Don't
The thing about Uncle Caden is that he never looks at me the way other men do.
Other men look too fast, too obvious, like they want you to catch them doing it. Caden looks like he's trying not to. Like every time his eyes land on me he's already in the middle of pulling them away. I noticed it when I was nineteen and told myself I was imagining things. I was still telling myself that at twenty-two, standing in my aunt's living room in a dress I'd grabbed off the sale rack, three glasses of wine into my cousin Dana's graduation party.
I wasn't imagining things.
The party was loud. My uncle Mike had the speakers going in the backyard and half my cousins were out there, but I'd stayed inside because my feet hurt and I didn't have the energy to perform happiness for a crowd. I'd had a rough week at work, my manager had corrected me in front of the whole team and I'd spent three days replaying it, so I stood near the drinks table, refilled my cup, and watched the room like a person who was completely fine.
That's when I tripped.
Not a small, graceful stumble. I caught my heel on the edge of the rug near the hallway and went forward fast and hard, the kind of fall where you already know before it's finished that it's going to be bad.
I didn't hit the floor.
His hand caught my waist first. His other arm came across my front and I was pressed against him , my face against his neck, his grip tight and sudden and completely still. Like catching me had cost him nothing. Like he'd been ready.
I laughed. That was my first instinct, to make it small and funny, to say oh god sorry, too much wine, the way you do when you want everyone to move past something embarrassing. I started to pull back.
He didn't let go.
Three seconds. Maybe less. But I felt every single one of them. His hand on my waist. My palm flat against his chest where I'd grabbed him. The party carrying on around us like nothing was happening, because to everyone else nothing was. I felt his breath against my hair. I felt him go completely still.
Then he let go.
I stepped back, smoothed my dress, said something about the rug being a hazard. He said nothing. He looked at me for just a second, something crossing his face that I couldn't name it, and then he turned away.
For the rest of the night he didn't look at me once.
I know because I was watching and I kept checking across the room when he was with my dad, through the back door when he was laughing with Mike, at the drinks table when he came to refill his glass and I was standing right there and he said excuse me like I was a stranger and walked away. I stood holding my cup and feeling something I had absolutely no business feeling.
By ten o'clock I'd almost convinced myself it meant nothing. He was tired, maybe. Distracted. Caden was always a little inside his own head, always slightly apart from the noise of the family. That was just who he was.
Then everyone started leaving.
My mom was in the kitchen. My dad was outside with Mike. The living room cleared out and when I came back from carrying cups to the kitchen, Caden was standing there alone , jacket on, keys in his hand, about to go.
I should have said goodnight and let him leave.
Instead I said, "Are you angry with me?"
He stopped. Turned around slowly. And looked at me the way he never looks at me , straight on, full, nothing held back. His jaw was tight. There was something in his expression I still don't have a word for. Whatever it was, it wasn't anger.
"No," he said.
"You've been avoiding me all night."
"I've been talking to people."
"Everyone except me."
He didn't answer that. The silence went long enough that I started to feel stupid. I was about to take it back, wave it off, say goodnight , and then he said my name.
Just my name. Nothing attached to it.
"Mara."
I waited. My heart was doing something I'd have to deal with later.
He opened his mouth. Closed it. His hand tightened around his keys. Whatever he'd been about to say, he pulled it back. Swallowed it whole.
"Goodnight," he said.
He walked out. The front door closed. I stood in the middle of the living room and didn't move for a long moment.
I lay in the guest room that night staring at the ceiling, replaying those three seconds over and over. The way he'd held on. The look on his face. The way he'd said my name like it was the beginning of a sentence he decided not to finish.
I told myself I was reading into nothing. That this was what happened when you spent three years paying too much attention to one person.
Then, at two in the morning, my phone lit up.
A text from Caden.
Four words: "Are you still up?"
I stared at the screen. Every sensible thought I had told me to put the phone down.
My thumbs typed before I could stop them: "Yes."
The three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. Then nothing. I lay there in the dark holding my phone, watching a screen that stayed silent, thinking about a man one floor above me who had picked up his phone at two in the morning, typed those four words, watched me answer, and then decided not to say whatever came next.
