Chapter Text
To Helena,
I am writing this approximately two hours after our first date ended, which means it’s been roughly one hour since I came home and tipped out every ounce of alcohol in the house, because when I leaned in and kissed your cheek goodnight, you told me you couldn’t date a functional alcoholic. Maybe not the best idea I have ever had, but not making a change for you would be the worst idea I have ever had.
You have probably guessed, after our date, that I have an insistent need to fill the silence. Here I am, writing a letter to a woman I just met after one date. I haven’t sat down and written for just myself in five years. Tonight, I told you it had been three years since my wife died, and that if it weren’t for my sister and my job, and I suppose, the alcohol, I wouldn’t be here today. I said to you that while it had been three years since she died, it had been five since I had been happy, that while the accident was the worst thing to happen to me, the guilt of those final two years of my marriage was a close second and the fact I could never give her the child we both wanted so desperately was the third.
I suppose that’s the danger of studying language for a living, you begin to think there’s always a proper way to say a thing. Tonight reminded me there isn’t. The truth came out of me in clumsy, unedited sentences, and you didn’t flinch. You looked at me as though I were something worth listening to, even when I was at my most unremarkable. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt that.
You brushed off my comment that it was the first, first date I’d been on in twenty years, saying I’d be the first you’d ever take home to your Father. But I saw the flicker behind your eyes, that split second of regret at having let something true slip free. I hope that one day I’ll give you this letter, and that by then you’ll no longer feel that way. That by then you’ll know you never need to guard yourself with me, that you can be unfiltered, unarmoured, entirely you.
It’s only been one date, but I already find myself hoping for more. I hope that when I message you in the morning to tell you what a wonderful time I had, and that I have an AA meeting tomorrow night, you’ll say yes to seeing me again. I’ve already planned it, Friday night, because a week feels too long to wait.
I’d offer to pick you up, but I’m guessing that won’t be an option, the private car and all. You don’t strike me as the sort who’d care to be taken to the most expensive place in town; you could probably buy it, and I doubt that would impress you. What I want to give you is something real. I want to give you me. Something that might one day become us.
So, I’ll tell you to dress casually, find some jeans and a jumper, and we’ll meet in town for the movies, like we’re sixteen again. I’ll make the oldest move in the book: pretending to stretch before resting my arm around you. I can already picture your face, the smile you’ll try to hide, the half-second before you decide whether to let me, and I hope you do.
After the film, I’ll take you for dessert before dinner, ice cream or cookies, whatever you like, and we’ll walk through the nearby park. When the moon filters through the trees just right, I’ll stop, pretending there’s something on your face, it’s only an excuse to trace my thumb from the corner of your mouth along your lip. Maybe you’ll smile. And maybe, when I finally lean in to kiss you, you’ll let me.
I keep thinking back to the night before last, when I first saw you across the room at that fundraiser. I always hated those Lumon events, but I suppose that’s what you get when they own the college and pay your bills. I had seen you many times before, always on a stage or on the news. I’d never been lucky enough to be able to see you in the crowd. I guess I’d never thought about it as a possible reality: the Professor and the beautiful billionaire heiress CEO. It sounds like the kind of thing that only happens in the movies.
You were standing near the bar when I first saw you, half-turned toward a group of people who all seemed to want your attention, though you looked like you’d rather be anywhere else. I watched your practised smile, the way you laughed when you were expected to laugh, held your drink to your mouth at an appropriate time to sip, but never actually took a drink. There was something almost literary about the way you occupied that space, as though you were both in it and above it, a character written into a scene she didn’t entirely believe in. You looked like a woman playing a part she had long outgrown, and I remember thinking that if I ever wrote about you, I’d describe you as someone who’d mastered the art of appearing untouchable while quietly hoping to be touched.
I remember wondering what you were thinking, if you were bored, or lonely, or simply waiting for someone to say something worth hearing. I briefly thought that I could go over there and be something worth hearing, but then I thought, why would you, the most stunning woman I have ever seen, want to talk to a man fifteen years your senior? And then, somehow, you were walking toward me as I was shaking the thought from my head.
When you asked if I was the same Mark Scout who wrote Epistolary Intimacy: The Literature of Letters and the Architecture of Affection, I think I momentarily forgot how to speak. I never imagined anyone, let alone you, would remember that paper existed. You said it was your favourite thing you’d read in graduate school, and I tried to laugh it off, but truthfully, I’ve never been more disarmed. Then you quoted a line from it, “To write a letter is to believe, stubbornly, in the possibility of being understood.” You said it had stayed with you, that it still makes you feel less alone during a time when the world seemed to expect you to speak in boardroom dialects instead of your own voice.
I didn’t know what to say to that. I just remember looking at you, really looking, and feeling something shift. It wasn’t the pride of being remembered or even flattered. It was the quiet, terrifying recognition that someone had not only read my words, but seen through them, straight to the man who wrote them. I’ve spent most of my life talking about intimacy from the safety of theory, writing about the ache of letters written but never sent. And then there you were, speaking to me like one of those letters had finally been opened. It terrified me, the way you turned something I’d written years ago into a mirror I hadn’t meant to hold.
You spoke about love letters as though you’d lived inside them, as if they were some made-up concept you would never experience yourself. And as you did, I found myself thinking that maybe, if I were lucky, one day I’d get to write one to you. I asked if you write, you said no, you don’t have a way with words like I do, but I disagree. I must have stood there far too long after you finished speaking, trying to come up with something remotely clever to say. In the end, all I managed was to ask if you’d like to continue the conversation somewhere that didn’t have a thousand eyes on you. Before I could think twice about the fact that I had just asked Helena Eagan on a date, you laughed, that small, surprised kind of laugh that made me think you weren’t used to being asked things so plainly. It was the first genuine look I had seen all night. I told you there was a little place off campus with decent coffee and a questionable liquor license, and that I’d be there tomorrow night if, by some miracle, you decided to show up. You said you might. I pretended to take that as a yes.
Last night I couldn’t sleep. I kept picturing you there, not as the Eagan heiress or the polished executive, but simply as the woman who might actually show up. I tried to imagine what you’d wear, how you’d sound without the filter of performance. I failed completely. Every version of you I conjured was some shade of impossible. I got up, pacing my bedroom with the absurd certainty that I had just done something both foolish and irreversible. I am still not sure what is more ridiculous, you even speaking to me in the first place, or me asking Ms. Eagan herself on a date to a college coffee shop. Because even now, before I know how you take your coffee or what you do when you’re nervous, I know that trying to make you laugh, or even smile, is about to become my new favourite thing.
Tonight, I stayed in my office far longer than necessary, pretending to grade essays I could barely focus on. I’d told myself I wouldn’t get my hopes up, that you were being polite, that people like you don’t show up for people like me. But as the clock crept toward seven, I found myself checking the window every few minutes, as if by staring hard enough I might will you into existence. I must have adjusted my tie half a dozen times before I finally gave up and decided to leave early, just in case you were there and I didn’t want you waiting on me. I remember standing outside the café, hands shoved in my pockets, every bit of me rehearsing what I might say if you didn’t come. And then you did.
You walked in wearing that brown outfit, the one I’d soon learn you hated because you said it made you look “too corporate.” This was after I told you I thought it made you look like you owned the whole city, and it was incredibly hot. For a second, I honestly forgot to breathe. You seem to have that effect on me. You smiled when you saw me, a small, uncertain thing that somehow undid every prepared line in my head. All I could manage was, “You came.” And when you said, “I said I might,” I knew I was in trouble. The good kind.
The café was quieter than usual, though it hardly mattered; every sound seemed to fade the moment you sat across from me. You ordered chamomile tea, and I tried not to let it show that I know you’re the type of person who doesn’t drink coffee after four (I hope that turns out not to be true). The conversation started easily enough: work, travel, the absurdity of faculty politics. You listened more than you spoke, nodding with that polite composure people use when they’ve been trained to measure every word. I realised halfway through what had turned from coffee into a meal that I’d told you far too much, about Devon, about my students, even about how I still can’t throw out my wife’s old record player, and you had barely said a thing about yourself.
It wasn’t silence born of disinterest; it was something gentler and sadder, like you weren’t used to being asked questions with the expectation of an honest answer. When I asked what made you happiest, you deflected with a joke. But in the small spaces between my rambling, I caught glimpses of you, the way your fingers traced the rim of your teacup when you were thinking, the way your eyes softened when I made you laugh.
There was a moment, just before our food arrived, when you looked at me with this half-smile that seemed to ask if I was real. It reminded me of something from The English Patient, how people fall in love through the act of listening. I realised then that I’d never really listened to anyone before you, not in that way.
When I later asked about your favourite book, you hesitated, as though you were still waiting to see if it was a test. You said Letters to a Young Poet, which didn’t surprise me at all. You said you always loved Rilke’s line that “for one human being to love another is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks.” I told you I disagreed, that asking for your number felt far more difficult. You laughed then, really laughed, and when I held out my phone, you looked at me like you couldn’t quite believe I was real.
You didn’t ask, but my favourite book is A Moveable Feast. Hemingway, of all people. I know he’s the antithesis of Rilke, but there’s something about the way he writes of Paris, of people and places that linger long after they’ve gone, that makes me ache in a way I can’t explain. My favourite thing, when I’m not buried in grading or faculty meetings, is wandering through town with a book in my pocket and no destination in mind. It’s a small ritual that makes me feel like the world might still hold a few quiet miracles. Last night, meeting you felt like one of them.
If Rilke is right, and love is a task, then tonight was the first lesson. You, across the table, breaking the quiet with a laugh that still hasn’t left my head. Me, relearning how to want something that isn’t self-destruction. I don’t know what this is yet, but it feels like the beginning of something worth writing down.
I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to know someone as much as I wanted to know you in that moment. Not the version that smiles for the cameras or signs the contracts, but the one who tucks her hair behind her ear when she’s uncertain, who carries whole worlds behind quiet eyes.
Helena Eagan, I want to know everything about you, if you will let me.
From,
Mark Scout