Intrusion (3 page)

Or at least, not a pleasant one.

Is that what he means? That he can talk about terrified women almost Macing him for sleepwalking into their gardens, but not about anything nice? I think it is, but just to check I look up at him. I look up expecting maybe slight mockery or something of the sort, and instead see those beautiful eyes all full of softness and warmth and this weary sort of kindness, like he knows how much it costs to carry being good in a world where almost anyone can be bad.

And that's when it hits me:

He is absolutely and utterly beautiful.

How did I not notice how beautiful he is? I suppose I could blame the door or the shadows or his tension, but really I know this is nothing of the sort. This is Ted, squatting there like an ugly toad in the back of my head. He made it so every man now looks like nothing to me, instead of what I can now see so clearly.

The guy in front of me looks like a goddamn painting of himself. His hair is curly and tousled—actually curly and tousled—and I didn't even notice. I wasted all my time on Trudy and terror and Mace trickling down my leg, and missed his glorious bed head. I missed the slight curl to his upper lip like a pout he would never be a part of, and the patterns his thick stubble makes all over his face. There are patches just to the right and left of his mouth, where no hair grows.

They are as smooth as the inside of his arm.

I want to pinch
them
, to see if he's dreaming.

I want to pinch myself, because I know I must be. Everyone talks about him like he's some troll underneath a bridge. Tanya from three doors down practically called him the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Can none of them see this?

Is there a way to stop seeing it? I seem to be holding my breath again, even though I think he is noticing. My eyes feel so full of sudden desire he can probably feel it spilling out all over him, but there is nothing I can do. It just keeps happening and happening for about a hundred years, all of it so mortifying I almost miss what should be obvious.

It keeps going because he is gazing at me, too.

He looks back at me that exact same way—as though my face is just as much a revelation to him as his is to me. His eyes linger on my lower lip, as plump as his upper lip is pouty. He finds the scar like a letter C by my ear and my eyebrows. . .God, my horrendously thick eyebrows. What must he think of them?

It seems pretty clear what he thinks of them.

If his gaze had hands, I think he would be stroking me there now. As it is I can almost feel his touch, and not just because of that long, slow assessment of my features. There is also the air between us, so heavy and warm it seems to weigh on my limbs. It makes me want to lay my cheek against someplace strange—like the nearly exposed inside of his thigh.

And I suspect he has some of the same urges. I see him leaning a little, as though this ocean of heat and silence and long looks is drowning him, too. My unseen hands are dragging him down to the bottom, where I wait with a kiss.

Christ, I think he really might kiss me. This is what is happening now, all weird imagery aside. He wants to kiss me, and I want to kiss him, and nothing in the world matters but that. I even close my eyes, every inch of me trembling with a kind of anticipation I didn't know I could feel. My heart is trying to eat me alive. My face feels so hot I almost ask him to wear a fireguard. Any second now, I think, any second and then. . .

And then. . .

“I should probably go.”

Clearly, I have misjudged this situation rather badly. I mean, of
course
he should probably go. We met only five minutes before, and it was under the strangest set of circumstances I've ever been a part of. Kissing is not the thing to do right now.

So why do I feel so jolted to hear him say it? Why do I feel so suddenly adrift? It makes me think of waking up in the middle of a dream that doesn't quite want to let you go. For a second, reality is turned on its head. Dragons really
are
trying to eat your bed. And though you go about your day as though that isn't the case—though I stand when he stands and nod when he nods and absolutely agree—it stays with you.

He did want to kiss me, I think.

He did. He did. He did.

Didn't he?

“Bye,” I say, and he stops at the door. He turns and looks one last time, as I stand there clutching the blanket he gave back with my face still flaming and my lips unkissed. He raises a hand, but of course it isn't the hand I notice.

I see only the yearning, as deep and real as those dragons aren't.

M
Y FIRST IDEA
is to just go over there and say
hey
, but the minute I imagine it I know it would never work. For a start, I can hardly think of what should follow the word
hey
. My mind comes to a grinding halt the second I get to the part where I have to say more. I see myself standing at his door, mouth gaping open as I struggle to construct the next sentence.

I see that look of disturbed confusion on his face at the sight.

No, no, no. What I need is a motive. You know, like a
killer
.

Fuck, I hope this pie doesn't make me seem like a killer. I use apples just to give it that extra wholesome touch, and put little pastry leaves on the top. Then once it is baked I wrap it in a checked cloth—the way people do in programs about normal people living on farms with lots of animals and plaid and oak furniture everywhere.

It takes until I'm halfway across the street with it to realize that this only makes me look more insane. He already knows I'm not some Betty Crocker type. Coming over to his house like this only makes me seem forced and fake. I think of Tanya telling me about the single dad at number thirty-seven, and how she was going to make him a casserole then go over there in her tightest jeans.

This is it how it seems—and I hate it; I hate it. I'm not used to liking men. Somehow the sensation crushes me into a tiny cube. The pie starts to feel enormously heavy in my hands, and I know sweat circles are beginning to form under my arms.

But unfortunately for me, it's far too late to go back.

He opens the door before I hit his garden gate. Worse than that: I think he actually opens it for me. He never comes out to get his mail—unless he does it in the middle of the night—and no one sees him shopping for groceries or going to work. Before the other day, that door might as well have been sealed shut.

And yet he does it now, at the sight of me crossing the street.

How can I turn back, after that? His expression alone is enough to make me keep going. The corners of his mouth seem to strain toward a smile; his eyes are full of that odd marveling kind of light. He seems almost feverish with it, and the first thing he says is:

“Did you come over here to see me? Is that pie for me?” In a voice that pretty much sinks me forever. He sounds so surprised—like he can hardly believe it. How am I supposed to fight back against that?

“Yeah, yeah, I just thought it might. . .” I start, but then I realize.

I don't know what I thought the pie might do. All that time I spent coming up with a reason for being here—how clever I imagined I was for baking this thing—and still none of this makes the slightest bit of sense beyond the idea that I wanted to see him. I wanted to see the first man I've been attracted to in two long, barren years.

Thank God he wants to see me, too.

“You can come in,” he says, and I swear all the hairs on the back of my neck prickle and stand up. The words seem so odd coming out of his mouth. He sounds like he's speaking a language he never properly learned, which suggests only one thing to me.

He's probably never said that to anyone before.

It certainly makes him a little jittery, to extend the invitation to me. He almost bashes into me as I cross his threshold, and when he goes to shut the door behind me, I see his left hand squeezing and flexing down by his side. I recognize it for what it is.

My own hands want to do the same thing—and probably would if they weren't clutching a pie. A chant has started up in my head:
We are in his house, we are in his house, we are in his house
, and nothing I do will quiet it.

Mainly because
I am in his fucking house
. This tightly closed and completely private person—these are his whitewashed walls and bare floorboards. He has a wind chime hanging from an archway to the right and stained glass in the door I can see at the end of this long, long hall, and both things make me understand why he looked the way he did when he first came into my home.

Details say something about a person. They reveal little things that he will probably never be able to tell me. Clearly, this is a man who loves things neat and clean and simple, but with just a hint of something sweeter. A touch of colored light fracturing through his plain hall; a low musical note drifting through the empty space.

Very serene, I think, and then I get this buzz of irrational excitement. What else can I learn in these tiny increments? I follow him to the archway with all kinds of possibilities rattling around in my head—though none of them prepare me for what I see in his living room. I expect small things, you see. I expect hardly anything.

And then I see all the broken stuff.

All the abandoned computers and half-working toasters, spilling their guts over oilcloths he has clearly laid out so he can lovingly put them back together. By the fireplace sits a huge old musical instrument of some type, battered and dented and missing parts but slowly coming back to life under his diligent care. There are lamps and lost toys, and then other things less understandable—things that look like mechanical birds made of old can openers and a spider he must have put together with two forks and a clock.

But all of them say the same: that he so desperately wants to fix things he fills his living room with junk and spends his days making everything okay again. I know he does, because as I stand there with my breath trapped halfway up my throat and my heart aching hollowly in my chest, he checks on one of these things. He checks on it like it's a baby bird with a broken wing.

Gently, oh so gently, he winds a little gear at the side of it until a light flickers into being in this hesitant sort of manner. Then once it gets going his face just lights up in a way that hardly seems right for someone like him. His smile is near shocking, like seeing the sun come out in the middle of some nuclear winter. It actually makes my eyes sting, even though that seems utterly ridiculous.

It's only a projector. It's not a fucking metaphor.

God, I wish it wasn't a fucking metaphor.

“I just really like to. . .you know, fix things,” he tells me after a second, with all the awkwardness of someone who just revealed a filthy habit. His eyes dart nervously over each half-built object in here, as though calculating just how much they'll cost him in my eyes.

But he has to know the answer is they cost him nothing. How can I help him see the answer is nothing? If anything, the sight of all this makes me ache for him in a way I've never ached for anyone. I think of him in here, patiently working on stuff that no one in the world but him would ever care about, and a door opens up inside my chest.

The door was closed before.

It isn't anymore.

“That's kind of weird isn't it,” he says—a statement not a question.

It's a deep pleasure to answer him anyway.

“That is not the word I would use.”

“Then which one?”

I think of my legs kicking in the darkness; the smell of chloroform and the swing of the porch light I knocked with one flailing hand. Can he see all of that deep down inside me somewhere? Does he know that I am also broken? I think he does. I think he would probably fix me, if he only knew where to start.

Shame he doesn't realize he's already begun.

“Lovely,” I say, and my heart soars to see his mouth straining toward that smile. It makes me think that I have a tool kit of my own, and am currently putting back together various parts of him. This was the one marked
everyone thinks I'm odd
, and it deserves to go down the drain.

He's perfectly normal, really.

“Maybe we should sit down,” he says after a second, and the only strange thing is that he chooses a seat so far from me.

But I like that. I like that he sits at the other end of the table, and then seems to realize what he's done isn't quite right. The room is so dark and people don't sit in the dark to do whatever we're going to, so he gets up and opens the shutters. Even better: when he returns to the table to sit down, he doesn't choose the far seat again. He chooses the one just to my right—as though he knows his original choice was wrong, too.

Either that or he just wants to sit closer to me.

I swear our knees are almost touching. Every time I move, I can feel the air between them, like a secondary presence. And when he puts his hands on the table briefly, one of his knuckles grazes the curve of my thumb.

The resulting spark is something else. It's real and strong enough to make him place that hand back in his lap. I come close to scratching that spot he touched, but manage to control myself. Instead I unwrap the pie, and start dividing the pieces onto the plates I brought. Lucky I did really, because I don't want him to get up again.

He might decide to take a seat across the room the next time he returns. Maybe he thinks this whole closeness thing was a completely bad idea. I'm almost afraid to look in case that's what his expression says, and this feeling only gets worse as time ticks on. The silence gets steadily heavier and heavier, with only the sound of my knife to punctuate it.

When he speaks it's practically a thunderclap—and not just because of the volume.

There is also the content of his words, and the rambling way he says it.

“You realize I don't even know your name. You're in my house cutting me pie at a table no other person has sat at, and I don't know what to call you.”