Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight) (18 page)

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.

I’m in that space, or if not me, my probes, ready to send data across the little gap in my vision.

Oh
.

And it’s just like that first time I found staph in my microscope. There was nothing, and then there was
everything
.

I turn my head to look at Evan, then, who hasn’t moved an inch.

He’s grinning at me, wide and pleased.

For the first time ever, I grin at him, and the sight of my smile must shock him because his grin disappears and he just
looks
at me, solemn. “Jenny?” he asks.

I face forward and close my eyes. “Again,” I answer.

* * *

“Just so you know,” I say, stomping my feet against the cold while Evan and I stand in line for a gyro at a food cart parked behind the university medical center, “today’s breakthrough or whatever does not mean I will now be all ponies and roses.”

“Never say,” he says, and grins, stomping his own feet.

“I think I feel sort of ambushed, actually, like all of the fail therapy was some secret, ongoing lesson that you meant to happen all along so you could spring this thing on me today.”

“Yeah, let’s go with that.”

He turns and grins right at me, with teeth and everything, and it’s kind of sad how it makes him look so different, mainly because I obviously made him so unhappy and never saw him smile.

That smile’s a lovely one. Broad and sure of itself.

He seems sure of who he’s smiling at, too.

After we ran through the exercise a few more times, he talked about proprioception and interpreting sensory cues. He told me I had
an amazing mind
and that the exercise was mainly to help me be more comfortable with my limited peripheral vision.

Also, he said, more comfortable with him.

Which made me realize that if there was anyone I was comfortable with, right now, in my life, it was Evan. Mainly because he had stood witness to everything I have been feeling and kept trying.

I think I should keep trying.

My amazing mind deserves to keep trying.

After we were finished, he told me he was starving and that he’d decided that he owed me dinner, and I found myself following him through a couple of courtyards to this food cart and I’m only a teeny, tiny bit worried I’ll miss my bus.

It’s nice, I think, to make Evan happy for once. He’s sort of cute when he’s happy and all the basset-hound worry lines in his face turn into smile crinkles. He isn’t wearing a hat, and the snowflakes are mixing in with his messy hair.

He keeps playing with the red-and-white star mint he’s sucking on, switching it from one side of his mouth to the other, between laughing at whatever I’m saying, which isn’t even that funny.

He’s kind of sparkly, actually. Sparkles look good on him.

“What do you want?” he asks me, and he does that thing he always does, which is steer me a little with his hand in between my shoulder blades, and I am honest enough with myself to admit that even through my puffy down coat, my cable-knit sweater,
sturdy cotton camisole, and four-hook bra strap, his hand feels really good.

It feels, in fact, amazing, the confident push of it, my proprioception is very on board with his hand, so on board, that I step back just a little into his hand, and I sort of feel his fingers spread out, cover more space, settle in, like he’s letting me know it’s okay to let him hold me to this moment and tell me where to go, and sort of
like
on him a little.

So I do, like on him, because I’m touch-starved and far away from home and living alone kind of sucks, actually, and it’s cold outside and right now, this minute, he sparkles.

“What do they have?” I try to make myself focus on the little menu written in marker on a grease-splatted cardboard square. “Do you eat meat?”

He looks at me, expectant, his hand still on my back. I think of the sad, shrink-wrapped, preservative-laden deli cuts of turkey in my fridge, my resignation at their existence, and in the cold sunshine, with Evan’s eyes on mine, I say, “No, I don’t. I’m a vegetarian.”

He turns to the gyro guy. “Two veggie gyros and the extralarge bag of potato chips.”

After the guy grills up our sandwiches and Evan pays, we go to sit on the low concrete wall around the courtyard.

He hands me a hot pita wrapped around a dripping mess of grilled vegetables and feta cheese, and I’m not sure how to go about it.

“You just have to dig in like an animal.” He leans forward and peels back the foil and takes this huge bite, letting the juice and grease drip on the ground.

I laugh but copy him. It’s so delicious I could die. I can’t remember the last time I’ve eaten outside, the last time I’ve eaten something that wasn’t a turkey sandwich or a bowl of cereal.

It’s perfect.

The freezing cold wind and the bright sun and the blazing-hot sandwich and Evan’s hip alongside mine on the wall, all perfect. We eat like children eat, fast and unself-consciously, ignoring the napkins piled on our knees.

I ball up the foil, and Evan takes it from me to lob into the big trash can, then leans back and opens the potato chips, tipping the bag toward me first.

“Thanks,” I say, taking a handful.

It’s kind of an all-inclusive thank-you. “Of course.”

“I’m sorry about all the other times.” But I wince, because this feels like the very last moment on earth for an apology, and his solid hip pressed against mine is messing me up, reminding me so keenly that I’m a human, with a human body and human feelings, that it’s like I need to get out all the feelings between me and Evan at the same time.

His eyebrows smash together again as he looks out over the courtyard.

“You don’t need to apologize for anything, Jenny.”

He said my name. That makes everything worse. When you’re lonely and afraid, it can be almost terrifying to be well fed and treated kindly and
acknowledged
by another human being.

Because, what if you find that you
need
all that food and kindness and acknowledgment?

Particularly if you might, maybe, need food and kindness and acknowledgment from someone like Evan, whose messy hair and crinkles and absurdly long arms and firm hip are growing on me.

“Just the same,” I try, choking the impulse to put my arms around him and melt into his neck and ask him to rub my hair, “I’ve been stupid.”

He just keeps looking across the courtyard, like something was going to sprout out of the middle of it any minute, and shakes his head. “No.”

“No?”

“I think it’s probably impossible for you to be stupid.”

“Why?” I blurt, but before I can tell him that never mind, seriously, I’m not fishing for compliments, he throws his handful of potato chips behind the wall and turns his body fully toward me.

“Do you know what I wrote in my notes, the very first meeting we had?”

I think of how I had sat, slouched in my chair and refusing to look at him when he did my intake. “I probably deserve to know.”

He leans over and tips his head so I am looking into his eyes. The winter light shines through his blue irises and makes them look silvery. His cheeks are flushed. “You
do
deserve to know. I wrote,
fiercely intelligent
. It was the very first thing that I wrote, right at the top of your chart notes. Basically, the exact opposite of stupid. I knew you
were angry, sad, but what I noticed, what was noticeable over absolutely everything else, was how goddamned smart you are. I thought about you the entirety of the week after our intake and before your first visit. I wasn’t sure, actually, that I would be up to giving you anything you needed, that I had the skills or the smarts to match you.”

I think I make a noise, of absolute protest, or embarrassed distress, but Evan just leans in closer and puts his index finger on my elbow, so I can feel the points he’s making, a little press with every word he says.

“I knew I was going to fuck it up for a while, is what I’m saying. I knew I would have to follow your lead. You’re not”—he tips his head up and looks at the sky, shaking his head—“you’re not stupid. I’m learning, too. I’m not ahead of you, you’re ahead of me.”

“The blind leading the blind,” I say, before I think better of it.

He laughs. “Maybe. But that’s the other thing. Right now, today, you’re not blind, whatever that means. You have a limited field of vision, you have vision differences, but all those brains, God, you showed us today that you’ll never, ever fail to
see
.”

And now I can’t look at him. I can’t.

Because I still won’t cry in front of Evan.

I grab the potato chips, instead, and then reach in for a big handful, and they are the most delicious potato chips in all the world. We eat all of them.

I crank the heat as soon as I get home from therapy with Evan. The wind hasn’t died down, and I think the snow has picked up, but it’s hard to tell when it’s so windy. It’s two buses from my place to the huge medical center, and I almost fell asleep in the second one.

The one-block walk from the stop to home wakes me up, but my muscles feel stuporous and heavy and my eyes are gritty—from the wind and from the crying I didn’t do, probably.

More good tears than sad ones, though.

My brain is worked up, however, buzzing, from the session with Evan. From our lunch in the courtyard.

What he said.

How he looked at me, like I was going to get this, all of it.

As we ran through his exercise a few more times before we ate, I couldn’t perfectly capture that first epiphany but it was all still so good, that feeling of turning a theory on its head with observable
evidence
—like yeah, I “know” my other four senses are effective in gathering information about my environment, maybe even as effective as the one that’s limited, but there’s such a universe in that half turn from “know” to evidence.