I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
She wonders why he stays.
She wonders if it has anything to do with pity.
If he feels some sense of remorse for scaring her.
She wonders if he can smell the loneliness on her, if he can see it in her face.
Wonders if he can tell just by looking at her how desperate she is for company.
If he cannot see it in her face, he can certainly tell it in the way she asks questions that make her blush in embarrassment just to keep him there. He must feel like he owes her something otherwise he would not entertain her lame attempts at keeping the conversation afloat.
She does not fully understand his answer but she dares not ask him for clarification. She doesn’t ask him what about his previous home had been so bad. He does not seem the type to take kindly to such personal questions and she can imagine him gritting his teeth, can imagine the muscle in his jaw pulsing. She can imagine him snapping at her to mind her own business. So, she saves herself the trouble. Reminds herself that she is a stupid girl – she does not need anyone else to remind her – and tries to erase it from her mind altogether.
But there is some semblance of humanity beneath the seething exterior, she thinks. He’d come at her swinging, berating her for being so absent-minded, but there is something like a smile when he speaks and she wants to smile, too. But the muscles have atrophied and she just goes on looking at him with some kind of breathless wonder.
She has always wanted to be the sort of woman who can buy into a joke, giggle and grin. She has wanted to be charming and coy. But she just goes on looking at him with that same peculiar tightness in her throat.
“It’s lonely,” she says, matter-of-fact. “I go so long without talking to anyone sometimes that I get scared that I’ve forgotten how. Sometimes I worry that if anyone were to ever talk to me, I’d open my mouth and no sound would come out at all.” She shrugs then and the corners of her mouth turn down in quiet contemplation.
lilian
