Two suits, she said. He blinked. I made you a second one, she said. 3 weeks ago when you weren't here. I had the measurements from when I fitted you for the Morrison wedding and I had the fabric and I She stopped.
I didn't have anything else to do with my hands. He looked at her. The almost smile was there and then passed it, something she'd only seen once or twice. The opened face, the unguarded thing underneath the steadiness. Clara, he said, "Don't make it into something larger than it is," she said, though it was exactly as large as it was.
"Come around this table. " He came around the table. He stopped when they were close enough that she had to tilt her head slightly to meet his eyes and she met them. And he looked at her the way Ethan had described, the way she hadn't been able to see because she'd always been beside him rather than across the street. And it turned out that Ethan, in this one specific thing, had been exactly right. It was something you could not perform.
It was something entirely true. She kissed him first because she was done waiting for things to happen to her. It was not a perfect kiss. Her nose bumped his once, and he was still dusty from the road, and the worktable was behind her, and she caught the edge of it with her hip, and none of that mattered at all. What mattered was that it was real, and that he kissed her back with a steadiness and a gentleness and a certainty that felt like the man himself, unhurried, unperforming, entirely present.
When she pulled back, he rested his forehead briefly against hers, his eyes closed, and she felt him exhale. A long, slow release that felt like something he'd been holding for a considerable time. "I'm sorry I left," he said quietly. "You came back," she said. "Work on that part. " He looked at her.
The almost smile arrived and then went past itself into something warmer and less guarded. "Yeah," he said. "I will. " What followed was not simple. She wanted to be honest about that then and later. There were two people with complicated histories trying to build something new without the benefit of a clear blueprint.
And it showed. She was, as she'd warned him, not good at needing things. She caught herself pulling back at odd moments, becoming very busy at the worktable when a conversation got too close to something important, making decisions alone out of habit when she didn't have to anymore. I was not forthcoming about the thing that had brought him here from the north, whatever it was. And there were evenings when she could feel it present in the room like a third person, and she had to decide whether to push or wait.
And she didn't always choose right. They argued, not often, but genuinely, the first time about the land east of town that Ryder had looked at, and priced and described to her across her kitchen table one evening with the careful enthusiasm of a man who has wanted something for a long time, and is still a little afraid to want it. She'd said it was too much money. He'd said he had the money. She'd said the water access was uncertain.