Say Uncle

Gravity

I made plans on Thursday evening.

Not real plans, I told Jade I might be free, which wasn't a plan, it was an option, and I did not cancel it because there was nothing to cancel. I just didn't make any other plans. I kept Thursday evening open the way you keep a window open on a warm day, not expecting anything particular to come through it, just leaving the possibility.

He texted at four in the afternoon.

"Dinner. There's a place near you. I'll pick you up at seven."

It wasn't a question. I noticed that. Not: are you free, do you want to, would you like to. Just dinner, seven, I'll pick you up. The same way he did everything, like he'd already decided and was telling me the outcome.

I should have pushed back on that.

I typed back: "Okay."

He arrived at two minutes to seven. I know because I'd been watching the window from across the room, pretending to read, and I saw his car pull up. I gave it a full two minutes before I went downstairs because I was twenty-two years old and I had some dignity left.

Not much, but some.

He was leaning against the car when I came out. Dark jacket, hands in his pockets, looking at his phone. He looked up when he heard the door, and his expression flickered; it was fast, there and gone, the kind of look a person doesn't know they're giving.

"You cut your hair," he said.

"Two weeks ago."

"It suits you."

He opened the passenger door. I got in. He went around the other side and got in and we pulled out into the street and the car was quiet except for the low music he had on, something without words, and I sat with my hands in my lap and tried to remember how to be a normal person.

The restaurant was small. The kind of place that didn't need to try hard because the food did all the work , low lighting, close tables, a menu written on a chalkboard. He'd clearly been before. The woman at the front knew him, smiled at him with that particular warmth people have for regulars, and led us to a table in the back corner.

Private and Quiet.

I noted that.

We talked. That was the thing about Caden , we always talked easily. It wasn't a performing kind of conversation you have when you're nervous and trying to seem interesting. The real kind. He told me about London, the project, a terrible meeting he'd sat through in week three that he'd been saving to tell someone. I told him about work, about a small win I'd had with a client that my manager had actually acknowledged in front of the team. He listened the way he always listened, like what I was saying mattered before I'd finished saying it.

Halfway through the meal I realized I'd stopped being nervous.

That was the most dangerous thing about him. He made it so easy. Sitting across from him in that corner table with the low light and the good food and the conversation that went wherever it wanted, I could almost forget what this was. Almost forget that we were at a restaurant alone in a back corner and nobody in our family knew we were here and the reason we were here was a thing neither of us had said out loud.

Almost.

"You didn't answer my question," he said.

I looked up from my food. "Which one?"

"What you were thinking about. When you said you'd been thinking too much."

I put my fork down. He was looking at me steadily, the way he did when he wasn't going to let something go. Patient and unhurried. Like he had all night and intended to use it.

"Caden."

"Mara."

I almost smiled. "You're not going to let that go."

"No."

I looked at the table. Then back at him. "You know what I was thinking about."

He didn't answer that. He just held my gaze and waited.

"Don't make me say it," I said.

"I'm not making you do anything."

"You're just sitting there waiting."

"Yes."

I exhaled. Picked up my water glass just to have something to do with my hands. He watched me do it.

"You," I said, finally. "I was thinking about you. You already knew that."

He was quiet for a moment. For a split second, something flickered behind his eyes. He wasn't surprised. If anything, he looked like a man who had been carrying a heavy burden for a long time and had just been given permission to set it down for a minute.

"Yeah," he said quietly. "I knew."

We finished dinner. He paid before I could look at the bill. We walked out into the night air and down the block toward where he'd parked and the street was quiet and our shoulders were close enough that they brushed twice and neither of us moved apart.

Outside my building, he stopped walking.

I turned to face him. He was looking at me the way he had in my aunt's living room, straight on, nothing pulled back. But different now, he was more settled like something had been decided.

He reached up slowly and pushed my hair back off my face. Just that. His thumb grazed my jaw on the way back down, and he let his hand drop.

"Goodnight, Mara," he said.

He stepped back. Got in his car. Drove away.

I went upstairs and sat on the edge of my bed and pressed my fingers against my jaw where his thumb had been.

My phone buzzed. A text from Caden: "Same time next week." It wasn't a question, and it is never a question.