold against my cheek. I tasted the salt of the popcorn we'd shared and something warm underneath.
He pulled back. I pulled back. We stared at each other for one and a half seconds — I know because I counted — and then we both laughed, and the laugh was the kind of laugh that saysthat just happened and we're both going to pretend it was an accidentbecause facing it head-on would require a level of emotional vulnerability neither of us has budgeted for tonight.
"Sorry," he said. "That was—"
"No, I— it's fine, I just—"
"The scarf was—"
"Totally the scarf's fault."
We nodded. Like diplomats. Like two adults who had just negotiated a minor international incident via scarf displacement.
I went home and replayed it frame by frame for forty-five minutes before I remembered to take off my coat. My first thought hadn't been about how it felt. My first thought — instantaneous, reflexive, absolute — had been a glance at his face to check whether my lipstick had transferred.
It hadn't. Because it was a transfer-proof matte. Because I'd planned for this.
That night, brushing my teeth, I caught my own reflection and saw a woman who had just experienced her first kiss with someone she genuinely liked, and whose first instinct had been quality control.
Nora, I thought.You are a very specific kind of insane.
The second kiss was deliberate.
Date four and a half — the one that got interrupted when his station called. We were at a bar in Mile End, one of those places with exposed brick and craft beer menus longer than some novels, which we'd been to twice now because neither of us had formally suggested it but both of us kept ending up there.
He'd been telling me about a call from earlier that week — a kitchen fire in a Villeray triplex, everyone got out fine — but the way he talked about it, the way he glossed over the part where he'd carried someone's cat down two flights of stairs and focused instead on how the cat had spent the entire trip trying to destroy his glove, told me more about him than any direct answer ever had.
He deflected the brave parts. He lingered on the funny parts. He made himself the clumsy character in his own story so he didn't have to be the hero.
Oh, I thought.We're the same disease in different packaging.
Then his phone buzzed. He looked at it. His face did the thing it does when work calls — a micro-expression between resignation and duty, like a light switching from warm to cool.
"I have to—"
"Go. Of course."
My chest tightened — brief, involuntary, gone before I could name it.Be careful,I almost said. But that was a girlfriend thing to say, and I wasn't that, and saying it would mean admitting I'd already started calculating the risk profile of dating someone who runs into buildings that are on fire.
He stood up. Put on his jacket. Paused. Looked at me with an expression I hadn't mapped yet — something between apology and intention.
