Page 193 of Across His Line

She stands there for a second with her back to me and her hand still on the lock. Then she turns around. She walks toward me across the rug, past the end of the bed, the lamp by the couch throwing her shadow long up the wall behind her. I think she’s going to stop. I think she’s going to say something. Good night, or thank you for dinner, or that she had fun.

She doesn’t stop.

She keeps coming, and I understand. I know what she’s going to do.

And everything in me wants to go to her. To meet her in the middle of the rug. To put my hands on her face and close the last of the distance myself, the way I’ve wanted to since the reading room, since the ice, since a booth with a candle in it twenty minutes ago.

I’ve spent weeks trying not to decide anything for her.

So I stand still.

She stops in front of me, close enough that I can feel the cold still coming off her coat and see the candle-pink still in her cheeks.

She looks up at me.

I don’t move. I don’t touch her. I keep my hands at my sides.

29

You’re Doing Fine

Tessa

They’re green. All the way green in the light, and they’re steady and on me. His hands are at his sides. He hasn’t moved since I came across the room. He’s standing there by the couch in his dark sweater with his jaw set and his shoulders still, like somebody waiting at a crosswalk for the light to change, and I realize he isn’t going to move.

I take one more step, and then there’s nowhere else to step. I can feel the warmth coming off him. I can smell his cologne. He still doesn’t move.

“Are you not going to help me out at all?” I say.

It comes out shakier than I want, and too quiet.

The corner of his mouth moves.

“You’re doing fine,” he says.

And I laugh. I can’t help it. It makes my hands stop shaking long enough to lift them.

I put them on his face.

Both of them. Flat, on his jaw, one on each side.

He goes completely still. Still like a held breath. I feel him under my palms, the whole of him stopping.

His face is warmer than I thought it would be. His jaw is rough, and it scratches the inside of my palms a little when I move them. I don’t mean to look at it the way I do. I don’t mean to take my time. But my thumbs move anyway, like they’ve been waiting to, along his cheekbones, up to the corner of one eye, where there are a couple of lines that weren’t there when we were fourteen. Across one eyebrow. Down the side of his nose, which is a little crooked at the bridge, which I’ve never been close enough to notice. It must have been broken once.

I know this face better than I know most faces. I’ve memorized it from the end of a lunch table, from the far side of a gym, from three doors down. I could draw it from memory. I’ve never been close enough to touch it.

He’s watching me, and I can feel his breath going in and out, slower than mine.

“I don’t know how we got here,” I say.

“Neither do I,” he says.

I move my thumb along his cheek again.

“You were awful to me.”

He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t look away.