*
29. Diorama
*
She was astounded.
In the space of one breath, a thousand moments crashed and collided in Nyota's mind, then broke in a crystalline burst. Tiny glints shone everywhere like suspended glass. Moments of noticing. The image of his legs came to her from a hundred angles, one each for the many times she had watched him walk. She saw his hips in her mind, and they were suddenly deliciously different.
She hadn't seen it coming.
And then the moments began to swirl around her, a galaxy of glimpses and notions and strange thoughts. They seemed to swoop past her, taunting her from outside herself. An image of him approaching her as a shy animal. Times when thoughts of him came to her in her shower, in bed, in private places and dark hours where his presence should not have been. A thousand moments of justification suddenly seemed so dumb.
A cold, fog-choked morning, watching him walk. She recalled seeing him expose his sweetness and boyishness through his gait, his stance. She had seen from a distance, which now seemed insufficiently detached, how his legs were almost inhumanly long, how his deviously fitted uniform traveled down those legs and ended where a pair of perfectly shiny black boots began. She suddenly saw those boots right in her face, as she bent to pick up a dozen dropped things. The smell of soap, leather, man.
The churning of noticings made her dizzy and she gripped his desk. Then blushed all over thinking about how his thighs were right then, at that very moment, pressed together under that desk. She was paralyzed, bent so slightly over the metal surface, so he could take her outline for her final project.
She dropped her hand from the padd and wondered how she might survive and move past the moment. She was cold with shock and lightheaded with sudden recognition, and she almost, really couldn't stand. And then it all slowed down and stopped.
Her teacher lifted his eyes to hers.
She was the shiny space girl, floating in the vacuum, and every moment she had known him hung like a star.
*
