Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(75)

I needed him to tell me.

“I remembered, through all of this, when I was moving out, that the landlord had told me a woman from Seattle, a postdoc, was moving in. I thought of all the times, if I had some reason to look at the contact sheet in your chart, that I would’ve found out that way. Always, always, we were drifting together, always, I was getting to know you more, falling for you. I just thought. I don’t know. I thought, when I saw that picture on your desk, realized you wouldn’t believe in it. Believe or trust in me.”

“What?” I whisper. He touches my hair, but just the long ends over my shoulder, not looking at me.

“I could hardly believe any of it myself. We had just agreed to meet, finally, I had wanted to meet you after the first time we chatted online. Already, I was nervous about meeting Lincoln because of the—intimacy,” he whispered this, and a flush rose from his throat.

He touched the hair on my shoulder again. “I had come to your office to tell you how I felt about you; meanwhile, I had all these feelings about Lincoln, and like I said, Lincoln was real to me, even though we hadn’t met. I’d been so confused, you have to understand, just f*cking off my pins.

“Then I picked up that picture, and this will sound totally stupid, but it felt like Christmas.” Evan dragged a hand over his face. His almost smile was back, but his eyes were wrecked, looking over my face desperately.

My hip, where I fell, throbbed. The chair was hard and cold against my bottom, my thighs. My heart was beating fast while my blood fizzed through it, on the edge of making me feel like I might float away from my body.

“I thought,” Evan said, his voice rough, “you wouldn’t believe in all of this, how could you? I barely could. I walked out of your office feeling like I was carrying some kind of, I don’t know, it sounds so f*cking stupid, but magic around, and you’re a scientist, and so unbelievably smart, I was just worried that you’d think I arranged it or something, like I was creepy, pathological, even. Can you imagine? By the way, this picture, I took this and we’ve been cybering for weeks and I just so happen to also be the slob that is firing himself for wanting to kiss you? There was no way you’d think that was real.”

I take his arm, and he stops. I’ve seen him patient, with me, with himself. I’ve seen him search, so many times, for what to say or do next. I hadn’t seen this.

This tangle of fear in the face of something he wanted that had become precarious.

It’s not something that I think I could have seen before.

But I get it now.

I get the lack of trust, the sense that what you want is a moving target, the grief of disbelief that losing yourself is possible when you were doing so well.

He looks at me. “I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t lose you if I told you this crazy story. If I told you right then, or if I sent you a picture of me, just me, in return for yours. I was completely positive that you would freak out, I had worked out all the reasons you probably would in my mind. Then, after you sent me that picture of yourself, and I was dumb and sent those macros of me, you, well. You broke up with me. With C. Of course you did. It was all the biggest possible mess, and at the coffe shop that day, I hadn’t planned the kissing, I promised myself none of that until I told you, and then we were kissing, and the last thing my brain or body wanted was to watch your light go out like I watched Lincoln’s go dark. I had decided I would meet you, like we’d planned, on Christmas Eve’s Eve and hope, hope it would be okay and you wouldn’t just walk out.”

My throat’s tight, my heart stopped, my eyes burning, and I don’t even know there are tears until he’s holding my face, rubbing them away.

But I don’t want that.

I turn my face away.

It’s not that I believe in magic, my work is concerned with the observable world, after all, it’s that I’ve always been able to see the convergences of things, the complexity of systems that pile together and behave like magic.

When I saw his tattoo in the van I didn’t believe that he had arranged all of this, but I step back and look at the whole system to try to understand what I believed. What I saw.

I’m not sure it was ever entirely observable.

Except, underneath, it was always just us.

The scrape on my hip starts to sting, and my tears are coming faster, sitting on this chair, at an awkward angle, my pants off, my face in his hands—I’m uncomfortable.

Inside and out.

I close my eyes.

That makes it easier to get inside my own body, out of my head, and just pay attention to the man in front of me. I put my hands over his on my face.

“Bad news from Dr. Allen today,” I tell him.

“I’m sorry.”

“I was feeling pretty good, and I didn’t realize that some part of that was her confidence that I was holding right where I was, that all I had to do was get used to the changes that had already happened. I didn’t totally get I would have to deal with more.”

Then I feel him lean toward me, and he kisses my forehead.

“I don’t believe in magic.” I open my eyes and look at him. “But actually, there is totally such a thing as coincidence.”

“What happens after a coincidence?”

“Well, in my work, I note it and move on and get on with the bigger picture.” He smiles. “I don’t know if I am good at the big picture. I’m good at big pictures of small things.”