Regan slid closer to him, propping her head up to look at him.
“I haven’t done it in a while,” he said. Dancing, he meant.
“Well, you’re good. Very good.”
Her fingers stretched out tentatively, finding the marks that State Street had left across his shoulders. The glow from the window illuminated pieces of their silhouettes, her right side and his left. With the way moonlight fell over them it seemed to him that they were each one half of a person, divided in two, each fraction left to be the other’s reflection. He felt the echoes of her touch unfurling in gooseflesh down his arms, his legs, spreading to the soles of his feet.
“I’m sorry,” Regan said. “About my parents.”
“Why?”
He saw only half of her tiny half-smile, a splintered crescent of amusement in the dark. “You didn’t notice? No, of course you didn’t,” she sighed. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Too late,” he noted, and her smile tightened to a grimace.
“Well, it’s no surprise they don’t like you,” she said. “They don’t get you, and besides, they don’t like anybody.” She slid her thumb over his clavicle. “They hate Marc, too. Just for different reasons.”
He had the distinct impression that she was drawing him, somewhere in her mind.
“Reasons like what?”
“Like, I don’t know.” She pulled away, her hand falling to the sheets, and he immediately regretted asking. “Marc’s, you know, the normal kind of intolerable. Loud, flashy, all that.”
“And I’m … abnormal?”
“Oh, extremely,” she said, and then laughed. “You’re the weirdest, Aldo.”
She said it so sweetly he almost thanked her.
Then, on second thought （third, technically）， he did. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” she replied, and rolled onto her back, closing her eyes. “Anyway, I’d say don’t take it personally, but I guess you never do.”
Not always, he wanted to say, but it was close enough to the truth that he didn’t argue. “I’m the one who should be sorry.”
That prompted one of her eyes to open. “What?”
“Well, you wanted me to make things easier for you,” he said, “and I didn’t.”
“That’s—” She sat up, bristling with a different energy now. One he couldn’t identify. “Don’t.”
He sat up, too, mirroring her. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t … think that. I don’t know.” She was agitated, shaking her head. “They’re the ones who are wrong, you know. And anyway, Madeline likes you.” She smoothed her hand over the comforter, seeming to want to repair the damage her unexpected friction had caused.
She implored him, silently, and he took a long look at her, just looking. He had drawn her eyes a few more times than he’d planned to by then, and he was pleased to see his estimations were correct, geometrically-speaking, if lacking in execution. Those eyes in real life were weapons, or possibly anti-weapons. They had kept her out of prison, he was sure of it. Wide-set and oversized and almond-shaped, little picture-boxes of innocence. Frames that made a mockery of everything concealed within.
“And me,” she said, so delayed he’d forgotten what they were talking about.
“And you what?”
“I like you.” She rubbed her cheek. “I mean,” she said, hurrying to obscure what she’d said with coquetry, “this is our seventh conversation, so that must mean something.”
“Does it?”
She was quiet for a moment, wrestling with the truths she reserved for herself. He sensed she needed a push, a nudge. A mirror-motion. He leaned towards her, pausing before they touched, and left room for the reverberations inside her to echo in him. He could feel it again, the buzzing she’d come into the room with vibrating there in that empty space, now occupied by the tremors of possibility. She could fill it with herself, she could shove him away, she could pull him closer. She could pry apart his ribs and leave him there, gutted, doe-eyes wide with, I didn’t think it’d be so wet.
He waited there, in the gruesome image of himself spilling crimson over her hands, seeping into the beds of her narrow fingernails and forever staining the sheets and the floors—and, if he were lucky, her conscience—when she matched the distance towards him that he’d already undertaken towards her. He could smell her hair, her skin, her lack of hesitation. The other half of her truths was a lie.