Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(52)

“I think we should talk about your goals for therapy.” He turns toward me and hooks an arm over the back of the sofa. Rests his head on his hand.

“Out here?” I try a similar maneuver, but just manage to knock the earflap on my wool hat over my eyes. Of course, when I pull the whole thing off by its pom-pom, my hair rises in a painful crackle all around my head.

“I thought you might be more comfortable talking out here than in the therapy room.”

He shouldn’t smile at me so slow and sweet. It’s unnatural. “Is this because I hugged you last week?”

“No.” His basset wrinkles gather in his forehead.

“It’s not like I like you or anything.”

He closes his eyes again. “I didn’t think that.”

“Well, good. Because I don’t. Not like that, in the hugging way.” I hope my coat will account for the hot blush I suddenly feel all over my face.

“We’re not having this conversation in the lobby because I think you like me.” He’s speaking slowly, like he’s trying to translate a sign written in a foreign language as he reads it.

This coat is really freaking hot. “I know,” I say. Wait. Don’t I?

Our eyes meet, I think mostly by accident because I was aiming for discharging my embarrassment into a middle-distance stare and he was just opening his eyes from shutting them in exasperation.

They’re as blue as they always are, but sitting on the sofa, even though we’re not any closer together than we are sitting at the therapy table, and much farther apart than we were last week during the exercise, makes looking into his blue eyes different than just looking at him.

I’ve never noticed that his limbal ring, the navy ring around his iris, was so dark before, that there is so much contrast between it and the color of his eyes.

Or that his eyelashes are long, and dark, too, like his messy, all-different-lengths hair.

It’s different.

I watch his laugh lines gather at the edges while I look right into his eyes, but I don’t look at his mouth, to see if he’s smiling. He holds my gaze, and he’s looking, too, because I can watch his eyes take in mine.

The small adjustments of his pupils and the minute changes of direction make it clear he’s looking at my eyelashes, too.

Maybe the dark freckle I have right under the outside edge of my left eye.

Then it’s too different, and too hard not to look at more. So I look away.

I just barely see that he looks down at the same time. And that he is smiling.

I look at my snow boots, counting the grommets while I try to name what I’m feeling. This has been a problem lately. It’s never been a problem before—I’ve been happy, and sad, and frustrated.

I’ve felt angry and sentimental.

I’ve loved. I’ve been loved back.

Maintaining long moments of wordless eye contact with the man who is supposed to make me feel okay about going blind, noticing all the exact shades of blue and how I can always tell he’s going to smile before he does, pretending I’m not responding to some tension between us?

I’m a little exhausted.

I’m not sad, but I feel like crying.

I feel like I would feel better if I cried.

So I take off my coat, and I know I look ridiculous because this sofa is too low and the coat is too big and I forgot that even though the zipper was undone that I had cinched and tied the bungee thing around the waist.

So I wrestle with my coat on the stupid sofa and when I stop struggling, and my coat is on the floor and I lean forward to hide my face in my hands I tell myself that what I feel on my face is sweat.

Until I feel a big hand between my shoulder blades.

Then I lean forward more, my arms on my knees, my face in my arms so I can sob into the fort of my body, and he doesn’t move his hand, just follows me down.

Follows me down, his hand between my shoulders the only point of contact I have between all the unnamed feelings in my chest and the real world. I can tell that it’s the heel of his palm resting on the edge of one blade, his middle fingers on the other.

He just lets his hand be a weight, an anchor mooring me exactly where I am right this minute, which is crying and confused and full of longing for nothing I understand well, at all, and his hand makes it okay.

This is okay, you are okay.

Even if this is forever.

Weeping with my entire body, the entire scope of how I have refocused my world—no hope, no easy breath, no grace, no work, no real love, no real desire, either.

Where he has placed the weight of his acceptance is against my body, exactly where it is at right now.

Uncomfortable.

Inconsolable.

Grieving.

Okay.

*

Evan’s car is ginormous.

It’s not even a car, it’s a van, and it’s not even a van, it’s a converted van. It’s tall, and huge, and tan, and ugly, but it gives good heat—in a steady, luxurious blast from a whole deck of vents. Plus, the captain’s chairs in front are heated.

My back and ass have dissolved against the inside of my three-inch-thick down coat pressed as it is into these perfect heated seats. I never knew how amazing it would feel to have an ass and lower back heated through so completely. All seats should be heated seats in Ohio in December. All drivers should adjust their converted van’s heat vents to “high” and turn the dial thing all the way red.