She humored him with a quick chuckle. “No, I’m not that volatile or reactionary anymore, thank goodness. But I suppose there’s a part of me that blames myself for the fact that I never got adopted. Before that, my life was one intense thing after another. My father’s suicide, my mom’s psychotic break, Child Protective Services getting involved. There’s this part of me that’s always wondered if I was some kind of cursed person from the get-go, flawed to the core, attracting bad things.”
“You aren’t flawed to the core. I think you’re wonderful. You endured a bout of bad luck and walked away from it with poise and strength. I admire your tenacity. You’re a fighter.”
“Yeah, well, it gets hard to believe you have worth when your mother is tying you up in the basement, shaving your head and doing exorcisms on you. And then you go to school with rope burns and no hair, and all of the teachers assume you’re a stupid girl acting out for attention. And then it gets worse. Yay you.” A shaky undercurrent jostled her hardened words.
Her hands shook as if her body was mirroring the cracking of fault lines beneath her rocky surface.
Brian sure could relate to such an aggressive effort to block pain, the act one enacts due to lack of trust, a skittish fear of others. He squeezed the arch of her foot and massaged the sole with his thumb. “I’m sorry that happened to you. Sounds awful, like something I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy. You deserved a stable life and a proper head start.”
With a definitive jerk, Helen pulled her foot out of his grip. His heart sank. What had he done?
“It’s fine. Ignore my self-pitying bullshit. The past is gone. Over. You find anything useful in that book?”
“I apologize. Did I hurt you? Touch you wrong?”
“No. I said it’s fine. Anything of value turn up in the big book of weird?”
Though Brian reeled from her retreat, he heeded her call to switch subjects and returned to reading pages full of various languages and eerie drawings. Avoiding difficult emotions by way of productivity was his forte, so he could respect Helen’s move.
Her apparent tendency to repress via labor also evidenced traits in common, albeit a sad alignment of broken pieces. Maybe he’d found the right woman at long last, someone whose cluster of pathologies mirrored his own.
A bizarre, unintended noise, steeped in a muddle of ironic amusement and childlike delight, sneaked out of Brian’s mouth.
She flipped her hair, shooting him a side-eye that betrayed the faintest flutter of vulnerability. “What the fuck was that, you swallow a whoopee cushion?”
He flinched, but not at the sound of her curse. She’d called him out, something he never experienced from the disingenuous flunkies who hung around the perimeter of his world.
“You remind me of myself sometimes is all.”
“Um, huh? I’m neither rich, nor famous, nor talented.”
“I meant your defense mechanisms. And of course you’re talented. I don’t see why you downplay your many positive traits with self-deprecation.”
“I feel so seen.” She fixed him in the crosshairs of her askance look. But now the corner of her mouth curved and a twinkle shone in her eye.
Moving a piece on his mental chessboard, Brian allowed a pause to linger. Just a few seconds, enough time for her to process the fact that he was thinking of her. “I do see you.”
The look passing between them drew intrigue, trepidation, and a hell of a lot of attraction into a strong field. Brian ran a single finger over the bottom of Helen’s foot, watching with delight as her sole curled like a caterpillar. He sucked his bottom lip. He’d love to make her toes curl from a different kind of stimulation.
“You’re a total player.” In one swift, fluid motion suited to a person gifted with superior balance and equilibrium, she scooped up her laptop and vaulted her body to sit beside him.
The teasing way she’d called him a player, combined with how she moved to get closer to him, betrayed the inviting nature of her retort.
Helen’s fragrance, smoky and floral, drifted from the lazy coils of her brown hair.
“Why would you call me that?” Though he tried to mask the sultry ache in his inflection with a cloak of neutrality, his speech insisted on coming out all low and rumbling.
She quirked her lips like she knew where treasure was hidden. He longed to see the riches inside her guarded, compelling mind as much as he craved the sight of her sexy body naked.
“You’re disarming. I’m sure you have quite the effect on women.”
“Do I have an effect on you?”
“Casting aspersions on you asking a question you already know the answer to, ego man.”
Helen pretended to read a webpage, scrolling down a wall of text though the waxy gloss over her eyes unveiled disinterest in the content. But her body heat, and the instinctual way she angled herself toward him, radiated sexual chemistry.
Brian neglected his sexual and emotional needs, sure, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t read women. “Is that why you kissed me? To cast your aspersions?”
One of her shoulders bent, the gesture an overblown attempt to convey nonchalance. “I kissed you because I’m attracted to you.”
The harder he worked to assemble her behaviors into some semblance of a coherent whole, the more insecurity emerged in the big picture of Helen. And he didn’t blame her, after surviving severe neglect and navigating the emotional wasteland.
She slackened beside him but still pretended to read.
The woman dared him to get close to her, offering tiny concessions. It struck Brian that, perhaps, she lacked the lexicon of social skills or vocabulary required to approach him with authentic assertiveness. Yet she’d been so assertive at the fair.
Which factors pushed her in one direction or the other, swung her pendulum to
