In The Light of Destiny

Simple is Harder

The smile stayed on her face longer than she meant to let it. She turned back to the water before he could see the full measure of it, but the warmth of it remained settled somewhere just beneath her sternum, quiet and persistent, like an ember that had decided it wasn't going anywhere.

The sun was continuing its slow descent toward the horizon, painting the water in colors that had no real names, only feelings. Rose and amber and the particular deep gold that appears in the last minutes before everything shifts to blue.

She was aware of him beside her in the way you become aware of someone when your body decides, without consulting you, that their proximity matters.

The warmth of his arm near hers without touching. The measured rhythm of his breathing. The way he occupied his space without crowding her present but not pressing, attentive without being demanding. She had been around enough men in this city, in this industry, to know how rare that particular combination was.

"I think I've found my new favorite hideaway place," she said, because the silence had become the comfortable kind and she wanted to stay inside it a little longer without letting it become something weighted. She looked out at the last of the light on the water. "It's really peaceful here."

"I like it," he agreed. His voice had the same quality it had carried all afternoon: unhurried, sincere, stripped of the professional veneer she had been half-expecting from the man whose name appeared at the top of industry conversations. He glanced at her.

"Can I ask you something, Emma?"

"Yes," she said. Then, because the afternoon had made her comfortable enough for honesty: "If I can't answer it, don't blame me."

He laughed at a real one, short and warm, and the sound of it did something to the air between them that she chose not to examine too carefully. "It'll be an easy question," he said.

She raised an eyebrow. "Those are always the ones that aren't."

He smiled at that. He looked at the water for a moment before he turned slightly in his chair to face her, his forearms resting on his knees, his green eyes catching the last of the evening light. "What kind of man do you like?" he asked.

The question was simple in its construction and enormous in every other way. She had been asked versions of it before, usually at bars, usually by men who were already halfway to the answer they wanted her to give, who asked it as a formality before telling her who they were and expecting her to adjust accordingly. This felt different. He asked it the way someone asks a question they actually want to know the answer to, without preloading it with expectation, without already having his hand on the steering wheel of her response.

She looked out at the water. She thought about it honestly, the way you could only think about it honestly when you were sitting by the ocean at the end of a day that had been surprisingly good.

"I want a man who can love me with all his heart," she said at last. Her voice was quiet but steady, not the voice of someone performing vulnerability, but of someone who had thought about this long enough to know exactly what she meant. "Someone I can make a family with. A simple man, someone I feel safe with." She paused. "Someone who likes to take walks. Who will read books to me and let me read to them? She exhaled softly. "Someone who's present. Who's actually there when he's with me?" She turned to look at him. "That probably sounds very ordinary to someone like you."

He was watching her with an expression she couldn't entirely categorize as something attentive and warm and slightly arrested, as though she had said something that landed in a place he hadn't expected it to reach. "It doesn't sound ordinary at all," he said.

"It's simple."

"Simple isn't the same as ordinary." He held her gaze. "Simple is usually the hardest thing to find."

She looked at him for a moment. "I suppose it is," she said quietly.

He smiled that slow, one-sided thing that appeared on his face when he was genuinely amused rather than performing amusement.

"I think I might know someone who fits that description," he said.

She blinked. "You do?"

"I do." He nodded with great seriousness. "I'll introduce you later. But right now," he glanced toward the horizon, where the last light was fading into the deep blue threshold between day and evening. The temperature had dropped a degree or two, the beach wind picking up slightly as the sun went down. "I think I should get you home. It's getting late."

He stood on the beach chair and held out his hand. She looked at it for a moment at the warm, open offer of it and then placed her hand in his. His fingers closed around hers, and she felt the warmth of his palm immediately, solid and real, and her pulse made a small, involuntary comment about this that she did her best to ignore.

They walked back from the water's edge toward the restaurant and then to the car, their hands separating naturally as they reached the vehicle, the easy, unforced way of two people who had spent an afternoon becoming comfortable with each other without making a project of it. The drive back through the city was quiet but not empty; it was filled with the particular quality of two people who had run out of the need to fill silence, which is its own kind of intimacy.

She caught herself glancing at him twice on the highway. Once, when they passed under a streetlamp, the light moved across his face in a way that made his jaw look very defined and his eyes very green. Once, when he said something quiet and half-laughing about the traffic, she realized she had already recognized the particular shape his voice took when he was being self-deprecating.

Both times she looked away before he could catch her looking.

Both times she was fairly sure he had already caught her.

He pulled up outside the dormitory building and parked along the side, and she was already reaching for the door handle when she heard his door open. She paused. By the time she had gathered her bag from the foot-well, he had come around to her side of the car and was standing at her door, his hand extended.

She looked up at him through the open door with an expression that was half surprised and half something softer than that. He waited without impatience.