Intrusion Read online

  Now I have to explain, the way Ted had to explain.

  “I just saw you outside my window. You must have. . .I don’t know. Sleepwalked?” I nearly stop short of saying more. Only his expression—half-hidden and vaguely wounded—pushes me on. “Maybe you were disturbed. By the things I said the other day.”

  “I don’t have your dog.”

  “I know that now.”

  “I would never steal someone’s dog.”

  “I think I know that, too.”

  “And I’m not trying to do anything weird by being here. It just happens to me from time to time—I wake up in strange places, occasionally holding strange items. Once I found myself in a hospital talking to a doctor about a disease I don’t have. He thought I was completely conscious and lucid.”

  “Are you conscious and lucid now, or am I talking to the dream you?”

  It disturbs me a little that he has to think about this. I clearly see him doing it—eyes focused inward, shifting a little back and forth as he considers. But there is something not so awful about this disturbance. It isn’t the same as the kind I felt about Ted or the thought of my dog being stolen. This is for him, instead of about him.

  And that makes a lot of difference—even if he answers oddly.

  “Do I seem it to you?” he asks, and now it’s my turn to work something out—though doing so is a lot harder than it should be. My first instinct is to tell him yes, but there is a bunch of other stuff buried underneath it. Strange, shiftless wondering if maybe he isn’t real at all. Maybe I’m the one still sleeping.

  “I could pinch you to check,” I say finally, expecting him to brush it off.

  Instead he holds out his arm, the gesture so trusting I hardly know what to think. All I understand for sure is that something squeezes my insides when he does it. I see the soft, pale skin of the inside of his wrist, and a great hand just gets my heart in its fist.

  I guess that might be why I ask him inside.

  Chapter Two

  AT FIRST HE will only stand in my doorway, hesitant to cross the threshold, as though the threshold is just a little too much. Like a vampire, I think, if vampires were actually repelled by the many busy details of someone’s home. I see those big eyes skittering over everything, as though my kitchen table just made the sign of the cross and my refrigerator has a feature that shoots holy water.

  It makes me wonder what his home is like, when he seems so wary of furniture and flooring and the fern on my windowsill. Maybe he eschews stuff like this and spends his whole time sitting on bare boards with only a pallet for his bed. Or does he simply despise my color scheme? Either way, he finds all of this strange. He finds me strange.

  His eyes ramble over me in almost the exact same manner.

  And it only gets worse when I offer him a blanket. He glances at my hand as though no one in the world has ever done anything like it. I have to put it around his shoulders, but even that is an awkward affair. He stiffens the second I get too close, and I very nearly back out. Then when I marshal my courage and lean in again, I feel that scrutiny all over the side of my face. It roams down my arms to my elbows as I tug it tight, and finds the backs of my hands when I cross the material over his chest.

  The only thing he doesn’t examine is my cleavage, just above the frothy neckline of my nightdress—which I suppose I should be grateful for.

  Instead, it just makes things weirder. It makes things even more like a dream. What sort of man looks at hands and elbows and arms and avoids the best parts? I’ve had job interviews before today where the ogling was worse than this. I’m not even sure if you could call what he is doing ogling.

  Does it count if it’s only your arms?

  Does it count if you feel like the one doing the ogling?

  “You could have frozen to death out there,” I say, but only because I feel weirdly like I have to. If I don’t he might not get why I just touched him with a blanket—or at least, that’s how things seem on the surface. Underneath I suspect there is something else. His eyes seethe with too much intelligence for it to be otherwise.

  He understands. He just maybe understands differently. I suggest that he sit down, and his reaction is just to the left of weird. His face seems to open somehow, as though the gesture is much bigger than it would be to anyone else. It has this note of revelation—like I solved some difficult problem for him.

  And there is a kind of wariness in him, too. He moves toward the chair in the same way that I moved toward him in the yard. On slow, careful feet that often seem to falter. It makes me hold my breath to watch him—though I don’t realize I’m doing it until he sits down and everything suddenly gusts out of me in a rush.

  I wish it hadn’t, however.

  He turns at the sound. He fixes those eyes on me, so direct suddenly it seems to strip a layer of my skin off. I have to turn away and focus on something else just to keep myself intact. Cosmo never told me how to cope with sudden sleepwalkers in my garden. It was all about businessmen you meet in bars.

  What use is that to me now?

  There is no way I can compliment him on his cravat. He has no cravat. He barely has on any clothes at all, and I definitely can’t draw attention to that. The only thing I can think to safely do is run a bowl of warm water for his freezing feet, but even that has massive drawbacks I don’t really appreciate at first.

  They occur only once I’m standing next to him with the bowl in my hands, and he’s looking at me with confusion. And then I have to crouch, while that confusion gets worse. It makes me wonder how on earth anyone ever does anything kind for other people, when being kind is so fucking awkward and dangerous. All I can think is: He hates my kindness. He’s disgusted at the thought of me washing some of the mud off. If I touch him, he’ll kick me in the face—or worse. Oh God, what if it’s worse?

  He might grab me. Maybe all of this was just a ploy, a plan, a trick, and just as I get into this vulnerable position at his feet he’ll get me around the throat. Only this time, I won’t survive. People don’t escape death like that twice. I was lucky with Ted, but now I won’t be because I let him in and left my Mace on the counter and—

  “If you want me to go, I can.”

  “No, no that wasn’t what. . .I thought. . .”

  “You don’t even have to say. You can just nod and I’ll go away. I won’t be offended, or hold it against you, and even if I was and I did don’t let it be a concern. Too often women are expected to be considerate and thoughtful when really fear and doubt would be a more reasonable response.”

  “I’m not fearful or doubtful.”

  “Whatever you squirted down the back of your leg suggests otherwise. Is it burning you a little? Maybe burning you a lot? You don’t have to pretend it isn’t so we can have a pleasant conversation. I would have a pleasant conversation with you anyway, if I had the first clue how to have one.”

  There are so many things I want to respond to in that one little speech that I don’t know where to begin. Has he really known all this time about the Mace? And if so, how in the name of God did he figure it out? He could have seen the bottle, I suppose. But knowing that a line of it is currently stinging the back of my shin is something else.

  It makes me wonder if he can smell it somehow, though that insane idea is not the one that really sticks out from among those words. The one that really gets me is that thing about not knowing how to have a conversation.

  Or at least, not a pleasant one.

  Is that what he means? That he can talk about terrified women almost Macing him for sleepwalking into their gardens, but not about anything nice? I think it is, but just to check I look up at him. I look up expecting maybe slight mockery or something of the sort, and instead see those beautiful eyes all full of softness and warmth and this weary sort of kindness, like he knows how much it costs to carry being good in a world where almost anyone can be bad.

  And that’s when it hits me:

  He is absolutely and utterly beautiful.


  How did I not notice how beautiful he is? I suppose I could blame the door or the shadows or his tension, but really I know this is nothing of the sort. This is Ted, squatting there like an ugly toad in the back of my head. He made it so every man now looks like nothing to me, instead of what I can now see so clearly.

  The guy in front of me looks like a goddamn painting of himself. His hair is curly and tousled—actually curly and tousled—and I didn’t even notice. I wasted all my time on Trudy and terror and Mace trickling down my leg, and missed his glorious bed head. I missed the slight curl to his upper lip like a pout he would never be a part of, and the patterns his thick stubble makes all over his face. There are patches just to the right and left of his mouth, where no hair grows.

  They are as smooth as the inside of his arm.

  I want to pinch them, to see if he’s dreaming.

  I want to pinch myself, because I know I must be. Everyone talks about him like he’s some troll underneath a bridge. Tanya from three doors down practically called him the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  Can none of them see this?

  Is there a way to stop seeing it? I seem to be holding my breath again, even though I think he is noticing. My eyes feel so full of sudden desire he can probably feel it spilling out all over him, but there is nothing I can do. It just keeps happening and happening for about a hundred years, all of it so mortifying I almost miss what should be obvious.

  It keeps going because he is gazing at me, too.

  He looks back at me that exact same way—as though my face is just as much a revelation to him as his is to me. His eyes linger on my lower lip, as plump as his upper lip is pouty. He finds the scar like a letter C by my ear and my eyebrows. . .God, my horrendously thick eyebrows. What must he think of them?

  It seems pretty clear what he thinks of them.

  If his gaze had hands, I think he would be stroking me there now. As it is I can almost feel his touch, and not just because of that long, slow assessment of my features. There is also the air between us, so heavy and warm it seems to weigh on my limbs. It makes me want to lay my cheek against someplace strange—like the nearly exposed inside of his thigh.

  And I suspect he has some of the same urges. I see him leaning a little, as though this ocean of heat and silence and long looks is drowning him, too. My unseen hands are dragging him down to the bottom, where I wait with a kiss.

  Christ, I think he really might kiss me. This is what is happening now, all weird imagery aside. He wants to kiss me, and I want to kiss him, and nothing in the world matters but that. I even close my eyes, every inch of me trembling with a kind of anticipation I didn’t know I could feel. My heart is trying to eat me alive. My face feels so hot I almost ask him to wear a fireguard. Any second now, I think, any second and then. . .

  And then. . .

  “I should probably go.”

  Clearly, I have misjudged this situation rather badly. I mean, of course he should probably go. We met only five minutes before, and it was under the strangest set of circumstances I’ve ever been a part of. Kissing is not the thing to do right now.

  So why do I feel so jolted to hear him say it? Why do I feel so suddenly adrift? It makes me think of waking up in the middle of a dream that doesn’t quite want to let you go. For a second, reality is turned on its head. Dragons really are trying to eat your bed. And though you go about your day as though that isn’t the case—though I stand when he stands and nod when he nods and absolutely agree—it stays with you.

  He did want to kiss me, I think.

  He did. He did. He did.

  Didn’t he?

  “Bye,” I say, and he stops at the door. He turns and looks one last time, as I stand there clutching the blanket he gave back with my face still flaming and my lips unkissed. He raises a hand, but of course it isn’t the hand I notice.

  I see only the yearning, as deep and real as those dragons aren’t.

  MY FIRST IDEA is to just go over there and say hey, but the minute I imagine it I know it would never work. For a start, I can hardly think of what should follow the word hey. My mind comes to a grinding halt the second I get to the part where I have to say more. I see myself standing at his door, mouth gaping open as I struggle to construct the next sentence.

  I see that look of disturbed confusion on his face at the sight.

  No, no, no. What I need is a motive. You know, like a killer.

  Fuck, I hope this pie doesn’t make me seem like a killer. I use apples just to give it that extra wholesome touch, and put little pastry leaves on the top. Then once it is baked I wrap it in a checked cloth—the way people do in programs about normal people living on farms with lots of animals and plaid and oak furniture everywhere.

  It takes until I’m halfway across the street with it to realize that this only makes me look more insane. He already knows I’m not some Betty Crocker type. Coming over to his house like this only makes me seem forced and fake. I think of Tanya telling me about the single dad at number thirty-seven, and how she was going to make him a casserole then go over there in her tightest jeans.

  This is it how it seems—and I hate it; I hate it. I’m not used to liking men. Somehow the sensation crushes me into a tiny cube. The pie starts to feel enormously heavy in my hands, and I know sweat circles are beginning to form under my arms.

  But unfortunately for me, it’s far too late to go back.

  He opens the door before I hit his garden gate. Worse than that: I think he actually opens it for me. He never comes out to get his mail—unless he does it in the middle of the night—and no one sees him shopping for groceries or going to work. Before the other day, that door might as well have been sealed shut.

  And yet he does it now, at the sight of me crossing the street.

  How can I turn back, after that? His expression alone is enough to make me keep going. The corners of his mouth seem to strain toward a smile; his eyes are full of that odd marveling kind of light. He seems almost feverish with it, and the first thing he says is:

  “Did you come over here to see me? Is that pie for me?” In a voice that pretty much sinks me forever. He sounds so surprised—like he can hardly believe it. How am I supposed to fight back against that?

  “Yeah, yeah, I just thought it might. . .” I start, but then I realize.

  I don’t know what I thought the pie might do. All that time I spent coming up with a reason for being here—how clever I imagined I was for baking this thing—and still none of this makes the slightest bit of sense beyond the idea that I wanted to see him. I wanted to see the first man I’ve been attracted to in two long, barren years.

  Thank God he wants to see me, too.

  “You can come in,” he says, and I swear all the hairs on the back of my neck prickle and stand up. The words seem so odd coming out of his mouth. He sounds like he’s speaking a language he never properly learned, which suggests only one thing to me.

  He’s probably never said that to anyone before.

  It certainly makes him a little jittery, to extend the invitation to me. He almost bashes into me as I cross his threshold, and when he goes to shut the door behind me, I see his left hand squeezing and flexing down by his side. I recognize it for what it is.

  My own hands want to do the same thing—and probably would if they weren’t clutching a pie. A chant has started up in my head: We are in his house, we are in his house, we are in his house, and nothing I do will quiet it.

  Mainly because I am in his fucking house. This tightly closed and completely private person—these are his whitewashed walls and bare floorboards. He has a wind chime hanging from an archway to the right and stained glass in the door I can see at the end of this long, long hall, and both things make me understand why he looked the way he did when he first came into my home.

  Details say something about a person. They reveal little things that he will probably never be able to tell me. Clearly, this is a man who loves things neat and clean and simple, but with just a hint of
something sweeter. A touch of colored light fracturing through his plain hall; a low musical note drifting through the empty space.

  Very serene, I think, and then I get this buzz of irrational excitement. What else can I learn in these tiny increments? I follow him to the archway with all kinds of possibilities rattling around in my head—though none of them prepare me for what I see in his living room. I expect small things, you see. I expect hardly anything.

  And then I see all the broken stuff.

  All the abandoned computers and half-working toasters, spilling their guts over oilcloths he has clearly laid out so he can lovingly put them back together. By the fireplace sits a huge old musical instrument of some type, battered and dented and missing parts but slowly coming back to life under his diligent care. There are lamps and lost toys, and then other things less understandable—things that look like mechanical birds made of old can openers and a spider he must have put together with two forks and a clock.

  But all of them say the same: that he so desperately wants to fix things he fills his living room with junk and spends his days making everything okay again. I know he does, because as I stand there with my breath trapped halfway up my throat and my heart aching hollowly in my chest, he checks on one of these things. He checks on it like it’s a baby bird with a broken wing.

  Gently, oh so gently, he winds a little gear at the side of it until a light flickers into being in this hesitant sort of manner. Then once it gets going his face just lights up in a way that hardly seems right for someone like him. His smile is near shocking, like seeing the sun come out in the middle of some nuclear winter. It actually makes my eyes sting, even though that seems utterly ridiculous.

  It’s only a projector. It’s not a fucking metaphor.

  God, I wish it wasn’t a fucking metaphor.

  “I just really like to. . .you know, fix things,” he tells me after a second, with all the awkwardness of someone who just revealed a filthy habit. His eyes dart nervously over each half-built object in here, as though calculating just how much they’ll cost him in my eyes.