Like knotted string, unspoken desire complicates what is simple.
They walk along, keep pace, looking at the streets of a new city. She laughs, looking at his face, holding onto his arm. It’s cold so their clinging makes sense
Catching his intent stare earlier in the day, she dared to ask, “What do you see?”
“A minefield” was his answer.
They attended sessions together, sat next to one another, wrote in the margins of one another’s notebooks.
As they walked, hip against hip, insulated by winter coats and their own respective relationships at home, she looked at him every few minutes with her broad, red-lipsticked, open-mouthed smile; she was telling him a funny story about a colleague who got so smashed at the Tennyson Society cash bar last year that he started reciting “In Memoriam” in its entirety. She was pleased with her own narrative (she would have called it “narrative” and not “story”) and so was he.
He tasted her delight and he liked it.
“It’s too chilly to walk anymore” he said, and she nodded in agreement. When his arm shot up to hail a cab and one stopped as if on cue, he felt as if he had proven something significant.
They got into the taxi. She put her arm around his strong back, narrow waist, so maybe in fact something had been declared. He paid for the cab despite her protest and said she could pick up the tab for their next ride. “This is not our ‘Last Ride Together,’” he murmured and the inside joke which, had it been made by a man with a larger waist might not have amused her, endeared him to her even further.
They stopped before they reached the party full of waiting people, turned to each other and held on. He touched her hair for a moment.
She wanted to hold him but it was impossible. She wanted him to kiss her but it was not right.
It was too soon, too dangerous, too close.
