Chapter 6 #2
She looks at me for a long moment and then she picks up her own mug and wraps both hands around it and looks out at the window, where the rain is pressing hard against the glass in rhythmic sheets, the city beyond reduced to smeared orange and white through the water.
"The coat rack is fine," she says, quietly. "For what it's worth."
"I appreciate you saying so."
"And the books landed pages-down, which is actually worse for the spines, but I'll live."
"I'll replace them if—"
"Narod." She turns to look at me, direct and warm in the low light. "Stop trying to account for everything. You're allowed to just be here."
I hold the teacup and I look at her.
She is still watching me.
Her wet cardigan is dark at the shoulders and she pulls the throw tighter around herself, and the movement makes the light from the floor lamp catch the water still damp on her collarbone, and I look at the window instead.
"The storm system that moved in this evening was forecast to clear by midnight," I say. "I checked the radar while we were in the bar. The pressure gradient suggests—"
"You checked the weather radar during our date?"
"I check the weather radar every evening at approximately nine-fifteen. It is a habitual practice. I find barometric data soothing." I pause. "I recognise that this is not a standard social disclosure."
"No," she says, "but given that you also know about glaze crazing, I think we're past standard."
"I practised considerably more standard disclosures before tonight," I tell her. "I had a list. I discarded most of them within the first ten minutes because you seemed—" I try to find the word. "Uninterested in standard."
"What was on the list?"
"Safe conversation topics. Weather. Cinema. Whether I had any upcoming holidays planned." I look at the teacup. "In retrospect, the weather came up anyway."
She makes a sound that is not quite a laugh but belongs to the same family. Low, warm, slightly unwilling, like something that got through her defences before she could categorise it as a risk.
The room settles into quiet again. Not an uncomfortable quiet.
The kind that has some weight to it, some density, the kind that accumulates when two people have run out of the need to fill space and are simply occupying it together.
I am not, historically, good in silences.
I tend to interpret them as social failure and respond with additional words.
But this one doesn't feel like failure. It feels like the opposite of something, though I am not sure what.
The rain falls in big plops onto the ground.
She watches it with me.
At some point she shifts position on the sofa, pulling her second foot up and turning slightly more toward me, and the movement changes the angle of her, brings her fractionally closer, and I register this the way I register changes in atmospheric pressure — accurately, immediately, and with significant physical effect.
"Do you date much?" she asks. "Or—" She seems to reconsider the framing. "Has this been something you've done before. The app. The bar. The whole—"
"No," I say. "Not successfully. I have attended seven first dates via the application in the past fourteen months. This is the first one to progress past the forty-five minute mark."
"What happened at the forty-five minute mark on the others?"
I consider how to phrase this. "The recognition that I was not what they had expected tended to create an early conclusion to the evening."
She is quiet for a moment.
"People left."
"People left," I confirm. "Politely, mostly. One occasion was less polite. There was an incident involving a fire exit."
She says nothing, but I watch something move across her face, something sharp and briefly indignant that she doesn't quite direct at me, and the protectiveness of it is so unexpected that I feel it like a physical thing.
"Well," she says, and the word comes out carefully, weighted with intention, like she is selecting it from a range of possible responses and discarding the others as inadequate. "They were statistically insufficient."
I look at her. I look at her properly, directly, the way I have been deliberately not doing for most of this evening because direct eye contact has always felt like an act of aggression I cannot afford to commit.
But she has said something that requires acknowledgment, something that feels like it was chosen specifically for me, and so I look.
"That's a kind framing," I say.
"I'm an accountant." She meets my eyes without hesitation, without the flinch I have learned to anticipate, and her gaze is steady and clear behind her dark-framed glasses.
"I deal in numbers. And statistically speaking, a sample size of seven is nowhere near sufficient for drawing meaningful conclusions about your overall viability as a romantic prospect.
Anyone who left before getting the full picture was working with incomplete data.
" She pauses, and something shifts in her expression, something softer and more deliberate. "Which makes them bad at analysis."
Outside, the rain doubles its intensity, a sudden escalating roar against the window, and she turns toward it, instinctive, and the movement pulls the throw from her shoulders and she reaches to reclaim it, and her gaze passes over me and stops, and she is looking at my shirt.
My shirt is, I become aware in this moment with new clarity, profoundly soaked.
It has been soaked for the entire duration of our time in this flat and I had been aware of it as a physical fact, the cold, the cling of the wet fabric, the slight discomfort, without it occurring to me to do anything about it, because doing anything about it would require me to address it, which would require drawing attention to my own physical situation, which is not something I am in the habit of doing in any space, let alone a small warm room with a woman I have been trying not to look at too directly for the last twenty minutes.
She stands up.
She steps forward.
She stops directly in front of me, and the geometry of this , me sitting, her standing, the reduced differential of our heights in this arrangement, brings her face level with the height of my chest, close enough that I can see the individual drops of water still caught in her hair where the towel didn't reach, close enough that her warmth is immediately distinct from the ambient temperature of the room.
Her hands come up, hovering just over my chest.
Not touching. Hovering.
"Take the vest off, Narod," she says. Her voice is quiet and completely steady, and her eyes are on mine, and she is close enough that I smell the vanilla beneath the rain. "You're freezing."