Elizabeth #3
His was warm—warm in the cold morning, dry and certain and firm—and it closed around mine the way it had on the dance floor at the wedding, careful, deliberate, like he’d been handed something he’d been told was fragile and had quietly decided to take care of it.
I felt that handshake in a number of places that have no business being involved in a handshake.
“I promise,” he said.
And then he held my hand. One beat past where a handshake ends.
The same beat—the exact same half-second too long—as the dance floor, and I understood all at once that the man had a tell, and the tell was this, this, holding on, and he looked at me with those steady eyes that didn’t dart away and didn’t slide off and didn’t reach for any joke of their own, and he said, in a voice so level you could have set a tool down on it,
“I’m a man of my word, Elizabeth. When I make a promise, I keep it.”
Which is a perfectly ordinary thing to say. It is. I turned it over more times than I will admit, and said plainly, with the words laid flat and bare, it stays a completely ordinary sentence.
But he said it holding my hand on the gazebo rail with the bees buzzing and the dew coming up bright on the grass and my name in his mouth like he’d been saving it, and he said when I make a promise I keep it like it was a fact about himself he wanted entered into the record—and I sat there with my hand in his and my armor doing nothing, none of it, every layer of it useless, just a girl on a rail with a cold mug abandoned somewhere behind her and a runaway pulse and the dawning, sinking, traitorous certainty that I was in genuine trouble.
Also—and this was so stupid I nearly said it out loud just to hear how stupid it was—some small, ungrateful corner of me was actually put out about the promise.
I’d asked for it. I’d stuck my hand out and requested it in writing, practically.
And he’d given it to me, plainly, for keeps, and that corner of me had the nerve to go oh in a distinctly disappointed key, and I evicted it on the spot without references.
“Great,” I said. My voice came out almost normal.
I took my hand back, and it took a beat longer than it strictly needed to, which I declined to log.
“Glad we cleared that up. Pie eating’s the kickoff, ten in the morning, wear something washable you don’t love, and if you let Jude beat you in the first round I am transferring you to another coach, and you will deserve it. ”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” And he smiled. Not the nod.
Not the careful almost-smile from across the register for all these years.
An actual smile, small and slow and aimed directly at me, the kind that reorganizes a whole face, and I felt it somewhere structural, somewhere I was going to have to keep an eye on.
The sun came through the maples. Up the lane, I heard the screen door open across the still morning—Grandma, up and out onto her porch when she’d been told to stay in bed, too far off to have heard a word but close enough, I had the sudden total certainty, to have watched the entire thing through the field with those sharp gray eyes—and she was, in her terrible silent way, more pleased with herself than she had been in years.
I went to hop down off the rail before I could do anything else I’d have to think about later, and the rail declined to let me.
My shirt caught. Some tiny finish nail Grandpa Walt had left in the wood fifty years ago had hooked my flannel, and I came up short mid-slide, stuck, in a position with no dignity available to it whatsoever.
“Hold on,” Matt said, and stepped in.
He freed the fabric off the nail with two fingers, careful, the way he did everything, close enough now that I could smell the cold and the hint of cologne on him, maybe his laundry soap too; basically, he smelled good, and I was mad that I noticed. “There.”
“Well, now you’ve committed,” I said, because the silence was doing things to my body that I didn’t want to acknowledge. “You can’t half-rescue a woman. It’s in the liaison bylaws. You have to see it through.”
“That so.” And his hands settled at my hips—warm, certain, no hesitation in them at all—and he lifted me down off the rail like I weighed nothing, and set me on my feet in the grass in front of him.
He didn’t step back. Neither did I. That was the problem.
I was looking up at him, and he was looking down at me, and his hands were still there at my waist, and the whole frost-bright morning went down to the size of the few inches between us, and for one beat, then another, neither of us moved quite fast enough to pretend we hadn’t noticed we weren’t moving.
His thumb shifted, barely, against my hip. My pulse forgot its job entirely.
Then we both remembered ourselves at the same time. His hands dropped. I found something urgent to look at over by the hives. He developed a sudden interest in the middle distance, and we stood there a foot apart, having a spirited conversation with the scenery.
“Go home, Hartford,” I said. “I’ll see you at the pie eating contest.”