5. Chapter 5 #2
It comes without warning, the kind that doesn't build, just detonates, a single crack directly overhead that shakes the old windows in their frames and reverberates through the floorboards, and Maya's pen stops moving on the page.
She doesn't make a sound. She doesn't look at me or give any outward indication that the thunder was anything other than weather.
But her hand finds my arm.
Just her fingers, curling around my sleeve just below the elbow, automatic and unthinking, the way a person reaches for something solid when the ground shifts without warning.
She doesn't look at me. Her eyes stay fixed on the notepad as if she is still reading it, as if her hand is doing something entirely independent of the rest of her, which I think, in this moment, it is.
I go very still.
I don't look at her hand. I don't shift my arm. I don't say a single word, because some things a person does without meaning to and the only right response is to simply be there, steady and present, and let them hold on for as long as they need to.
She holds on for eleven seconds. I count them, not because I am a person who counts seconds, but because each one feels like something I want to be certain I am not misremembering later.
Then her eyes move to the refreshment table, to the basket sitting there in the dark with its candles and its box of matches, and I watch the moment she registers it, the small straightening of her shoulders, the return of purpose, and her fingers release my sleeve as quietly and naturally as they found it, as if the whole thing were simply a passing moment.
She crosses to the basket without a word, and I look at the place on my arm where her hand was, and I think, with more certainty than I have felt about anything since arriving in Willow Creek, that I would very much like her to reach for me again.
She strikes a match and lights the candle and carries it back to the table, and the candlelight between us makes the room smaller than it was and the silence more deliberate.
She sets the candle on the table.
"Are you okay?" I ask.
She looks up, and for a moment I think she is going to deflect, to smile and say something efficient and move us back to the garland measurements where everything is simple and measurable and safe.
But she doesn't. She just looks at me in the candlelight for a moment and says, quietly, "Yes. I am now."
I nod once. We don't say anything else about it.
The flame steadies between us, small and certain, and the light it throws is the kind that softens everything it touches, the edges of the room, the shadows in the corners, the careful distance two people maintain when they are pretending not to notice each other.
I look at the notepad. She looks at the measurements.
We are both, I think, looking at the wrong things.
I become aware, gradually and then all at once, that we are closer than we were a moment ago.
Not by any single movement either of us made deliberately, but by the small, unconscious increments of two people drawn toward the same point of warmth in a dark room.
Her shoulder is nearly at my arm. The candle is between us and we are both leaning toward it, or toward each other, and in the soft and unsteady light I am not entirely certain there is a difference.
She looks up.
I am already looking at her.
The candlelight does something to her expression that the overhead fluorescents never would, softens the guardedness she carries like a second skin and leaves something underneath it that is quieter and more undefended, and I find I cannot look away from it, from her, from the stillness of a moment that neither of us has moved to end.
We are close enough that I can see the stem dye on her cuff.
Close enough to see the small crease between her brows slowly smooth away as she stops thinking and simply looks back at me.
Close enough that the space between us has become its own kind of conversation, one neither of us is speaking aloud and neither of us is walking away from.
The candle flame dips once between us.
Neither of us breathes.
And then, without either of us deciding to, the distance closes by half.
I am aware of it the way you are aware of a current pulling you before you understand which direction it's going.
Not a choice, not a refusal, just the slow, certain gravitational fact of two people who have run out of reasons to stay apart.
She is close enough now that I could count her eyelashes if I tried, close enough that the candlelight catches the green of her eyes and holds it, and I think, with the last coherent part of my mind, that I am about to do something I cannot take back, and I find that I don't want to take it back at all.
And then the overhead lights flicker once, twice, and come flooding back on with the sudden indifferent brightness of electricity restored, washing the room in fluorescence and ordinary reality, and we both step back at the same moment with the startled, blinking expressions of two people who have just been returned, without warning, from somewhere else entirely.
She looks at the notepad.
I look at the measurements.
The silence that follows is the specific silence of two people generating a great deal of activity in order to avoid acknowledging what just happened, and I have no doubt we are both aware of this, and neither of us has any intention of being the one to say it first.
"Garland drop on the east wall," she says, in a voice that is almost entirely steady. "Fourteen feet."
"Fourteen feet," I agree, writing it down, though I wrote it down an hour ago.
She caps her pen. Uncaps it. Caps it again.
I straighten papers that do not need straightening.
We pack up the table with the brisk, coordinated efficiency of two people who have decided, by unspoken agreement, that this particular evening is over, and we say goodnight at the community center door with a politeness so careful it borders on formal, and I hold the door and she walks through it and neither of us looks back.
***
I drive back to the estate an hour later with the windows down and the night air coming in cool and clean after the rain, and I understand, somewhere around the second mile, that the word I couldn't find for what I felt watching her work in the shop on Wednesday evening is the same word I still can't find for what happened in the candlelight tonight.
I am fairly certain that is not a coincidence.
I am equally certain I am not going to examine it before morning.
***