And it's not wrong that she should want to kiss him, right? After all, he's a nice guy. An attractive guy, she guesses, and if he weren't so timid she's sure women would be lining up around the block to date such an intelligent, good-looking, kind guy. Not always thoughtful, but mostly polite and generally likable. When he tries.
He quietly voices the opinion that he should probably go home.
In the car (he sits in the passenger seat, rocking back and forth slightly), they're listening to a mellow rock and roll station, Smashing Pumpkins edging through the speakers. It's an ironic song, she thinks. This radio station seems to be full of ironic songs -- lines like "'cause I love you just as much as I hate your guts" frequently gaining air time. Angry, confused and poetic songs that always seem to make her think of him. She doesn't hate his guts, though. She never has.
This time she's driving carefully, to make sure he doesn't get more upset than he already is. She doesn't think he could handle being jarred from left to right, she doesn't think she could handle having to stay most of the night without being able to explain that she wasn't being sarcastic. Her life is very strange, she thinks, and as her mind wanders from the road she hears him screaming something about a truck. Sharona, you're gonna hit the truck! Oh, my God...
Oh. There's a stoplight and a truck in front of them, isn't there?
She hits the breaks and swears loudly. His uneasy rocking becomes more pronounced as the screeching of tires against asphalt slowly fades into the emptiness, and she looks at him from the corner of her eye. He's talking to himself -- repeating something over and over and over, the way he does when he's frightened or thinking something he wants her to know but doesn't want to tell her. The stoplight is taking forever.
"The impossible is possible tonight." the man on the radio croons.
They pull up in front of his house. She unbuckles his seatbelt for him, making it easier to climb out of the car and into the street. He leans down, towards the window and waves a little before rolling his right shoulder. He gives her his thanks by refraining from a comment about her driving, and as he walks towards his front step she can't help but think he looks a little ill. A little disturbed, a little more peculiar than usual. It's dismissed, however, as she sees him shut the front door and imagines him turning to lock it. Instead of seeing the man she still wants to kiss as being more off-center than usual, she feels herself slowly drifting in the same direction.
The drive home is short and painless. She turns up the radio, now on a rock station that conveys her mood more than the previous. She's not usually a big fan of acoustic, but the song is slow and sad and vaguely familiar. Catchy. She finds herself singing along before she even knows it, forgetting the exact reason why she said what she said and what her boss is doing at the moment.
She's back at the stoplight when something hits her -- something, she realizes, very important: If she doesn't tell him she was serious, he's going to think she wasn't and that means he's telling himself she's teasing him. He probably thinks she finds the idea of kissing him completely ridiculous, and while it is (on some level), she still wants to do it. She'll never get to, but she wants to and maybe if he knows that... Maybe if he knows that, he'll scream in terror rather than get moody and upset.
She rolls her eyes, because there's no way she can tell him. It wouldn't be smart, it wouldn't be easy, it wouldn't make sense. She can just see him, looking at her with his eyes and getting more disturbed by the second.
So, Sharona, she says to herself, staring at the road. What's it gonna be: a petrified Adrian, or an agitated one?
Her eyebrows lower and scrunch together, fingers wrap themselves more tightly around the steering wheel. She'd rather have him nervous around her, she thinks, than distraught because of her -- and the station wagon pulls a tight U-turn in the middle of the afternoon, where anyone can see her. She's got an excuse. It's an emergency -- she's a nurse and needs to get to her patient, but most of the police officers know that by now, so she heads down the road and prays that he's sitting dutifully on the sofa.
Somehow, she thinks he'll take this easier if he's not standing.
He's leaning against his door, staring at the walls, at pictures of Trudy. He feels so guilty... like, like he shouldn't even be here. Alive. He shouldn't even be standing in this hallway, chest rising and falling, because these pictures are giving him such a happy smile and he knows he's not behaving himself. People always tell him Trudy would want him to move on, but inside... inside, he doesn't really think so. And it makes it worse, what he's doing now. Seeing his wife and thinking of Sharona.
That's what he's doing.
He wonders if she was joking... Being sarcastic. She does that sometimes, and he can't ever tell when. That's probably it, he tells himself. Sharona was probably joking. She has a... a great sense of humor, right? She had to be kidding. But that wouldn't explain her attitude in the car. She probably thinks he wasn't paying attention -- just because he's preoccupied with paranoia and fear doesn't mean he can't sense her. He can always sense her, feel her, smell her...
His hands start to shake, and he puts them in the pockets of his blazer. Not now, he thinks to himself, trying to focus his gaze on the floor. Not now... I, I'll see her in a few days. Two days. Two days and she'll be here, helping me with the bills and the shopping and who knows what else.
It doesn't help. He can still feel Trudy's eyes burning his skin.
This... this isn't fair. No, it's really not. And for a second, he considers the possibility that he's actually going insane. Completely... absolutely crazy. He's not supposed to be thinking of her. He's so sick of telling himself that.
He wants to think of her. He may not be supposed to, but thoughts can't be coated in germs and disease and what harm could it really do? It seems a little late to stop thinking about someone when he already considers her to be... be beautiful and smart, and very helpful. When she tries... which is most of the time, he acknowledges.
And what can be wrong with thinking compliments? That's all he's doing, really. Just thinking of... of positive things rather than negative ones. Like her smile. Her smile's great, it makes him feel happier. But that wouldn't be hard, he guesses, and it's nice to be distracted for a while. Distracted from shaking hands in his pockets. He wonders when he cleaned the bathroom last...
But, no. He counts to fifty, just the way she taught him to for these sorts of occasions, blinks and needs a water.
"Sharona was joking," he says to his empty house, looking at the refridgerator door. "She's... she's funny. She was just kidding. Just joking."
And he lets out a weak imitiation of a laugh, feeling pretty miserable because the next two days until he sees her are going to be absolute hell. He takes a water bottle out into the living room, inspects it, opens it, sits down on the sofa and carefully places a coaster on the coffee table where his Sierra Springs will rest. He takes a sip and sets it down.
She was just joking, he tells himself, a little more forcefully than before. She was just joking. I... maybe I was just joking, too.
But he wasn't. He isn't -- and if she is, he doesn't know what he'll do.