Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight) (23 page)

I love grilled cheese. I love fries. “Which, that sounds awesome, and I was just thinking that I was starving, but I didn’t know you made house calls? Office calls?”

I am hoping he will explain himself before I give up and ask him if he wants to make out, because while I ask my question he starts shrugging out of his coat and I don’t think he must work today because he’s wearing an old breast-cancer-research 10K T-shirt, and it’s neon pink, which isn’t the problem, the problem is that this T-shirt is too small. And it rides up, away from his hips and then I’m seeing skin, and the only skin I usually see as a single person is my own, especially in the winter, when the whole world is bundled up against casual leering except for noses and cheeks.

It’s this deprivation that accounts for making-out thoughts, for belly-licking thoughts, for pink-T-shirt-removal thoughts.

I’m positive.

“I don’t usually make house calls, no.”

His talking reminds me to look at the face part, not the tiny-bit-nude part. He has a nice face.

Nice arms, too, honestly. I mean, sure they’re still ridiculously long, he’s nearly a gibbon, but the shoulder part is rounded in this really good sort of way, and he has biceps, of course he does, because that’s just an arm part, but his are kind of strong-looking without looking like all he thinks about are his biceps.

And there’s that part, a part I’ve always loved on guys, that hairless dipping-in place between his biceps and triceps that looks sort of vulnerable but also like a good place to put your mouth.

He has that place, and it is a very nice version of that place if my compulsion to bite it is any indication.

I somehow find my way to his face again though it is almost impossible, the way he is boneless and practically naked in my office chair with his obscene T-shirt and scandalous jeans and titillating Asics running shoes with green paint splattered on them.

I am worried for myself and this crush so obviously sourced from transference and deprivation that has my imagination straddling Evan the occupational therapist and sucking into my greedy mouth the skin resting over the hollow of his throat while his gibbon arms are wrapped all the way around me and I’m running my fingers through his messy hair.

He is almost smiling at me and I worry a little about his freaky mind-reading ability.

“So if you don’t make house calls, I’m kind of back to wondering why you’re here?”

“I’m actually off work for a few days and to be honest, bringing you lunch was a little impulsive.”

Okay. That makes me blush. I have no choice but to ignore my blushing. “I have this effect on people, they eat with me once and then can never eat without me again. Also, they tend to pay for my meals.”

“Noted.”

With that, we just looked at each other in a way that was starting to become a habit, and then I can’t ignore the blushing. I can’t ignore his teeny tiny T-shirt. I can’t ignore his one-sided almost smile or his methylene blue eyes. I can’t ignore his pretty shoulders or his arms. I can’t ignore his big hands, his shoulder-blade-spanning hands, the way the tendons in them lock to every knuckle and speculate on things like capability and dexterity and, of course, the scar over those knuckles on his left hand that I’ve noticed before, and its reminder that he has a life and has been hurt in it.

“Evan?” Why is he so comfortable with these moments between us?

Have I really gotten so depressed that I don’t understand the meaning of these long looks, of how his hand wrapped around the nape of my neck?

Not understanding why a man like this touches and looks at me the way he does seems like a loss approaching the loss of my vision.

I mean this, and vision is my whole world.

“Evan?” I ask again, and I think it sounds different, I think he must know that I am asking him to explain to me where this shift has occurred, what we’ve drifted toward. “I think we should talk, too.” His voice is rough, and he looks down briefly at his hands.

I close my eyes, because okay, yes. What I know about Evan is that he will put his shoulder against the hard conversation. “About my goals for therapy?”

His eyebrows steeple together, and he sighs. Actually
sighs
, and it sounds frustrated. “No. Is that what you want to talk about? What you think we
should
talk about?”

I can’t believe it, but suddenly I am overcome with an impulse a little bigger than
the one that would have my hands under Evan’s T-shirt.

“Yeah.” I look at him, and I think about all the stuff he tried to get me to do before the exercise in the lobby and how I refused to do it and about those three blocks between me and the corner store and the gross turkey in my fridge and the bus route without transfers.

If I could ever get this guy to kiss me, is the thing, who would he be kissing? I’ve never doubted myself before.

I knew who I was, and everyone else did, too. I looked for the world around me in everything that I saw.

I looked for the world even as a young woman. I looked and I fought for the world one fucking cell at a time, and just when I thought I’d learned everything I wanted to, the whole world would change again.

When I just didn’t know, when no matter how I looked I was left in the dark, it would be Christmas again.

The lights shining and as high up as we could hang them.

I don’t want him to kiss a sad-sack microbiologist who takes one bus and has given up vegetarianism because she’s afraid to go to the good grocery store and sits in the dark at night passing notes with a stranger and needs her mom to talk her asleep.

I want him to kiss Christmas Jenny.

I want him to kiss the Jenny who’s cleared up all the fights and misunderstanding with herself, and will have love, for a whole year.

I want him to kiss the Jenny who has figured out how to collect all this new data on her new life where the equipment’s changed.

I want him to kiss the Jenny who’s remembered that even if everything looks different, it doesn’t mean what she sees isn’t good data.

I’m a scientist, I don’t know enough, right now, to make a theory.

All those nights I’ve sat alone in my place, afraid of the dark, there was probably all kinds of stuff I could have been seeing and understanding and I didn’t fucking
look
.

I am not a bad scientist.

I want him to kiss Jenny, who is a motherfucking-awesome microbiologist and is learning to drive again so she can go to museums on the weekends and the farmer’s market and lives her very own life, not the life I think retinitis pigmentosa is telling me I’m supposed to live.

And actually, retinitis pigmentosa never told me anything at all about how it was I was supposed to
live
.

Come to think of it, I’m not sure it’s told me how I’m supposed to
see
, either.

I won’t sit in the dark and wait for the whole goddamned world to spin around the sun to bring the light back.

I’ll hang up my own lights and they’ll burn with joy and discovery.

I can learn to see however I want to.

“Yeah,” I say again, “I want to talk about my goals for therapy.” I pull open my desk drawer and grab the voice-recognition-software CD he gave me weeks ago. “Let’s start with this. We’ll eat grilled cheese and french fries and you’ll put this on my computer and show me how to use it.”

I hold out the CD to him, and he takes it, slowly.

“You kissed me,” he says, and he looks right into my eyes and there are places along his cheekbones I watch get almost as pink as his shirt.

“You kissed me.”

“Yes.”

“Right here,” I put my finger on my forehead, at my hairline.

“Right here,” he says, and touches his cheek. “And here,” he says, and drags his finger to that spot just a little east of his mouth.

“I’m just saying.” I take a deep breath. Then another. “Until it’s right here”—and then I put my finger on my mouth, in the middle of my bottom lip, and I watch his eyes sink to that spot—“I’d like you to help me with this stuff. Also, this is your fault for showing me how much therapy could help me.”

Our eyes meet again, and his have gone dark. He’s fixing his eyes, I can tell, so he won’t look at my mouth.

So I look at his, and remember how it felt along my hair, how his hand held me to him.

“Okay?” I whisper. “Please help. I’m ready.”

He squeezes his eyes shut. “Yeah, okay. Of course.” He slides his chair forward, next to mine, and reaches in to insert the CD. His head is alongside mine, his body, like when we were in the lab.

I hear him take a deep breath. “Jenny?”

“Yeah?”

“We still have to talk about this other thing.”

I turn my head, and we’re close enough to end this.

We could really get into the kind of horny, rubbing, hot kiss that happens after you’ve not kissed for way too long.

I could feel his breath on my face, and something about that is painful and unbearable and makes me sore between my legs, but I want to choose myself more than I want to kiss Evan at this moment.

And in this moment, I want to kiss Evan more than I’ve wanted anything in a long time.

But I want myself the most.

I keep my eyes on his, the tension so hot and sweet I have to fist my hands to resist it. “Let’s talk about the other thing when it’s me, really me, that you’re talking to.”

“Okay.” He says this on a breath, hardly speaks at all, but then he turns away and takes my mouse and starts opening the new application.

“Can we eat, too?”

* * *

“Jen-nee R-eye-t iz fuh-rum See-at-tul.”

Jay knee right is fulcrum sea cattle
.

“Shit,” Evan says, reaching over me to fiddle with something while I laugh, again, so hard my face is starting to hurt.

“Wait, wait, lemme say something else,” I gasp, and hold my stomach so that I can suppress my giggling.

“Eh-ven iz vuh-ary fer-us-tray-ted.”

A van fairy for us traded
.

I burst into helpless laughter again, partly at how Evan puts his fist over his mouth and makes the basset-hound wrinkles and shakes his head. “Oh! Change the computer voice to the British one again, too, and let me try to read from this paper I’m editing.”

“No, no. This isn’t working. I need to get a better version for the kind of stuff you’re going to need it to do
—fuck
.” He forcefully ejects the CD and leans back in his chair, chucking the CD into the trash.

“Hey, I was playing with that.”

“It’s not going to work for you.” He leans his head back, his throat’s exposed, his T-shirt’s riding up again, and that’s the hotness, but also, this is the first time I’ve ever seen him really frustrated, or kind of angry.

It’s a little sweet, if you ignore that he’s indulging in man pain on my behalf, and I’m just fine.

“So we’ll try another version. Rome wasn’t built in a day and all that.”

“But this is
your
Rome.” He says this to the ceiling.

“Okay.”

“So it needs to get built faster.”

He rubs one of his hands in circles over his heart, and it bunches up his T-shirt even more and, God help me, I see his belly button.

Seeing someone’s belly button is like being next door to seeing them naked. I don’t know why. It just is. “So do you run?”

He leans up to look at me. “I do. Why do you ask?”

“Your shirt?” The pink shirt that will feature in all of my brand-new fantasies.

He looks down as if to remind himself that he’s half-undressed in my office. “Oh yeah. This run was a couple of years ago.”

“Did you run it for someone?” My friend Neil ran a lot of prostate-cancer races for his dad, and I always liked to watch the races and see the names of people the runners loved and were running for.

“My mom.”

I just wait because the way he said that makes my gut sink.

“It was the last race she watched me run. She had recently made the decision to discontinue treatment. I was so angry about that, I wanted her to keep fighting, she was still so young, and I knew it had been awful, but I just couldn’t hear her. I had this really fucked-up fight with her about it, punched the wall, and I’d never punched a wall.” He rubs his left hand absently and I think
his scar
.

It’s one of those kissable scars, then. One of those you want to kiss and make it better even after everything’s all healed up.

“I ran the race to try to convince her to start up treatment again. I thought that seeing all the runners, runners she’d met over the years, the family members and the survivors, would remind her to fight. She cheered, just like usual. She mingled at the big
party afterward, even though I knew she was tired. Sometime at the end of that race I figured out that she wasn’t getting inspired to fight, she was saying
good-bye
to the fight. To her friends. To the others who had fought alongside her.”

“To you?”

“Yeah, to me. To the part of me that needed her to stay with me forever just because she was my mom and that’s what she’s supposed to do. Even if she couldn’t fight for herself anymore, she was supposed to fight
for me
.”

I lean over and grab his hand. The wall-punching one. I count the little white dots where the suture knots were. “Eleven stitches.”

“Thirteen, actually.”

“I guess the wall won.”

He breathes out something like a laugh. “I guess so.”

I put my face against his hand, and he lets me, lets me hold his hand up, his scarred knuckles against my lips. Then I kiss his knuckles, and he makes a fist into my palm where I am holding his hand, so I kiss the scar again.

I look at him, watching me, and put my finger on his knuckles. “Right here, twice.”

“Jenny …” he starts.

“Is that why you keep trying with me?” I interrupt, my heart beating around in a knotted tangle of feelings. “Because you want me to fight?”

He looks at me for what seems like a really long time. “Yes. I want you to fight. Maybe I want you to fight, some, for me. So I can see that I can inspire someone to. Especially someone as great as you are. I know we’re not talking about this, but we have to talk about it, even if we don’t talk about it, how I feel means I have to do the right thing and let you fight with someone else.” He lets me take that in, take in how hard this is for him, too.