They can't tell if they're stood close or far away. Reaching out and stretching wouldn't let them touch but they prickle all over, he swears the breeze is made warmer by her breath.
The spring air is light, sticky on her skin. He leans his weight on the fence, resting all of himself on his forearms. The wood bends slightly as his bones creak against themselves.
Her shoulders hunch up and a nervous tongue wets a nervous lip before she says, "What are we going to do now, then?" He doesn't turn to look but sighs.
He's even more uneasy than she is, and she can only tell it because he doesn't show an ounce, he never shows or tells an iota, and all their conversations nowadays take place between the lines.
He is calm, cool personified, he functions like a robot and it bothers her a hell of a lot less than it should.
Now, even now, as he tilts back his face to the clouds that are orange like her hair in the sunset, his face is blank.
"What do you want to do?" he says, from nowhere. Before she can formulate a reply, he walks away to a nearby rose bush, plucks off a blooming red fist of petals. "This was always my favourite shade. Rose red." He says it quietly and she thinks he's about to walk over and give it to her, instead in inserts the stem into his lapel and smells it.
She takes an initiative and takes the six steps towards him, feels the petals brush softly against her nose. "They have a sweet smell," she says and he wrings his fingers in each hand almost in the way that he always has done.
She contemplates touching him, his hand, his face, his neck, anything. Anything to soothe this itch. She backs off, knowing not to be stupid.
"I'll do whatever you want." And she means it, she means it in every possible sense that he could twist that sentence into; everything's changed now, everything will never be the same.
"Alright, then," he says and then he looks at her, his eyes hollow. He reaches out, as if to touch her hair, orange like the sunset. His hand stops midway and then travel back to his chest, he takes the rose in his grip and gives it to her.
The sweet smell lingers in his nose as he walks away and he wonders if the matching rose red rims around her eyes weren't a little sweeter.