In The Light of Destiny

The Callback

She took his hand and stepped out of the car.

What happened next happened in the compressed, slow-motion way that accidents and beautiful things tend to happen too fast to prevent and too vivid to forget. Her foot came down at the wrong angle on the edge of the curb, her balance tipping forward before she could correct it, and she was falling not dramatically, not dangerously, but certainly and suddenly directly into his chest.

His arms came around her before she had finished falling.

For a moment, neither of them moved. She was held against his chest with both his arms around her, her own hands braced against the front of his shirt, her face tilted upward. She could feel his heartbeat steady and slightly faster than she expected. She could feel the warmth of him through the fabric of his shirt and the warmth of the evening air and the warmth that was coming from somewhere inside her own chest that had nothing to do with temperature.

"Thank you," she managed, which was the most composed thing she could find in the available inventory of words.

"You're welcome," he said. His voice was lower than it had been all afternoon, quieter, as though the distance between them had changed the register of everything. She could feel his breath, warm and even, and when she looked up at him his green eyes were very close and very direct and looking at her with no pretense at all.

She should have stepped back. She was aware of this as a logical fact. She was also aware that she was not stepping back, and that her hands had relaxed against his chest rather than using it as leverage to create distance.

He looked at her for a moment and stretched. She watched him make the decision not rashly, not impulsively, but the way someone does something they have been considering for longer than the moment suggests. He leaned down slowly, giving her every opportunity to turn away, and brushed his lips against hers.

It was gentle. It was the kind of kiss that asked a question rather than making a statement. Her eyes, which had gone wide with the first contact, fluttered closed as she felt the warmth of it move through her all the way to her fingertips. And then, because her body apparently had opinions she hadn't been fully consulted on, she kissed him back.

Not with urgency. Not with the desperate, grasping quality of something long denied. But with a warmth and a certainty that surprised her in its steadiness, like something she had known was coming without knowing she knew.

They pulled apart slowly. The space between them was still very small. He was looking at her with something in his expression that she had never seen directed at her before, something that was entirely without agenda, that was simply what it was.

"Wow," he said, barely beyond a whisper. The word seemed to have arrived without his planning it.

She smiled. It came up from somewhere deep and real and there was no way to stop it. "Yes," she said. "That was wow." She looked into his eyes, those quiet forest-green eyes that paid such complete attention, and for a moment the city and the dormitory and all the years of waiting and rejection fell entirely away, and there was just this: this corner of the world, this evening, this man looking at her like she was something worth finding.

She remembered herself, gradually, the way you remember a dream after being awake for a few minutes in pieces, gently.

"I was having a wonderful afternoon," she said. "I should tell you I got the third female lead. In Helpless Hands." She watched his face. "I'm working at the Brassica Agency now. With Mr. Jonas."

Something shifted in his expression. The warmth was still there, but something moved beneath it, a flicker of something more complicated. His eyes changed slightly. "With Mr. Jonas?" he said, and the way he said it carried a weight she hadn't expected.

"Yes." She kept her voice even. "You never called me back after the audition tape. I waited two weeks, Kylen." She raised an eyebrow not with heat, but with the particular composure of someone who had made a reasonable decision and was comfortable explaining it.

He looked slightly pained. He reached up and rubbed the back of his neck in a gesture that was so unguarded it was almost disarming the gesture of a man who had stopped performing and was simply being caught out. "We were going through a significant number of candidates for a male role this past month," he said. "The process ran much longer than it should have." He exhaled. "I should have called."

"You should have," she agreed. Simply. Without cruelty.

He looked at her. Something in his expression settled into respect. She had not made it a fight; she had simply stated a fact and let it be a fact. "I'm sorry," he said, and he meant it.

She nodded, accepting it. "Today helped," she said. "I have been so stressed out these past few weeks, and this," she gestured vaguely, at the general direction of the beach, the walk, the evening, the impossible beauty of all of it, "was exactly what I needed.

Thank you for that."

"You're welcome." He paused. "Do you think we could do this again? Dinner, next time a proper one, not just lunch." He looked at her with a nervousness that was completely at odds with everything else about him and entirely endearing for it. "If you'd like to."

She considered him for a moment. The man who had found her resume and called her out of the blue showed up on a Saturday and took her to the beach and listened to her and held her when she stumbled and kissed her without making it a conquest. The man with the forest-green eyes and the quiet way of occupying space and the unhurried manner that suggested he had decided she was worth his time.

"Yes," she said. "I would love to."

She leaned up and pressed a kiss to his cheek, brief and warm and deliberate. She felt him still. She stepped back and turned toward the building, her bag over her shoulder, her heels on the pavement, the evening air moving softly around her. At the door she turned back, because she couldn't entirely help it.

He was still standing beside the car, watching her go, with an expression on his face that she filed away in some interior place she would return to later, when she was alone and could look at it properly.

She gave him one last smile.

Then she went inside, and the door swung shut behind her, and she stood in the lobby of the dormitory for a full thirty seconds before she trusted her legs to take her up the stairs.