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When she asks him what he’s thinking (the knuckles of his hand have been trailing up and down her back, absently, for a long while now, his eyes are staring off into the distance, to some other place and she’s not sure she can follow), he answers: “The letters.” Not what she was expecting at all.
“What letters?”
She doesn’t know anyone who writes letters. Notes, yes. Often to say goodbye. Sometimes to lead the way home.
“All the letters people used to write. I read this book once, on the Ark—it was just love letters between these two people.”
“Real people?”
She shifts a little closer (ear right over his heart, the only sound in the world that can calm her: a steady, reliable beat-beat) and he lets his hand settle, finally at her hip (thumb tracing over her hip bone, tiny circles).
“I think so. I didn’t know who they were. People from the twentieth century.”
“Before the bombs.” She closes her eyes. When she wants to see the past, that’s where she looks, but this past is too distant: unreachable. “Nothing like us.”
“Just like us. Just—two people separated from each other.”
She feels his nose, pressed into her hair. Breathing her in.
“Do you know what line I remember most?” he asks, his voice the sort of quiet rumble she can feel through her. “‘I often think of you.’”
I often think of you.
I always think of you.
Of you.
She searches out his hand, because she doesn’t want to let him go.
“That’s the sort of letter I would have written to you.”
In these moments he can be honest, confessional, and she cannot. She hasn’t learned how yet. She nods; she squeezes his hand. “I would have read them all.”