I want to tuck it behind her ear but I resist, make myself look away because I don’t know what will happen if I touch her. I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop. Earlier, in the alleyway, I nearly kissed her knee while examining her wound, the urge so powerful it felt like an arrow to the chest, pinning me in place.
I didn’t. I don’t do that. I’m not a man who kisses women without permission, definitely not on knees, absolutely not in alleyways. There’s a progression to these things: a conversation, a drink, a date, a second date, a kiss, maybe more.
Life has patterns, systems, a proper order, and up until tonight, I’ve had no problem keeping that order but Thalia is a sudden bolt from the blue and I’m jumbled, disarranged.
“You don’t think there’s beauty and wonder in knowing how things work?” I ask, concentrating all my willpower on not moving her hair from her face.
“I think there’s something to be said for believing in magic,” she says.
Above the trellis, the heat lamp goes on again and a dozen heads turn upward, faces toward the heat, like so many sunflowers.
“Do you?” I ask as the flowers start to unfurl again, lifting themselves.
“Of course not,” Thalia says, her lips quirking again, like they’re about to move into a smile. “Not in magic. In magical, yes. I believe in a space between seeing and understanding, where what’s in front of you seems impossible until suddenly, it isn’t.”
“You like not knowing?” I ask, still looking down at her.
“I like feeling as if there’s more to this world than I could comprehend,” she says, slowly, her eyes following a flower. “I like that moment before logic and reason kick in, where you see something astonishing and you think, maybe there really is magic in the world and maybe anything is possible.”
I laugh, softly, and she looks over at me, a half-smile on her lips.
“I don’t actually believe in magic,” she says, a little defensively, and I shake my head.
“No,” I say. “What you call magic I call anxiety.”
Thalia lifts one eyebrow. The heat lamps switch off, and her face goes from desert sunset to moonlight. A couple behind us wanders off, and although we’re right by the entrance to the gardens — we haven’t gotten far — suddenly I feel like we’re alone, somewhere private.
I want to kiss her. I want her to tell me about magic and the spaces between things and I want to kiss her, taste her, sift her hair through my fingers.
“I can’t stand not knowing,” I admit. “I never could. I live for that moment when things fall into place, when the mechanism’s revealed. When everything makes sense again.”
“So you read the plaques,” she says, finally brushing the strand of hair from her cheek.
“When I was a kid, my mom took my older brother and I to see a magic show,” I say. “It was the usual stuff, card tricks, rabbit out of a hat, you know. And it drove me completely insane.”
She laughs. It feels like the sun just turned on.
“I hated not knowing how it worked,” I go on. “I hated that there was this guy, on stage, lying to all of us about what he was doing, telling us it was magic when it was just sleight-of-hand that he wouldn’t explain, and I hated that I couldn’t figure it out. So I went home and learned a bunch of magic tricks so I could understand what was really happening.”
“Did it work?” she asks.
“The magic tricks?”
“I mean, did knowing soothe you?” she asks. “Once you knew that it was just a flick of the wrist here, a misdirection there, did you feel better?”
We’re facing each other now, her dark eyes searching mine, and I have the sensation that I’m a cipher being unscrambled, my numbers and letters and symbols rearranged into a message that makes sense to the right reader.
I feel like this girl I don’t even know is undoing me.
“I did,” I tell her, thinking back to me, nine years old, shuffling a deck of cards again and again. “I revel in the pieces falling together the way that you revel in not knowing.”
She’s smiling. Still giving me that look, like she’s decoding me.
“Is that the real reason?” she asks, head tilted.
“I knew card tricks well before I ever touched a book about how to be a pickup artist, thanks,” I say, one eyebrow raised.
“Okay, defensive,” she says, but she’s laughing again. “I meant was needing to know how it worked the real reason you learned all those tricks?”
I stay quiet, gently unraveling.
“Or did you hate that some guy in a sweaty tux was trying to pull the wool over your eyes?” Thalia goes on. “I hear you can’t stand that.”
“If you’re fishing for an apology that I pretended to leave the bathroom and didn’t, I don’t have one to give,” I tell her. More people come up to the morning glory sculpture. Someone bumps my arm and apologizes, but I barely notice.