She'd been close enough to see it happen. You okay? Yes. He moved to put some distance between them, the old instinct, moving before his brain had approved the decision, and he caught himself and stopped and stood still instead. That caught Clare's attention immediately.
She didn't say anything. She just watched him. Later, after when they were standing outside in the quiet post gathering air, she finally said, "What was that?" When you almost moved away from me. I didn't move.
You almost did," she paused. "You caught yourself." He was quiet. He looked down at the empty cup in his hand. He thought about the right thing to say and the honest thing to say and decided they were the same thing tonight.
"It's a reflex," he said. "When something happens that draws attention to me, I create distance from everything, people, situations, it makes me smaller, harder to see. It's kept me out of trouble a lot." "I know," Clare said. "And I didn't do it.
I know her voice was quieter now. I saw you stop. I'm telling you it doesn't go away. The reflex doesn't go away because I meet one good person. I am not asking it to go away.
Then what are you asking? She looked at him directly. I'm asking you to let me be in the room when it happens. Not outside the room. Not protected from it.
She paused. I'm asking to be next to you even when it's uncomfortable for both of us. Darius looked at her for a long moment. He thought about Gerald Walsh on the sidewalk with his coffee mug. He thought about Tom and the catering company.
He thought about every room he'd ever walked into and immediately started calculating. That is not a small ask, he said. I know it isn't, Clare said. I'm asking it anyway. He looked at the street at the houses at the 30 ft of driveway and lawn that existed between front door and hers.
30 ft that he crossed now multiple times a week that had gone from feeling like the width of an ocean to feeling like a reasonable distance to feeling on the best days like barely anything at all. He looked back at Clare. Okay, he said one word quiet offered without decoration. But she heard everything in it. He could tell by the way she exhaled not with relief but with something more honest than relief.
The way you breathe when someone meets you where you actually are. They walked back to the street together. And for the first time, he didn't let go when she reached for his hand for exactly 4 and 1/2 seconds. And then he did let go a brief reflexive loosening. And he felt it happen and hated it.
The way you hate a thing your body does without your permission. Clare felt it too. She didn't pull away. She didn't make a face. She just let her hand drift naturally to her side and kept walking and didn't say anything about it until they were back on their own street back in the 30 ft of their own driveway with nobody watching.