"So, your mother was a dancer?" she asked from the kitchen. She realized how little she knew about him.
"Yes, she was," he answered from the couch in the living room. She heard him flip the pages of a magazine, probably Dance or some other trade journal she got and never read. At least it looked like she still cared.
"What about your dad?"
"Ah, I don't know."
"You don't know?" she repeated, stirring some coffee crystals into the boiling water from the teakettle and watching hypnotically as they liquefied and dissolved in a swirl of dark into clear. Like scarves in a modern piece.
"My mother defected from the U.S.S.R. while she was pregnant with me," he explained, "I never knew my father."
"Oh," she said, "I'm sorry, I didn't know."
"What about your parents?"
"My mom died when I was 5," she said, "And my dad sells airplane parts. He wasn't around much—he was always different after she was gone."
"Yes, I would imagine so," he looked up as she carried the steaming cups into the living room and placed them gently on the coffee table.
She sank down without a word on the couch next to him and stared at the coffee. "Thanks for coming up."
"I'm still on New York time," he offered.
She reached behind her head with both hands and began pulling out bobby pins from the heavy braid. It was starting to itch.
"Here," he said, "Let me help you."
She started when he touched her shoulder, staring at him, frozen. "You'll need to turn around so I can get at your bun," he explained.
Almost against her will she turned away and sat cross-legged so he could work the pins out of her hair. Sometimes Danny helped her get her hair out, when she was home. There was no way he could've known how lonely it made her for her apartment in the South Loop, for the rumble of the L-trains, the smell of Danny's cigarettes.
"My mum had really long hair as well," he explained, gently tugging an offending pin from under the ponytail holder that secured the whole knot to the back of her head. "I think nearly all dancers do."
His hand grazed the back of her neck, the tiny bumps of her spine that stuck out when she bowed her head, and she felt the goosebumps raise on her shoulderblades.
Julian, she whispered in her mind.
"There you go," he said, placing the small mountain of bobby pins on the edge of the coffee table. "Better?"
She stood abruptly and turned to him, holding out her hand. "Come with me," she whispered.
He looked up at her, surprised, for several long seconds. "What?"
She beckoned him silently again with her hand and this time he grasped her fingers and let her lead him into her bedroom.