Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(46)

In the quiet, not knowing where he is or what he’s doing, my eyes closed, I feel alone. Because I’m alone, I want to cry.

So for what feels like forever, but is probably not even a minute, I fight tears.

Evan has seen me be stubborn and sarcastic, he’s watched me half-ass a dozen therapies.

Once, I even got revved up into a kind of angry speech.

But he hasn’t seen me cry. Not even once. No one has, not even my mom, who I could barely get rid of after she came out here to visit when I got my diagnosis.

I suck in a breath, as quiet as I can, to chase back the tears and I dig my nails into the heels of my hands.

Then I hear something—a kind of rustle, then a clomp against the tile.

Then it happens again.

Evan has taken off his shoes.

While I’m processing that, I feel a sort of brush of air along my side, like a softer version of walking past the air lock in the lab.

Then, just after that, I smell—well, snow, and I’m not a poet so I can’t really get much more precise than that, and also, those red-and-white star mints.

This is what Evan always smells like, sugary mints and snow, even in September, when I met him.

Which means, he’s walked just past me, close enough to disturb the air around my body.

And he took his shoes off, and he’s not talking.

So obviously, I am supposed to be having some kind of therapeutic moment here, where my other senses get honed on the strap of this exercise and maybe later I’ll finger-spell W-A-T-E-R into his ginormous hand and we’ll embrace with joyous laughter.

I am totally embarrassed for myself that I even had that thought, and honestly, I can’t even believe that it’s me, acting like I do, in these sessions.

I am not this person who makes jokes about the blind and refuses to do things I know perfectly well are good for me.

Except here, standing in the quiet, my eyes closed, my occupational therapist creeping around in his socks, I am that person, and that person is angry, and that person is juvenile, and that person—

Is warm on one side of her body.

The breath I take in is sort of instinctual, and I want to take a step forward, away from the source of the heat, but I’ve had my eyes closed for so long that I have a sensation that I am standing in the only safe place on the floor and to step off it would be to drop into the abyss.

So I focus on what must be the heat of his body? How close would he have to stand for me to feel that? So I then I realize I am sort of craning my brain toward the warmth, like my brain is a probe I’ve sent away from the ship, where I am the ship, and I need the probe to give me an idea of what we’re looking at.

Except, I can’t look and my probe can’t look, it can only take samples of whatever this thing is and send back data.

All at once, I get the impression that he’s facing my right side, close. Like, so close that if I shrugged my shoulders, my upper arm would make a little contact with his chest.

It takes me another superlong minute to break down the data into objective bits to confirm this impression.

I mean the warmth, I think. Because the foyer’s kind of cold and I’m wearing a sweater and so is he, so if I can feel his body heat, then he must be really close.

I think he held his breath, at first, because now I hear it, above me, he’s close enough to let me realize that he’s just about exactly a head taller and I’m certain of this because—

My hair. My hair is long, board straight even in rainy Seattle, and I’m wearing it loose today because I didn’t have to be at the lab.

I can feel his breath sifting what must be no more than half a dozen hairs along where my hair parts down the middle, or maybe he’s stirring up a few shorter baby hairs because the nerves in those few follicles, I never knew, are so sensitive.

Six nerves, barely nudged, are enough to light up a thousand more downstream, until in addition to the sensation that I am standing at the edge of a cliff, I also feel the teeth of warm prickles pressing me back and away from the abyss, pushing me back and into—

His chest.

“Oh,” I say, because as soon as I make contact I open my eyes, dark afterimages swimming across my vision from keeping my eyes closed for so long, and when my eyes are open Evan is not just an impression, a collection of sensory inputs, he’s, well, he’s Evan, and he isn’t just close, he’s in my space, right inside of it.

So I said oh, the same way I would if I accidentally nudged a stranger on the bus.

He doesn’t move away, though. Like a stranger would.

I can’t see him—he’s standing in my periphery—but there is a sense of my uneasy periphery getting filled in, spreading out, in a way that I haven’t felt for months.

It’s not nothingness, something is there, and it’s not a saber-toothed tiger, it’s nothing to be afraid of, it’s just the regular world.

I’m in that space, or if not me, my probes, ready to send data across the little gap in my vision.

Oh.

And it’s just like that first time I found staph in my microscope. There was nothing, and then there was everything.

I turn my head to look at Evan, then, who hasn’t moved an inch.

He’s grinning at me, wide and pleased.

For the first time ever, I grin at him, and the sight of my smile must shock him because his grin disappears and he just looks at me, solemn. “Jenny?” he asks.