30. Conversation
If he were feeling exceptionally childish and good-natured, he would creep up behind her and cover her eyes with his elegantly gloved hands. Riza would sigh and push him away and go about her business as usual.
Once, his hands were bare; his skin pressed warmly against her eye sockets. "You can't see me," he told her, the tone of his voice anything but cheerful. He sounded like a raw wound.
Riza reached up and placed her hands over his. Beneath their joined hands, her closed eyes burned with something fierce and hopeless that she did not wish to put a name to.
"I always know where you are," she said.
He moved his hands. His face seemed as dark and unreadable as the world outside the office window—it was long past late, and the sky was heavy with rain-pregnant clouds.
Riza handed him a file. "Please sign these, sir," she told him. He laughed, weakly, and although the room lightened, the shadows still lined the creases of his face and the depth of his eyes. Riza didn't think that that sort of darkness—pervasive and unfading, like a deep stain—would ever leave him.