Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(52)

So for what feels like forever, but is probably not even a minute, I fight tears.

Evan has seen me be stubborn and sarcastic, he’s watched me half-ass a dozen therapies.

Once, I even got revved up into a kind of angry speech.

But he hasn’t seen me cry. Not even once. No one has, not even my mom, who I could barely get rid of after she came out here to visit when I got my diagnosis.

I suck in a breath, as quiet as I can, to chase back the tears and I dig my nails into the heels of my hands.

Then I hear something—a kind of rustle, then a clomp against the tile.

Then it happens again.

Evan has taken off his shoes.

While I’m processing that, I feel a sort of brush of air along my side, like a softer version of walking past the air lock in the lab.

Then, just after that, I smell—well, snow, and I’m not a poet so I can’t really get much more precise than that, and also, those red-and-white star mints.

This is what Evan always smells like, sugary mints and snow, even in September, when I met him.

Which means, he’s walked just past me, close enough to disturb the air around my body.

And he took his shoes off, and he’s not talking.

So obviously, I am supposed to be having some kind of therapeutic moment here, where my other senses get honed on the strap of this exercise and maybe later I’ll finger-spell W-A-T-E-R into his ginormous hand and we’ll embrace with joyous laughter.

I am totally embarrassed for myself that I even had that thought, and honestly, I can’t even believe that it’s me, acting like I do, in these sessions.

I am not this person who makes jokes about the blind and refuses to do things I know perfectly well are good for me.

Except here, standing in the quiet, my eyes closed, my occupational therapist creeping around in his socks, I am that person, and that person is angry, and that person is juvenile, and that person—

Is warm on one side of her body.

The breath I take in is sort of instinctual, and I want to take a step forward, away from the source of the heat, but I’ve had my eyes closed for so long that I have a sensation that I am standing in the only safe place on the floor and to step off it would be to drop into the abyss.

So I focus on what must be the heat of his body? How close would he have to stand for me to feel that? So I then I realize I am sort of craning my brain toward the warmth, like my brain is a probe I’ve sent away from the ship, where I am the ship, and I need the probe to give me an idea of what we’re looking at.

Except, I can’t look and my probe can’t look, it can only take samples of whatever this thing is and send back data.

All at once, I get the impression that he’s facing my right side, close. Like, so close that if I shrugged my shoulders, my upper arm would make a little contact with his chest.

It takes me another superlong minute to break down the data into objective bits to confirm this impression.

I mean the warmth, I think. Because the foyer’s kind of cold and I’m wearing a sweater and so is he, so if I can feel his body heat, then he must be really close.

I think he held his breath, at first, because now I hear it, above me, he’s close enough to let me realize that he’s just about exactly a head taller and I’m certain of this because—

My hair. My hair is long, board straight even in rainy Seattle, and I’m wearing it loose today because I didn’t have to be at the lab.

I can feel his breath sifting what must be no more than half a dozen hairs along where my hair parts down the middle, or maybe he’s stirring up a few shorter baby hairs because the nerves in those few follicles, I never knew, are so sensitive.

Six nerves, barely nudged, are enough to light up a thousand more downstream, until in addition to the sensation that I am standing at the edge of a cliff, I also feel the teeth of warm prickles pressing me back and away from the abyss, pushing me back and into—

His chest.

“Oh,” I say, because as soon as I make contact I open my eyes, dark afterimages swimming across my vision from keeping my eyes closed for so long, and when my eyes are open Evan is not just an impression, a collection of sensory inputs, he’s, well, he’s Evan, and he isn’t just close, he’s in my space, right inside of it.

So I said oh, the same way I would if I accidentally nudged a stranger on the bus.

He doesn’t move away, though. Like a stranger would.

I can’t see him—he’s standing in my periphery—but there is a sense of my uneasy periphery getting filled in, spreading out, in a way that I haven’t felt for months.

It’s not nothingness, something is there, and it’s not a saber-toothed tiger, it’s nothing to be afraid of, it’s just the regular world.