Weekly Writing – November 30 2024

“My apologies,” the guest repeated. “I would not want to compromise such loyalty as you seem to have to her, of course.”
Yet he still looked at her that way. As he had since the start – what did he see? What did he want from her? It would have been easier, so much less frightening, to just sweep dust. But…
“Perhaps I was wrong,” he said, suddenly enough to swat that thought from her mind. “To stay for the night is not such an imposition. Though I think I have exhausted my appetite for storytelling. Would you be willing to keep me company a while longer nonetheless?”
What else was there to do but dust and fear disobedience? His clothes still smelled of rain and the mountainside, and he looked at her strangely, yes, but so few looked at her at all. While she was there and didn’t know what would happen next, she was alive in a way she might never be again after that night.
“I would,” she decided. She herself, and that alone made it worth staying.
He nodded as if he, too, had made a decision, and stood from his chair. He loomed too much over her that way, and she pushed herself up from the bed to match him as best she could, though closer, far closer to him than that simple motion felt as if it should have carried her.
He still looked at her as if she were a puzzle he hadn’t quite solved yet. He touched her arm the way she might have lifted something particularly delicate from the mantle, and her heart seemed to tumble from whatever grip she had on it. This was something for paintings again, for books and other people. He didn’t even look at her the way those painted people looked at each other.
But if her life was going to become small and perfectly understood again in the morning, she would spend that night making it just as large as she could. Maybe he wouldn’t even have kissed her – maybe he would have apologized again and pulled away – but, pulled by a boldness she might have to treasure for decades as the only chance she’d ever had to be herself, she stretched up on her tiptoes to kiss him first.