“That question alone makes me want to push you into traffic.”
“Honesty, then.” He turned toward her. “Some people are shallow. Some people think praise is harmless because they’ve never been punished by it. Some people want a success story because it lets them believe life is controllable. None of that changes the fact that you were worth exactly the same before they noticed.”
Maya stared out the windshield. “You’re getting better at this.”
“I’m terrified of getting worse at it.”
It was such an honest answer that she turned and looked at him. He held her gaze. The air between them shifted in a way that had become increasingly familiar and increasingly difficult to survive.
There had been moments already. Too many.
His hand at the small of her back as they crossed a street. Her fingers brushing his wrist when she reached for a pan and neither of them moving immediately away. The night she fell asleep reading on the sofa and woke under a blanket she knew she had not pulled over herself. The morning he returned from a shower in a gray T-shirt, hair wet, and she had to look down into her tea because desire had arrived late but unmistakably, embarrassing in its force.
