He paused. Was it me? Was I the reason you put on real pants? She looked at him for a long moment. Not performing it.
Not building to something. Just looking at him. The way Clare looked at things she was deciding to be honest about. Yeah. She said it was you.
He exhaled. He didn't know exactly what he was exhaling for years maybe or some significant portion of them. the held breath of a man who had decided his own wants were a luxury he couldn't afford. I don't know how to do this, he said. I want to be clear about that. I don't know how to be, he searched for the word available.
I haven't been available in a long time. I've been a father and an engineer and a coworker and a neighbor and everything else, but not this. He met her eyes. I'll probably get it wrong. I know, she said.
I've got a 7-year-old who will absolutely interrogate you about your position on dinosaurs before she decides if she trusts you. I have strong positions on dinosaurs, and I have a dead woman's reading glasses in my nightstand drawer," he said quietly. "Because I'm not ready to move them, and I don't know when I will be." He watched her face when he said it. Watched for the flicker, the one that would tell him it was too much, too. more than anyone who hadn't signed up for grief management should have to receive at a bar on a Friday night.
No flicker. Okay, she said. That's all. Oh, Ethan. Her voice was steady and warm and completely unshaken.
I'm not asking you to put her away. I would never ask you that. She held his gaze. I'm just asking you to let me sit next to her. Something broke in him.
Not loudly, not visibly. Nobody at that table would have seen it, but it broke some loadbearing thing he'd constructed. Over four years of necessity, and underneath it was not rubble. Underneath it was something he'd forgotten was still there. He reached over and put his hand over hers on the table.
She turned her hand over and held it. That was all, just that, a hand on a bar table at 10:15 on a Friday night in Denver while Marcus argued about baseball and Diane flagged down the bartender and the juke played something neither of them was listening to. But for Ethan Parker, who had spent four years keeping his hands to himself, it was the bravest thing he'd done since he'd walked through the front door of his house on a Tuesday in April and kept moving forward without knowing how. They stayed another 40 minutes. The conversation moved and shifted and came back to the two of them and spread out again.
The way evenings do when they're going well when nobody wants to be the one to say it's time. Marcus made one final attempt at a karaoke singoff that was voted down 6 to1. Diane left with a long hug for Clare and a meaningful look that Clare ignored with practiced ease. Jake or Jason, both of them, it turned out they'd both come back, had moved to the bar entirely and were deep in conversation with a group of people neither of them knew. When Ethan and Clare finally walked out, they walked slowly.