I sit in the therapy room by myself until it is five minutes past the time we are supposed to start, and then I give up and decide to leave.
I am surprised to find that Evan is in the foyer again, sitting on a cube-shaped leather sofa that is one of those sofas that isn’t really meant to be sat on, I think. It’s all low to the ground and his knees are higher than the level of his hips and the back of the thing is cutting across the middle of his back, but he has his hands behind his head and manages to look weirdly comfortable.
The foyer’s completely silent, echoing how quiet the campus has been getting as we edge closer to the winter break and students take their finals and leave, fly in all directions to their homes, leave the grounds crew with fewer and fewer walks they need to shovel to clear the way for the skeleton crew of administrators and staff, researchers like me.
Snow’s been drifting against the buildings instead of groups of students.
A silver tinsel tree in the corner is blinking with blue and white lights.
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.”
“Well. My mom would probably like you.”
“Of course, you don’t mean that in a way that means you like me.”
I laugh and smack him on the arm. He leans way over like I almost knocked him down and grins down at his shoes again. “Of course not. I mean that in a ‘she’d be glad someone thought they had to take care of me’ kind of way.”
“That’s the thing, Jenny”—he stands up and grabs a lab coat off one of the XL hooks—“I don’t want to take care of you. I want to help you take care of yourself.”
“And I just want all of this to stop. I don’t want to need you, at all. Ever.”
He looks at me, in this new way he has where he seems to take me all in. “Then take me into your lab and show me why.”
* * *
“I thought we were going to get to use the big thing, the ESEM.” Evan is standing in my lab with a cotton swab in his mouth.
“We are, but we’ve got to start with the basics.” I hold out my hand. “Okay, that’s good, hand over the swab and take a seat at the bench next to me.”
He sits on the lab stool where I’ve set up a compound microscope, a couple of wet-mount slides, and methylene blue.
“Okay, watch me make this wet mount, then I’ll give you the swab and you make yours.”
I drip distilled water on the slide and roll the swab from the inside of Evan’s cheek firmly against the wet slide, then drop the slide cover over. When I look up to hand him back the swab, I find him hovering right over my shoulder. When he takes the swab, his thumb brushes over mine.
So, it’s kind of sexy. I don’t know.
His eyebrows scrunch up as he copies what I did to make the wet mount, but you can tell he’s having a great time because he keeps breaking out in these grins where you can see all the places his teeth overlap a little.
“Got it.” He leans back and gestures at his slide.
“A plus. You can throw the swab away in that box under the bench with the red biohazard liner.”
“Okay, now what?” He spins on his stool to face me.
“This next part is pretty cool. You’ll put a couple of drops of the methylene blue stain on one side of the slide cover, and the square of superabsorbent paper on the other. The paper will pull out the distilled water from the wet mount, and draw the stain under the slide cover, pulling it across your sample. Once you see all blue being pulled into the paper, the slide’s done.” I talk while I make the slide.
Methylene blue is pretty close to the color of Evan’s eyes.
“Like that.”
“Neat.”
“Yep. Now you do it.” I hand him the bottle of stain. He prepares the slide perfectly, and when the blue has pulled into his paper and he lifts it up, he looks at me with total delight.
I kind of laugh at him just because it makes me happy to see someone happy like that with something so simple and something I think is so cool. He laughs back and nudges my shoulder with his. I hadn’t realized that we’d drifted so close together.
“So, here’s the hard part, but the best part.” I pull the compound scope so it’s right between us and turn it on. “You’ll look through here, and this whole part houses the lenses. You set the slide up on the stage, try to center the slide over the light source, then secure it with those clips. You’ll look through the scope and adjust the stage up and down until you see the color of the stain and maybe some blobs. Then use the coarse adjustment until you feel like you can almost see individual images on the slide. The fine adjustments are last, and they will make everything sharp.”
We’re on heavy lab stools, so I don’t scoot away but just lean back to let him work the scope. Plus, I may have to lean back in to help him focus. His upper arm rests against my shoulder, and it’s nice, like his hand on my back had been.
He seems so comfortable with being close, with incidental touching, I wonder if it’s because of his job, or him, or what.
“I see blobs.” He turns his head from the eyepiece, his hand on the coarse adjustment.
“Okay, let me see.” I lean in, and he moves his head just enough to the side to fit mine.
I can feel the warmth of his cheek though we’re not touching.
I reach down automatically to the coarse-focus knob and my hand covers his.
He moves his hand away, but slow, like he’s being respectful of the equipment and of me. He doesn’t jerk from the closeness and touch at all.
He doesn’t move away from me in any way, like he’s just fine right inside my space, half of his chest along my back and shoulder, his head bent with mine.
It feels amazing, and confusing, and maybe a little more amazing because it’s confusing.
My stomach drops heavy and sweet into my pelvis and it’s that, the familiar, early throb of wanting and horniness that stills my hand in the middle of my adjustment on the scope.
Feeling horny feelings is a little different than feeling safe and accommodating feelings.
I breathe out, slow, and get the focus into a place that just a few tiny nudges with the fine adjustment will bring the cells up. I leave it there because I want him to have that moment where he can see everything, and it looks like the slide will be a pretty good one.
“Okay, it’s almost there, just use the fine focus.” I move my head from the eyepiece, and he’s right there, reaching for the adjustment knob before I’m completely moved away. Our temples press together for a moment, and his hand moves under mine again.
When I take a breath to steady myself, it doesn’t work because I just suck in mint and the warm, clean smell of his skin.
Which somehow makes me think of how easy it would be to just turn my face into his neck.
“Oh,” he says, then, under his breath, and I can feel his big body go still.
“Yeah? You got it?” I keep my voice low, too, because I totally understand.
“I do.” He takes his hand off the knob and rests it on the bench. I sort of want to put my hand over it and weave all my fingers through his.
I just look at his hand, instead.
There’s a white scar through the middle knuckle that has the faint impressions of where suture knots rested as the laceration healed. I wonder how he hurt himself. I want to run a finger along it.
“What do you think?” I really, really want to know.
“There’s a bunch of different things, and some things that I think are on top of other things. The color is more translucent than I expected.”
“Right. Different densities of material will take the stain differently. What else?”
“There’s more than one kind of thing. I think a couple of strings from the swab. Then little dots, pieces of things. I can tell what the cells are, though. I can see the walls, and the nuclei?”
I kind of laugh, because it’s just so awesome, the way his voice is serious but his mouth is smiling.
He looks away then, and he’s just inches away.
His eyes find mine.
“Thank you for showing me this,” he says.
“Yeah, of course.” Now I’m looking at him, not just at his brain.
He straightens up, but I sit up with him, and we’re still looking at each other and I don’t know what’s going to happen or what he’s going to say and suddenly, I am looking at his mouth.
I can’t believe I’m doing that, so I look back into his eyes.
But his eyes don’t seem surprised at all.
Then he reaches up and he curls that big hand around the nape of my neck and I swear to God, all the breath in my body rushes to the surface of my skin in this insane flash of heat that makes it so I can’t breathe back in, not ever, it feels like.
His face is so serious, and my brain is totally scrambled against working out what will happen next, even though I must know because he pulls me to him, without any hesitance at all, without any of the reluctance I would think he would have given how dedicated he is to his professional life.
He pulls me right to him, and then, his mouth is against my forehead, pursed in a kiss, but not exactly, because I can feel him breathing, and his hand on my nape has tightened, to hold me right there.
I can’t even process this, and I close my eyes, and as soon as I do, everything in the entire world is his hand on my neck, his mouth on my forehead.
“Jenny,” he whispers along my hair.
He says it again, without even his voice, just his breath. Holds me to him, right there.
I keep my eyes closed.
I need the entire world to stay just like this.
* * *
He’s standing at the bus stop with me until my bus comes because I wouldn’t let him give me a ride home.
The snow is coming down again; during the last week it had reliably started up in the afternoons and snowed all night. I liked to snuggle in my bed and listen to the plows in my neighborhood in the wee hours of the morning, their bright lights whooshing by my windows.
Every morning had a new unspoiled blanket, with only a few little alley-cat prints in it.
Even a full two and a half weeks from Christmas, they are predicting a white one.
I smile and look up at the fat flakes coming down.
“Does it snow in Seattle?”
He’s wearing a striped, wool ski cap with a sporting-goods logo and one of those heavy canvas coats with the big cargo pockets all over. He’d be warm for a crisp fall stroll, but standing still in the ankle-deep slush at the bus stop, the snow coming faster and faster, and the occasional blasts of below-freezing wind, he is obviously miserable.
He looks at me with his eyebrows raised, his arms crossed and his hands stuffed in his armpits.
“It does snow, but not a lot, and it tends to shut everything down. Of course, there’s lots and lots of snow in the Olympics and the Cascades.”
I watch him clench his jaw against chattering. “It’s pretty, coming down so fast and heavy like this.”
“Dude, go inside, you’re freezing, and I wait for this bus all the time. I’m wearing ten times more coat than you.”
He grins and pulls his hat down lower. “I’m good. Lusting after your coat, but good.”
Evan saying the word lusting makes something unfair happen in my underpants.
I take a deep breath and look right at him. There’s snow on his collar, his shoulders, his hat. “Do you …”
“I get it,” he says. “I always did, actually, in a lot of other ways, but I want you to understand that I get that I’m not going to be able to adapt the entire field of microbiology so that it feels good to you, in the same way, whatever the progression of your changes are.”
“I could stay just like this, forever. Be able to do everything but drive at night and avoid people’s sneaking up on me.”
“You could.”
“Or I could end up with a dog for the first time in my life.”
“Yeah. Though you’d work with a cane for a long time, first.”
A laugh kind of forced out of me in a cloud of cold breath. “How I am supposed to live with that kind of uncertainty?”
“You tell me, I guess.”
I look at him then, and he laughs at whatever look is on my face. “Help me out, sensei.”
“You’re a postdoc, a researcher, in science.”
“Right.”
“So, you know, better than anyone, that you could plan and work for something and at any time it could go sideways.”
“Sure.”
He just looks at me.
“But,” I say, “I’m always doing everything all along the way to adjust for change and screwups and ways the data come out that weren’t anticipated. I mean, a five-year project will be as much about discovery as it is about hypothesis. So, we basically expect it to all go sideways. It probably means we’re doing something right if it goes all sideways.”
He looks at me some more. Doing that almost smiling thing.
I look at the snow falling on the trees and street signs. “Right. Okay.”
“I’m just here to help you adjust and discover.”
“Yes, thank you for driving that point home.”
“Anytime, Grasshopper.”
He nudges me with his shoulder. So I look up at him almost smiling at me. When I look too long, his smile fades away, and we’re both just looking, now.
And then I reach up and grab his shoulder and brace myself on my toes and I kiss his cheek, which is cold and stubbly, but his breath is so warm along my ear that I kiss him again, still on his cheek but it’s a spot closer to his mouth.
I hold my kiss there, the location innocent, but the duration indecent, my lip turned out against his skin where I can feel it warming up, where I can feel snowflakes landing and melting.
His shoulder eases in my hand, and so I slide over it, holding him close.
I finish the kiss, but release him slowly.
He whispers, “Jenny,” just as the bus roars up along the stop.
I turn away fast, but feel his naked, mitten-free hand brush my cheek, barely.
I get into a seat that’s opposite the seats closest to the stop, but I still see him. He’s already headed toward the parking garage, his head down.
I keep my fingers on my mouth all the way home.
At home, I turn on all the lights, for once, even though it makes it harder to see the snow. I’m worried that all of this wanting to kiss Evan that’s developed from working hard to avoid and thwart Evan is some kind of delayed reaction to my diagnosis.
Like, I worked so hard, at first, to reassure everyone that I was going to be okay, just so I could do what I wanted to do, so my mom could continue having her life in Seattle, that now I’m just breaking apart and Evan is conveniently there and so hot in his long-limbed sort of way and doesn’t seem to hate me despite my efforts.
And here in Lakefield, other than lab buddies and confusing surprise cybersex with the anonymous former tenant, all I have is Evan.
Although it must be some kind of against the rules to even longingly almost kiss your occupational therapist. And vice versa. I mean, when he held me in the lab it didn’t feel entirely therapeutic.
I would call and ask my mom about all of this, but she would probably tell me to marry Evan, so I elect for a weird conversation with C.
Who is not on, but he’s posted at least two dozen pictures since we’ve talked, mostly of snow and snowflakes—a tiny drift on a mailbox flag, a clump of falling snow glowing midair and backlit by a streetlight, and one so close and sharp you can see each point of a single flake.
What do you think?
I kind of jump when the message comes through. I feel jumpy and unsettled all over. I feel leftover wanting for Evan that’s not really leftover and with it something like embarrassment, and then maybe sweetness.
Also, I feel anticipation of seeing him again, even if I don’t know what I’ll say, after everything that happened today, but I realize if I trust anyone with the awkward ever after of almost kissing, it’s Evan.
He seems weirdly okay with almost-kissing moments. I don’t know if that’s maturity or gravitas or what.
Or maybe the almost-kissing thing happens to him a lot.
I do know I want to see him again, already, and this has never happened, so he could simply be using my hormones against me so that I will install voice-recognition software and put my lights on timers and relearn to drive.
They’re beautiful, I say.
The snow, the too-quiet feeling of the snow, is the perfect way to sit in front of these pictures and these messages with my heart confused.
I close my eyes—now, the embarrassment comes.
I broke down in front of my OT and he kissed my forehead and he saw my bra and he must know I tried to really kiss him, kiss him, at the bus stop.
I’ve been thinking a lot about snowflakes, C writes.
Who cares about snowflakes?
Is my very first thought. My next is the way the snowflakes melted against Evan’s cheek.
My message box is blinking, waiting for me to reply. I think about things going sideways.
I think about when an experiment fails and the only thing to do is to design another, and to use what you’ve learned.
What about them? I ask.
His cursor blinks a long time then he sends a long message.
About how they are too small to do anything but drift together, but when you look close they seem so singular.
Drifting is different from moving under your own power, deciding something. It’s currents—in the water or in the air.
Or, in the middle of something where no one can face truth or honesty and tells stories instead. Drifting together. Drifting apart.
It doesn’t mean anything except that you’re passive in the current, or that the current is stronger than you are.
I read through his message a few times.
First, I think, I don’t want to drift anymore, but I don’t write that.
Another message from C blinks through.
We should meet.
Oh.
Just to start a friendship? It feels like we should, I know it might be awkward, and I don’t want you to feel unsafe. We can’t be that awful, because of the way tenants are placed in the house, it’s possible we walk right by each other all the time, anyway.
My hands are shaking, but in the interest of avoiding drift, I write,
I’ve thought of that, too. What are you thinking?
I’m really tied up at work, there are some things I need to figure out here.
But it gets quiet, probably for you, too, when the University’s winter break more officially starts, which this year is the 21st. So maybe a couple days after that? Unless you’re traveling somewhere?
I’m not traveling. My mom decided to fly in Christmas Day and stay through the New Year.
Christmas Eve’s Eve?
Ha. Yeah. I know where you live, of course, but we could meet someplace neutral since it will be our first time meeting in person. The mashed-potato place, Potato Mountain that’s across the street from the corner store?
11 a.m.?
December 23, 11 a.m., you and me and mashed potatoes.
My hands feel a little shaky, and I can’t really see why I shouldn’t meet this person. He works on the same campus, he lived here six years and my landlord maintained he was a “good guy,” though I didn’t want details.
Our chemistry, while pixilated, is obvious.
He is well rounded—has an artistic hobby.
He has been keeping me company all this time when I hadn’t wanted to keep anyone else’s company. I called my mom. I dutifully called and emailed my friends from home, though it was a struggle because they were worried and their worry and questions made me uncomfortable and a little more depressed and just … weary. This last week I’d noticed that my colleagues had piled in one car together, laughing, to go to a pub they’d invited me to, as well, and I had very politely turned them down and come home to talk to C about his pictures.
The campus was so quiet.
I had kissed my OT today.
Deal.
When I tell him good-bye and shut my laptop, I’m glad I turned the lights on like Evan’s always telling me to do. Because I need to see everything right now, and not be in the dark. My life used to be simple.
The little house I shared with my mom and our coffee brunches with a view of the sound.
The hours at the bench figuring out how small things get messed up and then live anyway.
Clear days when I took my bike on the ferry to Bainbridge and could see Mount Rainer.
So I’m really glad the lights are on, right now.
I’m glad the snow will fall all night long, all over this day where I was blind in about a hundred different ways and none of them had to do with my vision.
Then everything will look all new tomorrow.
I’m sleeping with the lights on, too.