13. Harper #2
"The water board. You picked the dullest possible answer so I'd reach for the better story. You used to do that at three a.m. Tee me up and then sit back."
He went quiet, caught. "You remember the hour."
"I remember everything," I said, and wished I hadn't, because it was too true and he heard all of it.
The kettle clicked off. Neither of us moved toward it.
"Ask me something real," he said. "You always saved one. You'd do twenty minutes of nonsense and then slide the knife in at the end."
"You noticed that."
"I waited for it," he said simply. "It was the best part of the night."
I should have let that go. I picked it up.
"All right." I wrapped both hands around the empty mug so they'd have a job. "When you typed to me, before any of this, before the face, did you know? That it wasn't just good talk. That it was the kind of thing that doesn't come twice."
He didn't reach for charm. That was the part that undid me, that he answered the way he used to, slowly, like the truth deserved to be measured before it was spent.
"I knew the night you told me about the planetarium without telling me it was a planetarium," he said.
"You said you'd once wanted to rearrange the sky and gotten away with it for a Tuesday.
I read it four times. I had built a life out of letting nothing matter, and a stranger made the sky matter at three in the morning, and I sat in the dark and was furious about it.
" He looked at me. "So. Yes. I knew. I just had a great deal of practice pretending I didn't."
The room had gotten very small. I hadn't noticed him crossing it, but he wasn't at the far counter anymore.
He was close, close enough that I could see he was as undone by this as I was, that the steadiness was costing him, and somewhere in the talking I had drifted toward him too, because the pull was mutual and the kitchen was complicit.
"This is a bad idea," I said, and didn't step back.
"Almost certainly," he agreed, and didn't either.
He lifted one hand and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear, slow enough to stop, telling me with the slowness that I could stop it.
I felt the warmth of him before the touch, and my whole body leaned toward the wanting like a plant toward a window, and for one unguarded second I let myself feel exactly how much I wanted it.
His eyes dropped to my mouth. Mine had already made the same mistake.
The air went thick and the distance went to nothing and there was a breath, one shared breath, where it would have been the easiest thing in the world to close it.
I stepped back.
Not far. Just enough. Just the width of self-preservation, which I have always kept handy.
Something flickered across his face, but it wasn't anger and it wasn't the cold withdrawal I'd braced for. He just let his hand fall, and gave me the space, and waited.
"It's not that I don't want to," I said, and my voice came out rougher than I meant. "You should know that. It's the opposite of that."
"I know."
"Then you know why I can't." I pressed my back against the counter and made myself say the true thing, because he kept giving me true things and I owed him at least one.
"When I was seven my father went out for nothing and never came back, and I learned the lesson everybody in my position learns.
You don't get attached to the things you want, because wanting them is how they find the door.
I'm very good at not wanting. It's my best skill after the computers.
" I laughed, and it cracked. "And then you walk in at two in the morning and you're exactly who I thought you were, and that's the scariest thing that's happened to me all week, and a man typed me a death threat about a ghost tonight. "
"You'd rather I'd been a disappointment," he said. Not cruel. He just understood it, all at once, the whole shape of me.
"God, yes," I breathed. "A disappointment I could survive. I've got a whole system for it. You being real breaks the system."
He nodded slowly, taking it the way he took everything, like data he intended to honor instead of argue with.
He didn't tell me I was wrong. He didn't promise he'd never leave, which is the lie men reach for, and the fact that he didn't reach for it made me trust him more, which made everything worse.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay?"
"You're not asking me to prove I'll stay.
You're telling me you can't believe it yet.
Those are different problems." He picked up the cold kettle and, absurdly, started it again, giving us both somewhere to look.
"I'm patient. I've been alone on purpose for most of my life.
I can be near you and not collect on it. "
"That's a terrible plan."
"It's the only one that respects you," he said. "I'd rather have the version where you choose it than the version where I talk you out of your own armor."
I looked at him standing there in a dark kitchen making tea he didn't want, and I felt the thing I'd spent fifteen years not feeling, the dangerous pull toward a person, and I hated how good it felt and I did not let go of the counter.
"I don't know how to trust your face yet," I admitted. "Then trust my work," he said. "I'll earn the rest." I lay awake the rest of the night wanting to let him.