The following two weeks had their own rhythm. They were not dating. Marcus was clear about that in his own mind. Clear in the way a man is clear about something he hasn't examined too closely. Because examining it too closely would require him to act on it.
And acting on it would require him to believe he deserved it. and believing he deserved it was the hardest thing he'd attempted in three years. So he kept the word off the table. They were two people who rode the same train. Two people who had started talking. That was all.
But they talked every morning now, not just the short exchanges, full conversations, the kind that picked up where they'd left off the day before without needing any preamble. He learned that Emily had moved to Boston 4 years ago from Columbus, Ohio. following a relationship that hadn't survived the distance before it even started. He learned that she'd taken up photography at 23. After a period she called the 2 years I'd rather not discuss in detail and that the camera had become the thing that helped her look at the world again after she'd stopped wanting to. He learned that she was funny, genuinely, quietly funny, with a dry witch she deployed so understatedly that sometimes the joke landed 3 seconds after she'd said it.
She learned that Marcus had a system for everything and got irrationally irritated when the system was disrupted. She learned that he was secretly deeply invested in Amara's book club at school and had read four of the middle-grade novels himself so he could discuss them with her. She learned that he'd started his career wanting to be an architect, had taken two semesters of design before life, and cost redirected him, and that he still sometimes doodled structural sketches in the margins of his worknotes without fully realizing he was doing it. "Show me one," Emily said one morning. "No, why not?" "Because they're not.
They're just doodles. It's nothing." "Let me see," Emily, she held out her hand. The expression on her face was the one he'd come to recognize as her. I will wait as long as it takes expression, which was, he had to acknowledge, extremely effective. He exhaled, pulled out his work notebook, flipped to a page in the back.
She took it carefully. She looked at the sketch, a rough drawing of what might have been a building or a bridge, something with long, clean horizontal lines and an open center. It was good, better than doodles. She could see the care in it, the instinct for proportion and space. Marcus, she said, don't.
This is really, I said, don't. She handed the notebook back, but she said quietly, almost to herself, I think you've been filing yourself in the wrong category for a long time. He closed the notebook. What does that mean? It means you've been calling yourself a maintenance man, but you're actually a builder.
She met his eyes. There's a difference. He stared at her. The train rocked. He looked away first, but the words followed him all day the way her words always did, settling into corners of his thinking and staying there, rearranging things quietly when he wasn't paying attention.
It was on a Tuesday morning, 17 days after Emily came back from her father's first hospital stretch that Marcus showed up to the train and found her sitting in his seat. Not across the aisle, not one row ahead, his seat, the window seat in the third car, the one he had been sitting in every morning for four years. He stood in the aisle, looking at her. She looked back at him, completely unruffled. "You're in my seat," he said.
"I know, Emily." "There's another seat right here." She patted the aisle seat beside her. "This one's actually slightly more comfortable." "I checked." "You checked. I have been riding this train for 8 months. I have done extensive research. He stood there for another two seconds long enough to make a point about the absurdity of this and then sat down in the aisle seat.