Signals

I woke up with a plan. It was not a complicated plan. It did not require equipment or significant preparation. It required only that I be a normal, functioning adult woman who was capable of making her interest in another person reasonably clear without embarrassing herself.

I had done this before. I was sure I had done this before. At some point in my life, before France and before snowstorms and before men with composed faces and warm hands, I had successfully communicated romantic interest to another human being, and it had gone fine.

I was confident. I came downstairs at eight o'clock wearing the nicest thing I had brought with me, which was a dark green jumper that did something good for my complexion and that two separate people had told me was flattering. I had also brushed my hair with actual intention, rather than the cursory gesture I had been giving it since arriving in France.

Julien was at the kitchen table reading. He was wearing a plain grey shirt with the sleeves pushed up, and his hair was slightly disordered from sleep; he looked entirely unreasonable. I sat down across from him. He looked up.

"Good morning," he said.

"Morning," I said, and smiled.

Not a normal smile. A specific smile. The kind that meant something.

He looked at me for a moment.

"There is coffee," he said.

He went back to his book.

I sat with my specific smile and my good jumper and looked at the side of his face.

Right.

I poured the coffee.

The second attempt came twenty minutes later.

Lucas had eaten breakfast with the speed of someone who had urgent business elsewhere and disappeared upstairs, leaving Julien and me alone in the kitchen. I brought my cup to the sink, rinsed it, and then, when Julien stood to do the same, I did not move out of the way. This was intentional.

In my experience, standing in someone's way in a small kitchen was a reliable method of creating proximity. The other person either asked you to move, which opened a conversation, or reached around you, which created contact. Both outcomes were acceptable. Julien looked at the sink. Looked at me.

"Can I—" he started.

"Oh, sorry." I stepped sideways.

He rinsed his cup, set it on the rack, and went back to his book. I stood at the sink. The plan had produced no measurable outcomes. I revised the plan. The third attempt was better conceived. At half past ten Lucas asked for help finding a book he had left somewhere downstairs, which required us all to search the living room, which required us all to be in the same space moving around each other in a way that seemed promising. I found the book under the sofa and held it up triumphantly.

"Got it," I said.

I turned too quickly standing up. My elbow caught the side of the bookcase. The small potted plant on the second shelf rocked dramatically, and I spent the next thirty seconds lunging to catch it, overcorrecting, and depositing a modest amount of soil onto the floor and my own socks. Julien watched this from across the room.

"Are you alright?" he said.

"Fine," I said. "Completely fine."

I handed Lucas his book.

There was soil on my sock.

Lucas inspected the plant with interest.

"It lost some dirt," he said.

"It's fine," I said. "Plants are resilient."

Julien had a look on his face that I recognised as the suppressed version of something. I chose to believe it was admiration.

The fourth attempt was during lunch. We had made sandwiches, or rather, Julien had made sandwiches and I had contributed by handing him things and making commentary, which he received with his usual patient expression. We ate at the table, and at some point, I rested my chin in my hand in a way that I believed looked thoughtful and possibly alluring.

Lucas looked at me.

"Does your neck hurt?" he said.

"No," I said.

"You are holding your head like it is very heavy."

"I'm just thinking."

"About what?"

"Things," I said.

Lucas accepted this and returned to his sandwich. Julien said nothing, but when I looked up he was looking at me with an expression I could not fully decode. It might have been curiosity. It might have been a concern. It might have been that he had noticed I was behaving strangely and was politely declining to say so. I sat up straight and ate my sandwich with dignity.

The fifth attempt was unplanned and therefore, ironically, the closest to successful. Lucas had gone upstairs for a nap, an arrangement Lucas considered beneath him but submitted to on Saturdays with the resigned air of someone honouring an old treaty. Julien was in the living room. I came in, intending to read, and found him standing on a chair reaching for something on the highest shelf.

I stopped in the doorway. His shirt had come untucked slightly on one side. The reaching had pulled it up just enough to reveal a strip of skin at his hip, and I was a reasonable adult woman who was not going to make anything of a strip of skin at someone's hip but my body apparently had not received this memo because it ceased to function normally for approximately four seconds.

I recovered.

"What are you looking for?" I said.

He glanced down at me from the chair.

"A book Lucas wants. Blue cover. I can see the spine, but I can't quite—"

"I'll hold the chair," I said, and moved forward and put both hands on the back of the chair near his legs, which were at approximately my eye level, which I had not fully considered before offering.

"Thank you," he said, in the normal tone of a person accepting help with a chair.

I looked at the wall.

"Got it," he said.

He stepped down from the chair, which required him to step past me since I was holding the back of it, which meant for one brief moment he was very close and slightly above me and then beside me and then at normal distance again holding a blue book.

"Thank you," he said again.

"Of course," I said, with what I hoped was an air of casual warmth rather than a woman who had just been staring at a wall.

He looked at me. Just for a moment, a slightly longer moment than handing someone a chair warranted, the particular look I had been collecting since the first night, direct and unhurried and giving nothing away and giving everything away simultaneously. Then he took the book upstairs. I sat down on the sofa. I was starting to wonder if I had imagined the hallway. Between the fifth attempt and the sixth, I sat in the kitchen and conducted a private audit.

The smile: not received. The sink blockade: abandoned after four seconds. The bookcase incident: actively counterproductive and resulted in dirty socks. The chin-in-hand at lunch: noted by a seven-year-old as a possible medical concern. The chair: the closest thing to success, and even that had ended with me studying the wall while he stepped past me at close range and said thank you in the voice of a man accepting ordinary help with an ordinary chair.

The problem, I decided, was not my intentions. The problem was that Julien was a very composed person who gave very little away, and I was apparently a person who, under mild romantic pressure, became someone who knocked over houseplants and made sustained eye contact with walls. I was still working out a different approach when Lucas solved the problem for me, as he occasionally did, in his entirely unconscious way.

The sixth attempt happened at four in the afternoon and involved a film. This was Lucas's doing. He had come back downstairs with the determined energy of a child who has decided what is going to happen and intends to make it happen through sheer force of personality. He had selected a film, queued it up, distributed blankets with the authority of someone who had thought about optimal arrangements, and positioned himself between Julien and me on the sofa with the look of someone who found this entirely reasonable.

The film was about a robot. It was charming. Twenty minutes in, Lucas shifted, redistributed himself with the complete physical ease of a child, and ended up lying across both our laps with his head on my knee and his feet on Julien's. Julien looked at me over the top of Lucas's head. I looked back. We were connected now, by a sleeping child and two laps and a blanket, closer than the sofa required and both aware of it. I shifted slightly. My arm, resting along the back of the sofa, was close to his shoulder. I let it settle just a fraction lower. Not touching. Very nearly.

Julien glanced at my arm. Then at the film. Then, slowly, he leaned back against the sofa cushion, which brought his shoulder into contact with my arm. Definite, unhurried contact. He did not look at me when he did it. He just settled there, watching the film, as though this were perfectly ordinary. My arm was no longer very nearly touching his shoulder. It was touching his shoulder.

I looked at the film. The robot was doing something brave and sad, and I retained absolutely none of it. Halfway through the second act, Lucas woke up, decided he needed water, untangled himself from both of us with complete disregard for the spatial arrangements he had created, and disappeared to the kitchen.

Julien and I sat in the sudden absence of the child between us. I was aware that I was now slightly closer to him than before. The warmth of his shoulder against my arm was still there, adjusted but not removed. I turned my head. He turned his at the same moment. We were quite close. His eyes dropped briefly, just briefly, to my mouth. Then Lucas came back with his water, and a biscuit he had found somewhere and reinstalled himself between us with the casual destruction of someone who had no idea what he had just interrupted.

"The robot is going to be okay," he announced, as though this was information we required.

"Good," Julien said.

His voice was entirely steady. I was less steady. The film ended. Lucas went upstairs to put his pyjamas on because it was, as he explained to us gravely, never too early to be prepared for bed. Julien and I were left in the dim living room with the television dark and the blanket still pooled between us. I decided that six attempts and a near-miss was sufficient intelligence gathering. I knew what I had seen in his eyes when he looked at my mouth.

"Julien," I said.

He looked at me.

"I am not very good at being subtle," I said. "I think I've been making that clear all day. So I'm going to stop trying."

He was very still.

"I like you," I said. "I think you know that. I think you've known it since at least the hallway and possibly before. And I think you like me. And I would very much like to stop pretending that neither of those things is true."

A pause.

A long one.

"The hallway," he said slowly, "and possibly before."

"Yes."

"And the kitchen. And the chair."

"The chair," I said, "was a genuine offer of assistance."

"The standing in front of the sink."

I opened my mouth.

Closed it.

"That was also—" I started.

"The smile this morning," he said. "The chin in the hand at lunch."

I looked at him. He was not quite smiling, but the territory around his eyes had changed in a way I was beginning to be able to read.

"You knew," I said.

"I suspected," he said. "I wasn't sure. You are not," he added, with the gravity of a man choosing his words thoughtfully, "the easiest person to read."

"That is," I said, "a very diplomatic way of saying I was obvious."

"You were not obvious," he said. "You were—" He paused.

"Subtle?" I offered.

"I was going to say interesting."

"Interesting," I repeated.

"Ellie."

"Yes."

He reached over and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, slowly, with the same deliberate care he had used in the near-dark the night before. His fingers stayed at my jaw after.

"I like you," he said. "I have liked you since at least the hallway. And possibly before."

He gave my own words back to me gently, and I felt the smile start before I could do anything about it, wide and uncontrolled and entirely undignified.

"Good," I said.

"Good," he agreed.

He was smiling now. A real one, the same unguarded smile I had caught once at the lunch table, brief and gone before I could study it. Except this time it stayed. It stayed, and it changed his whole face in a way that made it difficult to think clearly about anything else.

I thought about the last two days. The snowman and the kitchen and the hallway and the sofa and last night's near-dark and forehead against forehead and all the small accumulated moments of almost, all of them leading here, to this dim living room and a man smiling at me like I had said something he had been quietly hoping to hear.

It seemed, I thought, like a reasonable return on two days of houseplant-related humiliation.  From upstairs came Lucas's voice, announcing that he could not find his second slipper and requiring immediate assistance. Julien closed his eyes briefly.

"One moment," he said, to me or to the universe, it was hard to say.

He stood.

At the door he turned back.

"Don't go anywhere," he said.

I pulled the blanket over my knees.

"I'll be here," I said.

He went upstairs. I sat in the dim living room and listened to the distant, muffled sounds of a slipper being located, and felt something settle in my chest that was warm and unhurried and not frightening at all. Outside the snow had stopped. The world was very quiet and very white. I was, I thought, exactly where I was supposed to be.