Caleb #2
And then I caught her at it again — eyes coming off the bare wall and back to me and staying, frank as you like, before she remembered I had a face she might be expected to look at instead. I leaned on the doorframe and let her get all the way to the bottom of the look before I said it.
“You're gonna want to stop looking at me like that.”
Her eyes snapped up. “Like what?”
She said it while she was still doing it. I laughed before I could stop it.
“Like I might be a tasty treat.”
She made a sound — half outrage, half a laugh that got loose anyway because she'd been caught dead to rights — and clapped a hand over her own mouth like she could shove it back in.
“I was not—” The laugh won. “Okay. I might have been.
A little. In my defense, you're standing there like that, and you still haven't put a shirt on, which is a choice you are actively making, so really, when you think about it, this is a you problem.”
“It's my house.”
“It is your house, that's fair, that's a fair point, I concede—” She was backing toward the door now, hand finding the frame behind her without looking. “Anyway. I should. I was going to ask if you wanted to come over for coffee in the morning, but, you know what, maybe it's not — because I—”
And she ran clean out of sentence. Stood there holding the unfinished end of it with her ears going red.
“—I'm gonna go,” she finished, which was not the end of that sentence and we both knew it.
She went. Got herself out the door and down my steps and across the road on legs plainly filing a formal complaint — and even bolting, she cut one look sideways into my open garage, at the bike sitting in it under the work light.
Same look she'd been sneaking it for weeks, every time she figured the dark covered her.
I followed as far as the doorframe and leaned there and laughed out loud at the night, because a man's allowed.
Halfway up her own path she said something to herself that was unmistakably the word idiot and unmistakably aimed inward, and then she was up her own steps and inside, gone.
I stood in my doorway a second in a damp towel, shaking my head at the dark square of her door, and then I went and put a shirt on — a good three minutes too late to be any use to her, which I decided was the funniest part of the whole business.
An hour after she'd fled my porch, I was back at the same window with a fresh coffee I actually meant to drink, no light on behind me, when the show started.
Willow came out of her place on Sophia's side. Moving like she had a schedule, a covered dish held out in two hands like you'd carry a thing you didn't want to tip. Down her path. Over the road — past her own side entirely — and up onto Murph's porch.
She didn't even get the chance to knock.
Murph's door opened before her knuckles were up, like the man had been standing behind it doing arithmetic on her arrival, and Willow went in, and the door shut, and the porch light came on right after — somebody inside reaching over to turn it on for somebody who was already through the door.
Huh, I thought.
I read rooms for a living and I couldn’t read that one — chalked it up to the two oldest people on the street having some history, and went no further with it, because the part of me that's good at reading was off-shift, and the part of me that had spent the evening with a flustered woman's palm flat on my chest was running the place.
But it pulled at the corner of my mouth, that little piece of theatre over the way — two old people who'd snipe at each other clear across the cul-de-sac in daylight, sitting down to dinner together in the dark like it was nobody's business.
Which it wasn't. The whole street was full of things that weren't mine to know tonight, and I was, for once, fine with every one of them.
I'd turned the lights off and was most of the way to done with the day when the knock came.
Soft. Two knuckles and a pause, just like before.
I crossed the room and had the door open in three steps, and there she was on my porch in a dressing gown and bare feet on the cold boards, hair down, chin up like she'd marched herself over before the sensible part of her could lodge an objection.
“Okay,” she said. Fast. “I bailed earlier. On the coffee thing. I want it on the record that I'm aware I bailed.”
“Noted.”
“So.” A breath — the line clearly rehearsed the whole way across the road.
“I owe you a coffee. In the morning. My place.” Her chin came up another half-inch, holding the ground.
“You keep turning up with things and fixing things and bringing me — so. My turn. Come over. Stay for it.” A beat. “That's all.”
And before I could get a word past the grin she'd put on my face — before I could say yes, or I'd have come the second you asked, or beautiful, or just her name — she turned on the cold boards and went, fast, down my steps and back across the road and up her own path, the dressing gown and the bare feet and the whole of her courage spent in the one trip.
I shook my head, and I smiled, and I called it after her retreating back, across the dark.
“See you in the morning, Sophia.”
She didn't turn around. Her hand came up over her shoulder — half a wave, half surrender — and then her own door opened and shut and the latch caught, and Sycamore Row went quiet around me.
I stayed in my doorway. My porch light reached about halfway across the road and quit, and her side of it stood dark except for the one square of yellow that came up behind her kitchen window a moment later. I watched that a while.