Page 53 of Only and Forever
Viggo shakes his head, a smile breaking across his face, before he sips his coffee. “I also may have been reading a steamy scene when you walked in.”
My jaw drops. “Wait. Romance novels do that to you?”
“Mm-hmm,” he says, throwing me a glance over his coffee mug. “Now romance novels have your attention, don’t they? Ten bucks says you pick one up before the week is over.”
“Ten bucks? We’ve got a high roller, folks.”
“I’m hedging my bets with you.” He sips his coffee again.
I stare at him, fascinated. “They really give you boners?”
Viggo splutters into his coffee, wiping his mouth. I think I’ve scandalized him. “Tallulah,” he chides.
“Oh, come on. Let’s not be squeamish about you having an erection this morning, me waking up soaking wet—”
Viggo drops his coffee mug. It spills everywhere. “Christ, Tallulah.” He grabs a rag from the other side of the counter and starts mopping up coffee. It’s not really working, just painting the butcher block chocolate brown.
“What? There’s nothing to be ashamed of.” I leap off the stool, grab a rag from the oven handle, and wet it a little, add a squirt of soap, and chase his haphazard mop job with actual cleaning power. “It’s just hormones and pheromones,” I tell him. “We’re two people who are attracted to each other physically and we talked about sexual desire; you were reading a sexy book; I had a vivid dream—”
“Tallulah,” he warns.
I toss the rag aside. “That’s going to affect us, is all I’m saying. Simple biology.”
He turns his head, abandoning the coffee-soaked rag on the counter. His eyes search mine. “You really think that’s all it boils down to? Hormones and animal impulses?”
“I won’t generalize. Attraction and arousal aren’t universal experiences, and people have all sorts of frameworks for them. But for me, for my body, my perspective, that is what it boils down to, yes.”
“So what, then,” he asks, leaning in, hands braced around his mug, “love is a lie?”
“A construct. And, as I said, that’s justmyperspective. I respect that you feel differently.”
Viggo nods, staring down at his coffee. “So this... pull between us, our chemistry, you’d chalk that up to pheromones? And if...” He peers up, searching my eyes. “If one day you felt like something more existed between us, that would just be some hormones making you feel warm and fuzzy about me?”
I shrug. “A hormonal response because of an evolutionary adaptation that makes me predisposed to bond to people who make me feel good, yes.”
“Hmm.” He stares down at his coffee.
“How do you see it?”
Viggo’s quiet for a minute, turning his coffee mug gently back and forth on the counter. “I see love as... elemental, something so deeply woven into everything that makes life feelalive. And I’m not even talking exclusively about romantic love. Love takes so many forms. Love for ourselves. Our surroundings. Strangers. Friends. Family. Partners. To me, to reduce it to only an animalistic impulse does it a profound disservice. I think—” He clears his throat, scrubs at the back of his neck. “I think love is... wrapping your arms around every emotion, even the hard ones, even when being numb seems so much safer. Love is hoping, even after disappointment has taught you not to. Love is that bone-deep hum of peace through your body when you’re hugged hard, when you’re listened to well, when you’re not left alone in your sadness. Love is stubborn and persistent, an indomitable weed that springs up in those slivers of soft soil in our concrete-jungle existence. It’s like...” He leans closer, wedging our legs together like puzzle pieces. “You remember, in high school science, we learned about subatomic particles, how they behave, that it means we don’tactuallyever truly touch each other?”
I frown, not sure where he’s going with this. “Yes,” I tell him slowly. “Electron repulsion.”
He opens his hand on the counter. Hesitantly, I set mine on it. Viggo stares at our hands, clasping mine gently. I feel every callus on his palm, the heat of his skin. His thumb sweeps along the tender space between my knuckles, and warmth spills through me. I pin my thighs together.
“That’s how I see it,” he says quietly, “that both things can be true. Science is right. And so is this. We’re not touching; that is proven. But we arefeeling, and that is just as real. I’ll never know what it’s like to be you, Tallulah...” He peers up, those pale eyes even more striking in the soft morning light. “What’s your middle name?”
“Jane,” I whisper.
He smiles. “Tallulah Jane Clarke. I’ll never know exactly how, emotionally, mentally, the world presents to you, how you experience it, in the same way I’ll never actually physically touch you, no matter how close I might try to get...But, that proximity, that touching-yet-not-touching...” His fingertips graze down my hand, making me shiver. He turns it over, tracing the lines of my palm, swirling up and down. “That... charged, impenetrable space between two people who feelsoclose—their hearts, their minds, their bodies—yet never truly touch, that place of mystery,that’sreal. And I think, it’s that reach to feel and know and connect to every part of each other, in spite of the distance between us... I think that’s love, in so many beautiful, mysterious iterations.”
I stare at him, a lump in my throat, my eyes burning.
I have no words. No way to explain how deeply I respect the conviction of his belief, even when I am so empty of corroborative experience to embrace it. Listening to him talk, I feel glimmers of what he’s known, how he’s encountered love and intimacy. But mostly, what I feel is a profound sense of how far my life experience has been from what he knows. Sadness washes over me.
“I think...” Carefully, I pull my hand from beneath his, then turn and glide my fingertips over his knuckles. “I think that is beautiful.”
“But you don’t see it that way,” he says after a beat.