Chapter Eight
Eight
They didn’t talk for a long time after that.
Truthfully, she didn’t really know what to say.
They had covered a lot of very weird ground way too quickly, and it was all fighting it out inside her head.
Like the fact that they had way more in common than she had always imagined, before she’d accidentally spewed out all the ways they were similar.
Or maybe not so accidentally.
She didn’t know.
All she knew was that those books were now dancing in her head. Come Closer, Parable of the Sower, Little Children, she remembered, but got no nearer to the reason he had wanted or liked any of them. They were so disparate, so random, and so full of moments she couldn’t imagine him enjoying.
My love is like a fever, she found herself thinking.
Then closed that thought up, like a book.
She had others to go over, anyway. Like the absolutely bizarre fact that he had been hurt by something she had done, even though she’d never thought of him as someone who could be hurt at all. She’d seen other people call him an old man without any impact.
So what did it matter when she had?
You’re just harsher, she thought. And actually found herself wincing over the idea. More than wincing—rethinking how they talked, how she talked, the things she said. Feeling out boundaries, things that might cross the line for him. As if she actually cared, or caring was even worth it.
After all, it wasn’t as if he ever pulled his punches.
And he won’t over this, her brain added.
At some point, you’re going to get him cracking a sneery joke about the fact that you sung like that, and you know it.
The worst part was, though: she did know.
She did, even as she tried to deny it. He was just startled, he just hates singing, he just he just he just, she told herself.
But really it all amounted to the same thing.
She’d done something from the heart, something sincere and joyful.
And he had scoffed and rolled his eyes and tried to stop it somehow.
Like that time in the bar just outside campus.
The one everybody always hit on Friday nights, but he had rarely ever gone to.
Hell, she had rarely gone to it, either.
Her friends had been thin things then, ready to have a chat with her if there was no one else available, happy to accept her help and her ability to solve their problems, but disinclined to ask her to events.
And she had always known why.
She wasn’t the right kind of fun.
She was the sort that she had imagined Miller to be when she had first seen him speak: passionate about things she loved, desperate to talk about them, hungry to set the world to rights.
But nobody—not even him—really liked that.
He preferred her without all the gushing enthusiasm; they preferred conversation about things she had never really understood.
The minutiae of their happy, middle-class lives, what they were going to do at the weekend, who they were seeing.
They didn’t understand My mother went without meals so I could come here; they didn’t get that weekends could be filled with working as a night watchman; they had no conception of not being seen.
But she had gone one night, with Stacey or Sookie or Sally, to the Wanamaker with the warm beers and the makeshift dance floor.
And for once she had danced. She had dared to make a fool of herself, even though she was already learning it was a good idea not to.
In fact, she felt as if she only had then because that was when Christian had first spoken to her, encouraged her, spun her round.
Of course it had all been bullshit in the end.
But at the time she had enjoyed it.
And in the middle of it all she had looked up and seen him.
Standing in the darkest possible corner, completely alone, without even so much as a soft drink in his hand.
Staring at her, in a way she had never forgotten.
Those dark eyes shot through with a kind of thunder, as if the very idea of her dancing was a personal affront to him.
Then once he realized he had been caught, it had shifted.
Grown withering, she had thought.
Or maybe just contemptuous.
She still didn’t know for sure, all these years later.
She just knew that it had been unpleasant, and would probably be unpleasant now in some way.
He would make her pay for enjoying something in front of him—and sure enough, when it came time to grab something to eat he didn’t ask her what she wanted.
He just swung into the parking lot of a place called Plain and Hearty—on the gloriously green and tree-lined outskirts of Salem—that seemed to serve all of three items. Oatmeal, something called a potato sandwich, and boiled broccoli.
“This can’t be a real place,” she said as she peered at the menu proudly displayed on the window beside the door.
But he had already gone inside.
Worse, in fact.
Because when she finally got in there, too, and sat opposite him in a booth at the back, he got up and tried to sit in the booth behind her.
Perfectly aligned, his back to her back, and then a very pointed opening of his paper.
As if she’d offended him somehow, by sort of working things out with him and then singing.
It was ridiculous.
“You cannot actually be doing this. Or expecting me to just accept it,” she said, without turning her head. And he answered without turning his. Voice dry and deadpan, with just a touch of exasperation.
“We’ve just spent four hours together. You really don’t want a break?”
“This isn’t a break. Your head is two inches from mine.”
“Well, I don’t really see what difference that makes.”
“Yes, you do. Yes, you do. You know this looks like a kid wanting me to know he doesn’t want to play with me.
Don’t act like you don’t see it, don’t play innocent with me.
I’m not misunderstanding this one,” she said, too fierce, she knew.
It made her seem upset—even though she wasn’t—and would most likely lead to him being even worse than he already was.
But then she heard the rustling of his paper and the scrape of his boots on the cheap linoleum, and suddenly he was shoving himself into the seat opposite her.
“Oh fine. Fine. Here. Happy?” he fumed. As if anyone could be, just as plates of the beige-est food to ever exist were set down in front of them, by a waitress inexplicably scowling harder at her than he was.
“Not really, no. Now I have to eat garbage while being angrily glared at.”
“The food here isn’t garbage. I drive out all the time just to grab lunch.”
“That doesn’t fill me with confidence. In fact it fills me with dread, honestly.”
“Liked the breakfast I ordered you, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but there they had things I enjoy.”
“They do here, too.”
He gestured at what she now had in front of her, before picking up his own fork to tuck into what he had.
Switching from the left hand to the right, as usual, sawing with one side of it, then spearing it angrily and shoveling it in.
It always looked to her like he didn’t enjoy it, like he just needed fueling up, which was probably a good thing considering his meal was even plainer than hers.
But her stomach was growling, so she had to at least try.
She picked up one half of what looked like a toasted sandwich, imagining the flavor of boiled potatoes in the middle. And instead got such a hit of garlic it almost made her eyes water. She actually coughed into her sleeve, it was that strong.
Much to his amusement.
“Told you. They only serve basic stuff but you can quadruple the amount of the basic stuff if you want. So I quadrupled it for the thing you like,” he said, and damn him, he had gotten it right.
Hell, she even knew how he had—the garlic shaker at Desoto’s Pizza.
The one he’d seen her upending all over her triple mushroom, as he worked on the bread he’d scraped all the tomato and cheese off of two tables away.
Trying to ward off vampires, huh, he’d said.
If by warding off vampires you mean warding off you, she’d replied.
But apparently he didn’t care if she reeked, and she didn’t care if he mocked her, because she ate the whole thing.
Then couldn’t help sucking her fingers when she was done—even though he reacted the same way as he had for the breakfast in the diner.
That smug satisfaction briefly dipped, just long enough to hit disgusted.
Or maybe unsettled.
It was hard to tell, and even harder to spend time working out. “Fine, it was good,” she conceded. “But I am still going to propose that the second rule is we trade off. You pick one place to eat, I pick the next. And we both have to take into account what the other person might want to eat.”
“Do you even know what I like?”
“I’m already thinking of the stewed cabbage place just outside Paramus, New Jersey.”
“Then we have an agreement. Rule number two, restaurant trade-offs.”
“Cool. And what did you have in mind for number three?”
“No more than ten minutes of talking per hour.”
He gave her a pointed look on the end of that, and tried to pick up his paper.
He had to know, however, that she was never going to allow such a thing.
“And how are we supposed to work that out? Are you wanting me to time it?”
“All I know is we have already massively gone over budget.”
“We better be super fast, then. What’s rule number four?”
He pretended to consider. Then, “No talking about personal things.”
“We should make rule number five no vague rules.”
“These rules are perfectly clear. You’re just determined not to understand them,” he said, but the paper was down again. He was leaning forward slightly, invested in this overshoot of rule three.
And she was happy to oblige him.