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Somebody tells her that she is predictable, easy to read, calculable. They do basic arithmetic in their head, two plus two, and they get the perfect answer. Her feet shuffle down steps, shuffle across tiled floors in cool bathrooms, shuffle down the street, too tired to even try to lift themselves up a single step. Somebody tells her they can see right through her.
But she still shuffles every day and picks up the phone at any time, from noon to noon, midnight to midnight. He calls just once at three in the morning one day and fourteen times at three in the afternoon the next. It seems the predictability is justified in him from her, and if she didn't find it so insulting that somebody could suggest as much as that she is a simple addition problem, perhaps she would give the theory some credit.
There's work each day, phone ringing each day, and every hour she can go without a ring or without a coworker complaining, there is another hour of rest earned. Each hour she is quiet is an hour she can watch him move in his space, all golden-brown flawless and intelligence, his glasses framing his face like a sleek picture frame, demanding her to look at him, look at him, he's so beautiful.
He'll sometimes do the simplest thing. He'll take sticky notes, pads of them, and stack them up, twist them sideways so they fan all out, and then twist them back to straight. Every few hours, they'll meet eyes and heat will overcome the chilly draft from rainy London weather, and she'll submerge herself in a useless aspect of work.
“What do you work so late for?” he asks her one day, just on his way out the door, casually, though they haven't spoken since a simplistic 'merry Christmas' the year before.
She shoves her hair, tucks it behind her ears and she really swears she can still feel his fingertips grazing it like artwork. He is Michelangelo’s David and she is leftovers that have sat in the fridge too long, festering and holding on to some ridiculous semblance of hope that makes no logical sense in the long-term. She speaks, lips parting nervously and eyes flitting upwards against the electric current that runs between them, “It's, uh,” and she pauses, taking to long to excuse her reasoning, to come up with something that is not so painful-sounding, but then gives up. This is Him. He can hear it. “To distract myself. I suppose.”
He juts out his lower lip, forming a frown that disapproves her motif, and it feels snowy cold and three feet deep. “It seems the best people take the worst care of themselves,” he remarks and is headed to leave as her lips fall open again, trying to press words out when it rings, and the beast consumes her.
Sometimes it feels like her existence is her stupid mobile, cacophonous ringing. She swears, she can't stand to hear the horrid clanging ring and one day she'll just go mad.
Other days, she feels so attached to her brother that she can't tear her eyes from the pixelated display screen, displaying just the time and some oceanic palm tree background that she assumes is to calm or something, but it just stirs the stench of weeping in her gut.
And, of course, he's always there. He sits at his desk, types something madly into his computer, pretending that he doesn't notice her eyes imploring, searching for some way they can connect again. She is reminded of a casual remark made by somebody she did not care for: some people are meant to love each other and not meant to be together.
But the absolute worst part is that they are not Romeo and Juliet. They are not forbidden, they are not pressed behind glass walls. The Capulets are her brother's phone calls and the Montagues are her free moments, spare and uninviting.
It takes a few weeks before he stops by her desk again, brows flicked up as she closes the mobile phone exasperatedly. “Are you alright?”
“Fine,” she repeats, her own personal mantra, like saying it enough could possibly make it more true. Co-dependence, she thinks she hears somebody whisper from somewhere. He watches her behind bespectacled warm eyes.
“I wanted to...” he floats away from her on some current, though, and doesn't manage to finish the thought.
She drops her gaze, taking a step back from the sudden dissonance. “I'm really alright,” she finishes.
It's meant to be a final thought, a bitter goodbye and a souring note, one that will repel him. He instead is swung back into orbit, attracting closer. “I wanted to see if you were busy tomorrow. I was hoping...”
“Yes.” Before he finishes, her answer slips out like an embarrassing moment. She flushes madly, deeply, wildly and then meets his eyes.
It is utterly unprecedented and as of nothing that has come from a movie. His body curves at the hips and his face leans across the faux-wood desk, lurching closer and she is feeling the world heat up as she raises her hands to meet his cheeks, cup them gently like they are leaving her after this forever. It is like kindling in a fire, warm and just beginning. His lips are soft as she recalls, his hair tickling her fingertips and kissing them, too, before their soft kisses move away and he is smiling ever-so-slightly, but aching and radiating a just-can't-get-enough-atmosphere.
“I'll see you, then.” He smiles, warm and sweetly pungent as coffee in the morning.
She hesitates, bare feet on hot sand, impending doom looming overhead like a certain death but also a certain salvation. “I...”
He finishes for her, a sweetness and a gentleness all wrapped into one infinite smile: “I know.”