The trick, Phoebe had learned a long time ago, was to watch the eyes and not the mouth.
Mouths could be trained.
Nobody trained their eyes.
She’d been watching Mike’s eyes for the better part of two weeks now at the coffee shop, at her own kitchen table over cold tea, on the walk here with the sun doing its slow drop toward the brownstones and the maddening, itchy, wonderful thing about them was that they never did the thing eyes were supposed to do.
She told him about the circus.
She told him about Regina Phalange, a name she’d built specifically because it was too stupid to be believed, a test disguised as a joke disguised as a fact.
His eyes didn’t do the flinch.
They didn’t do the polite skim past, either, the fastest kind of dismissal, the one where somebody decided you weren’t worth actually looking at.
They just stayed.
Interested.
Like she was a song he hadn’t heard the end of yet.
She hated that.
She loved that.
Both, at the same volume, which was new.
The garden had thinned out around them, the after-work crowd gone home, the tourists chased off by the intercom’s polite reminder that closing was in forty minutes, and somewhere behind them a sprinkler system ticked over and hissed to life on a bed of something that would be dead by October.
They’d left the little café with its yellow piano and its half of a song still hanging in the air between them she could still feel it in her fingers, the shape of the chord she’d never finished, the particular relief of him not fixing it and drifted, without discussing it, back through the gate into green.
He hadn’t asked again.
That was the part she kept circling back to, turning over like a stone she wasn’t done being suspicious of.
He’d asked the question once, on the gravel path, plain and unshowy and completely unfair, and then he’d let her not-answer it, let her redirect them both into caffeine and music like the question had never happened at all.
Most people, once they’d landed a real question, couldn’t help but circle back to it, couldn’t resist picking at the thread until it unraveled the whole sweater.
He’d just left it there.
Available.
Not owed.
That was worse than pressure, somehow.
Pressure she knew how to survive.
She’d survived pressure her whole life, had a whole set of muscles built exactly for pressure the deflect, the joke, the bigger stranger lie thrown fast enough to bury the smaller true one.
Nobody had built her the muscle for a person who simply waited. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
They came to a bench by the pond in the Japanese garden, the water gone the color of a nickel in the fading light, a heron or maybe the same heron standing in the reeds like it had never left, and she sat down because her legs made the decision before the rest of her did.
Everyone who’d ever been this easy to be around had wanted something eventually.
That was just true, the way the sky was up not bitterness, just data, collected over enough years that she’d stopped being surprised by it.
The nice ones wanted to fix her.
The smart ones wanted to solve her.
Even the good ones, the truly good ones, had eventually needed her to be smaller, quieter, less, in some specific room at some specific dinner, needed the volume turned down on the parts of her that came from where she’d actually come from.
He hadn’t asked her to turn anything down.
He’d asked her a question with a trapdoor built into it and then sat next to the trapdoor without once looking down it, waiting to see if she’d jump on her own.
“You’re doing the thing,” she said, not looking at him, watching the heron instead.
“Where you don’t ask again.
It’s very rude, actually.
Most people would’ve asked again by now.”
“I figured you’d get there or you wouldn’t.”
“That’s an annoyingly patient way to manipulate somebody.”
“Is it working?”
“That’s the annoying part.
I can’t tell if it’s working or if it’s just you.” She pulled her knees up onto the bench, arms around them, the specific small-and-contained shape she went when a thing mattered enough to need less of her sticking out into the world.
“I don’t actually know the difference yet.
With you.
That’s new.
Usually I know the difference immediately.”
He didn’t say anything to that.
He just let it sit, the way he’d let the question sit, the way he seemed to let almost everything sit until it either resolved on its own or didn’t, and something about the stillness of it the sheer, patient nerve of a person willing to just wait next to her instead of in front of her cracked something loose she hadn’t planned on cracking.
“The one where my mom didn’t leave,” she said.
The heron didn’t move.
Neither did he.
“That’s the one,” she went on, quieter now, the surreal furniture of the afternoon the circus, the ribbons, Regina Phalange and her many vowels falling away all at once, leaving just the plain thing underneath it, the thing she almost never said in this exact shape, without a joke bolted onto the front of it to soften the landing.
“Out of everything.
Circus people, the high-five, all of it.
The one I actually wish had been true is the boring one. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
The one where she just stayed.
Where I got a mom who was there on a Tuesday for no reason, doing something completely unremarkable, and I didn’t have to build a single story to make up for the fact that she wasn’t.”
She said it plainly, no tears in it, no performance either way, the flat quiet that only showed up when something was real and she’d stopped trying to dress it as anything else.
She’d learned, a long time ago, that if you said the true thing sunny enough, fast enough, people let you keep moving before they had to actually sit with it.
She didn’t do that this time.
She let the sentence finish exactly as heavy as it was and didn’t reach for the next joke to bury it under.
He didn’t reach for anything either.
He didn’t say I’m sorry.
He didn’t say anything that would’ve turned the moment into something about him his face doing the right amount of careful, his hands still, nothing rushing in to fill the space she’d just opened.
That was the thing that undid her, in the end.
Not a perfect response.
The complete absence of one.
Interesting, she thought and this time the word didn’t come with the second half that usually followed it, the suspicious that had shadowed him since the corner booth, since the wave that answered the wrong name.
Just interesting.
Just a fact about the world, landing clean, the way facts were supposed to land before people taught her to brace for the ones that came with hooks in them.
She let it be quiet.
She let him keep sitting there, not fixing it, not performing anything at it, and for the first time in longer than she wanted to count, being read this completely didn’t feel like the start of the part where she’d have to run.
hey quick one before you close the tab.
if the cliffhanger is killing you, the future already exists.
you just need a ticket through.
every chapter the second i finish writing it.
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P.S.
in a parallel timeline, the rest of this story runs completely free on unwrittenrealm.com.
just saying.
that timeline also has more chapters.