I can almost hear the soft snap of those colored lights shift from off to on.
He is wearing the same V-necked sweater with a plaid shirt he always does. The same fancy running shoes. He looks different, though.
I figure out it is because his eyes are closed. All the worry grooves in his face are relaxed when his eyes are closed, and his eyebrows are in a normal position instead of scrunched up against each other.
Huh.
I clear my throat, but in a fake way, like “Ah-HEM.”
He doesn’t open his eyes. “Hey, Jenny.”
“Um, hey? Dude, do I have the wrong day?”
“Nope.”
“So we’re going to do that thing again, out here in the lobby?”
He opens his eyes, which has the predictable effect of making me feel a little unsettled. “Come sit down.”
“On the sofa?” It’s huge, but it sort of feels all wrong to sit on a regular piece of furniture with him. I hate the fake-wood-grain table with its plastic school chairs in the therapy room, but it suddenly seems like a way better option.
“Sure.” He pats the cushion next to him and crosses his legs at the knee, which should look silly but doesn’t.
I wonder if he practices making awkward and nerdy look sort of cool. Like he fills his house with furniture that is the wrong scale for his tall body and buys plaid shirts in bulk and tells his barber to leave crazy, too-long pieces of hair mixed in with the regularly cut hair so everything always looks messy.
Then he runs his hands through his hair and puts on his plaid shirts and uses mirrors to watch himself sit in uncomfortable furniture until comfortable furniture looks like it’s the one with the problem.
His eyebrows scrunch at me and weirdly, this relaxes me and breaks my mental loop. But I’m still not sure about sitting down on the sofa next to him. I tug my knee-length, puffy nylon coat closed where I had been getting ready to zip it back up.
I feel like I want to hide from him, just a little. My coat is good for hiding. It’s forest green with leaping deer logos embroidered all over it. My mom ordered it for me from an outfitter’s catalog so I wouldn’t die of exposure in Ohio.
It’s like wearing a bed outside.
“Jenny?”
“Yeah.” I tug my coat again.
“Sit.”
I slowly walk over, then sit down on the opposite end of the long sofa. And down some more. The sofa really is low to the ground. My knees rise slowly, while my slippery, puffy-nylon-coat-covered ass slides slowly down. I have to dig my snow boots into the edge of the carpet to keep from sliding completely off the sofa into a heap of static-electricity-covered eiderdown.
“So,” I say, resting my shoulders against the freakishly hard back of this dumb-ass piece of furniture and rolling my head in his direction. “You come here often?”
“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.
Even my toes, through the vulcanized trekking material of my snow boots, are warm because Evan pushed this magical button that redirected the blasting hot air from my head to my feet right at the moment my face was starting to feel roasted.
I love Evan’s van and its ass brazier and convection heat.
He turns a corner, disturbing a garland of sleigh bells he’s hung from the rearview, and I smile. I could almost pretend I was in a horse-drawn sleigh, huddled under deerskins with hot bricks at my feet.
Or something.
“You good?”
His voice seems like it’s coming from far away, and I realize that I’m drifting. Not sleeping, exactly, but after my long, hard cry and the granola bar and orange juice Evan made me eat from the lobby vending machine, and the quiet minutes in his van, warm all the way through for the first time in days, my brain has just powered down.
Gone a little half-lit and soft.
Maybe that’s why I say, “So good,” and smile at him.
“Yeah?” He turns away to shift. I have no idea how to drive a manual transmission. When you’re from Seattle, a city built on stair-step hills building from the sound, the idea of stalling out in the middle of one of those hills in traffic is enough to actively avoid developing the skill set.
I like watching him drive the van, though.
The gearshift thing is mounted right in the floor between us and he worries the fake-wood knob on it with his thumb when he drives. This van is the first thing I’ve seen him next to that seems scaled to him.
Except me, maybe. I always feel normal-sized around him, too.
“Yeah.” My voice sounds all dim and foggy, too. “Warm.”
“Too warm?” He glances over again.
I like how he hooks his wrist over the top of the steering wheel. “I miss driving.”
“You still could,” he answers.
“It scares me now.” Being warm is apparently my personal truth serum.
“I know, but that’s what I’m supposed to be doing. Helping you do things that scare you. Things like getting a daylight license and your car outfitted with extra mirrors. Negotiating reading and writing if your vision changes more. Not everyone”—he looks over and meets my eyes at a red light—“gets assigned someone whose only job it is to help them get through the things that scare them.”
“No,” I say. “Just the ones going blind.”
He makes a frustrated noise in his throat and shifts into gear with a jerk. I feel bad that it seems like, bit by bit, I’m getting to him.
He’s probably everybody else’s number one, guardian angel, superhero occupational therapist.
To me he’s the guy that reminds me, every week, that my life is only going to get worse.
Though he’s more than just that.
We’ve known each other for more than three months and while I just keep introducing myself to him, over and over, as someone angry with her diagnosis, he keeps introducing me to Jenny Wright, Fiercely Intelligent.
Which means he keeps introducing himself to me as a man willing to fail and try again.
“Where should I park?”
We had pulled into the administrative loop around the science campus. He had asked me to take him to my lab.
I had finally sniffed up the last of my tears on the sofa, and after he waited for me to get myself together with a tissue and pointed lack of eye contact, he’d said, “Let’s get out of here.”
“You have to park in the garage. You won’t have to pay; I have my badge with me.”
He pulls into the parking garage, where I show him we can enter the tunnel that will take us to the lab. It’s underground, so the lab’s atmosphere can be controlled with separate HVAC systems, and because some of the equipment is heavy and requires its own power grid.
I’m explaining this to him as we travel along the tunnel, following the green tiles along the floor that lead to my lab.
“So you’ll be working with the environmental scanner in this lab? I’ll be able to see it?”
“Environmental scanning electron microscope, and yeah, of course.” I slide my badge through the key lock and put in my code.
I’d explained to him over my vending-machine snack about the work I was doing with E. coli and how Lakefield State was my dream lab because it had the ESEM, which would allow me to look at live, wet-mount specimens and the kind of changes they went through when stressed. ESEMs don’t require that the specimen be mounted in a vacuum, which means live and juicy specimens and possibly better data than anyone’s ever collected before.
He was shockingly interested.
When I’d started to draw on a napkin how the ESEM worked, he’d scooted closer on the sofa and leaned over my arm to ask questions. He’d had a pretty intuitive understanding of equipment mechanics, which makes sense, because he works with a lot of tech, himself.
It’d made me feel sort of guilty—his enthusiasm for my work in the face of my resistance to his.
Then I’d wondered if he was doing it on purpose as another kind of object lesson.
But watching his face light up as the air rushes by us in the air lock, his sudden grin at me that makes me feel a blush all over my neck, I think he he’s just having regular fun.
I probably owe him.
“So we have to stop here before we go in.” I open the door to the locker room that juts away from the air lock. “I have lab clogs to change into, basically just shoes that I don’t wear anywhere else, but there are disposable booties to put over your tennis shoes on that bench. You’ll have to take off your sweater, so you have short sleeves under the lab coat, for safety. Then wash your hands. That’s it. You can wear one of the lab coats on that hook, those are all for visitors and students and stuff.”
He sits on the bench to pull booties over his tennis shoes. I get my coat and hat off, stuff them in my locker.
I realize I’ll have to take off my sweater in front of Evan.
Which, I’m wearing a T-shirt under, but it feels—intimate. We aren’t talking, joking around, like I do with my colleagues in this room.
I can hear him pull his sweater over his head, the shush of clothes being removed in close proximity.
It gives me chills that the cool lab air can’t explain when I hold my breath and pull my own sweater over, and of course it catches the bottom hem of my T-shirt and a large surface area of the skin of my belly and back hits the air and maybe his gaze, I don’t know.
I don’t look.
I just stuff my sweater in my locker and grab an elastic to pull my hair back.
It’s when my arms are over my head, wrapping the elastic around my ponytail, that I realize I’m wearing a purple bra under a thin, white, men’s T-shirt.
I don’t even normally wear purple bras, it’s just that I normally wear this kind of bra, in regular colors like white and black, but apparently Nordstrom Rack had my bra in ten different nonstandard colors because that’s what was in the latest care package from my mom—a rainbow of bras and a freezer bag full of peanut butter cookies.
After the thing with my coat and the bra maybe I should talk to my mom about dressing her grown daughter.
Except, I think she shops for me to feel close to me and to try not to worry so much and I wouldn’t want to take that away from her. Plus, you know. Free bras and coats.
“Jenny?”
“Huh?” I am holding my lab coat, but for some reason not putting it on, even though it would solve my purple-bra problem.
“Where’d you go?”
When I turn around, Evan is sitting on the bench, his booties on, also stripped down to a T-shirt. His plaid shirt must have had long sleeves.
The
way he’s sitting, something about it, maybe it’s that he’s wearing that rumpled-looking T-shirt and it fits kind of tight, how he’s leaning forward, he doesn’t seem like Evan.
He seems like a guy, and this impression isn’t helped by the look on his face, which is basically the same as usual, his eyebrows all steepled up, with that kind of near smile, but his eyes seem more direct somehow, and like he’s looking at all of me, not just my brain.
If that makes sense.
“I don’t know,” I answer, because I’ve forgotten his question.
“Sometimes I watch you just go somewhere else, and I just wonder where that is.”
“I was thinking about my mom.” I sit on the bench next to him so I can unlace my boots. The feeling that he’s looking at me doesn’t go away.
“Those are some socks.” He’s grinning at me, and I follow his gaze to my socks, which are pink with mustaches printed all over them.
“That’s why I was thinking about her.”
“Your socks?”
“Well, no. But that could be the reason. She got these for me. I was thinking about how she got me my coat, and this bra.” We both look at my boobs at the same time and the second he snaps his gaze away with another grin he’s trying to fight, I want to smack my forehead.
I have a serious filter problem.
I can’t believe I made Evan look at my boobs.
I clear my throat. “Anyway, so I was thinking it’s probably kind of dumb that my mother still buys socks and bras and coats and whatever else for her grown daughter but I could never tell her to stop because it’s the only way she knows how to take care of me, right now. She’s my mom and it’s her job to keep bad things from happening to me, and she can’t stop this thing from happening so she sends me boxes full of socks and cookies and T-shirts with funny things on them and rolls of quarters for the laundry and maybe, for a few seconds when she’s packing her boxes up she feels like she’s stopping a little bit of the bad stuff that’s happening to me. So that means I’m happy to wear purple bras and mustache socks. That’s where I went. What I was thinking of.”
Evan looks down at his feet. “I like the purple bra,” then he looks right at me, but not at the bra, for which I am grateful. “And your socks.”
Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight): A Loveswept Contemporary Romance Page 16