It wasn’t unlike the Art Institute, which made sense. She understood why Aldo opted to surround himself with it. It was like bathing in opulence, only colder, stiff with authority. Churches were their own kinds of museums—with their devotion to ritual, at least, if not to God—and to exist inside of one was to dwarf oneself with inequity.
She understood the compulsion to seek out more space. To lessen to a speck of nothingness.
Aldo picked a pew somewhere in the middle, gesturing her in first and genuflecting before he sat. It looked like a motion he performed out of habit rather than deference. She’d noticed he had a different set of expressions for thinking and for routine, and this one came with a notable blankness.
She wondered what he looked like when he did other things; when he taught, for example, which her cursory Google search had indicated he did without much devotion. She wondered how he looked when he slept; when he dreamt; when he came.
She shook herself, shuddering a little.
“Cold?” Aldo asked.
Something like that. “It’s very … austere, isn’t it?”
“That’s a cold word,” he noted with half a smile. “And yes, it is. I find it sort of refreshing.”
He leaned forward, picking up one of the paperback missals from the chair in front of him. He wore no jewelry, she observed. He was notably unornamented. He didn’t bite his nails （Regan did, sort of, but painted them regularly to keep herself from it）。 Instead, Aldo’s fingernails were neatly trimmed, possibly even filed in addition to clipped. They contained those little pale half-moons she rarely saw on her own fingers. He smoothed his hand over the cover of the book, setting it squarely on his lap, and promptly commenced his fidgeting.
He fidgeted a very specific way. It wasn’t knee-jiggling. It was closest to a finger-tapping, though it transitioned very quickly to what Regan thought at first was aimless drawing but then realized was purposeful writing. Scrawling, actually, in numbers. Math equations? Probably. He moved with a sequential rhythm from tapping to drawing to scribbling. She nearly missed it when they were supposed to stand, occupied as she was with her attempts to translate his motions.
Mass was familiar, the words and refrains all the same. The psalm that day was about wings; Catholicism yearned for flight as much as it championed a healthy sense of fear. The institution was particularly human that way.
At some point during the homily, Regan returned her attention to Aldo, who was definitely thinking now. His lips were a different shape when he was considering something, almost as if he were on the brink of mouthing it aloud to himself. His fingers fluttered, then stilled for a moment, and then returned to drawing. A hexagon, she noted. He drew the same shape, over and over, and then paused.
He turned his head, looking at her.
Caught, she registered with a grimace.
His mouth quirked up with a question, accompanied by a furrow of his brow. All the energy he’d expended on whatever problem he’d been solving transferred to her, and she felt the impact of it like a blow, landing squarely in her chest. She tried to think what it was that made his mouth so appealing and couldn’t.
She reached out, tentatively, and every inch of him went still.
He was skittish, she realized, half-charmed, and she considered retracting her hand, only she’d never been the ease-in sort of person. Instead she rested her fingers on his knuckles, briefly, and lifted his hand to transfer his palm from his left thigh to her right. Not in a sexual way, in her opinion. There was a certain area of space she considered utilitarian, and though Aldo had gone slightly rigid with uncertainty, she made a gesture she thought he’d recognize: Continue, she beckoned, and he frowned at her for a moment, then nodded.
He drew a hexagon carefully against the fabric of her skirt. Beneath his touch, she felt her skin pebble, a little chill settling around the cage of her ribs. She nodded again, dismissing it.
Then Aldo started writing numbers; she recognized the shape of the number two, then a five （he crossed the bridge of it at the end）， then eventually recognized the letter z. He was one of those people who drew a horizontal line through his letters and numbers. He drew something like a sigma, more scribbles, then a broad horizontal line. He was definitely doing math, and she reveled in her possession of it; in being the instrument to channel his thoughts.
Then the shape of his formulas changed, his energy shifting along with it. He was drawing faster now, as if he’d caught onto something. She could see that his hesitation had faded; he was no longer concerned with the fact that he was touching her, which she wasn’t sure whether to find exciting or insulting. The flame of his thoughts picked up and she rapidly lost track of what he was writing. Every now and then, she caught a number. A triangle. Once or twice she felt certain he’d drawn a question mark, as if reminding himself to come back later, only he wouldn’t come back later. The medium of her skin—of her limb, in fact, which she was holding uncharacteristically still, not wanting to disrupt him—would likely not be there when he came back to it. His touch was quick and light. It fluttered over her and she fought the urge to grab his hand, to place it somewhere else that would benefit from this degree of frenetic concentration. Either it was cold in the church or something else had made her keenly aware of the warmth radiating from his touch.