“Sure.” He sat and I curled myself into his arms and the feel of them round me was perfect as well—just the right weight and pressure.
We stayed there like that without moving. Without saying anything. Slowly the floodwaters lowered still more and were followed behind by a dark seeping current of shame.
It went deeper than simple embarrassment. I couldn’t even imagine what Luc must be thinking; how much his opinion of me must have lowered.
I said, “I’m so sorry.” My voice hurt.
“You don’t need to be sorry.”
“Your brother…” I had no idea how much time had passed, but I knew I had ruined our plans for the lunch with his brother in Paris. My chance of a job.
“There’s no problem. I texted him. He understands.”
He was trying to make me feel better. I shook my head. Ordinary people, I knew, wouldn’t understand something like this. “No, he doesn’t. How could he? How—?” I was about to say, “How could you?” when I stopped talking because for the first time I’d noticed what lay on the table in front of the sofa: a booklet of Sudoku puzzles, with a pencil laid on top of it. It wasn’t my puzzle book, but one that looked a lot like it, and it was set out so tidily within my reach that it couldn’t have been a coincidence. Taking a moment and trying to think, I looked once more around the room, noticing all of the things Luc had done.
He had turned off the music. He’d closed the curtains to dim the light. He had stayed close but not too close. Kept calm. Moved quietly. Brought me a blanket.
I shifted my head on his shoulder to look at him. Study him.
Luc went on holding me. “Fabien understands meltdowns because he still gets them himself, sometimes. Not very often. He usually shuts down instead. But his meltdowns were very…spectacular, when we were young.”
What seemed strangest to me wasn’t what he was saying but how he was saying it, in the same tone people used when they talked about commonplace things like the weather.
I asked, to be perfectly certain, “Your brother has Asperger’s?”
“Yes.”
His brother who was, like me, a computer programmer. A skilled one, apparently, to have been put at the helm of developing Morland Electronics’s tactical and sonar systems. “And when did you…how did you…?”
“When we had breakfast,” he said. “That first morning, when you told me all you had learned about Jacobites.”
I felt my face flushing as I recalled how I’d monologued, talking and talking till Jacqui had signaled me. “You must have thought I was crazy.”
He turned his head then and looked down at me with those incredible eyes that could hold my world steady. “I thought you were beautiful.”
Just for that moment, while I looked at him and he looked back at me and those words hung suspended between us, I felt in my heart it might truly be possible, what we were trying to do. But the tear that I felt slowly trailing its way down my heated cheek hadn’t been caused by my meltdown. I brushed it away.
“I can’t do this,” I said. “Not to you. Not to Noah. I ruin things, Luc. I’m not capable—”
“Who told you that?” he asked quietly, as he had asked me that day in the old ruined troglodyte house, when I’d tried to convince him the first time that I couldn’t do real relationships. “Was it your cousin?”
“No.” Jacqui had always looked after me, guarded me, watched out for “friends” who were taking advantage of my lack of social awareness, my need to be liked, for their own ends—to help with their homework or do little chores for them. “Real friends,” she’d told me once when she had rescued me from a posh restaurant where four girls had taken me out for a birthday lunch and left me stuck with the bill, “don’t just take from you all the time. Real friends look after you.” She’d been especially watchful of boys, though there hadn’t been many. My few teenage boyfriends had not hung on more than a couple of months before backing away in what quickly became a predictable pattern: they’d promise to call me and then never would, and I’d wait while my hopefulness slid into heartbreak.
“Why do they always leave me?” I’d asked Jacqui through my tears one night. “What’s wrong with me?” And she of course had reassured me there was nothing wrong with me at all, but even though I hadn’t yet been diagnosed with Asperger’s I’d felt my difference painfully.
When I’d started university, my cousin had been going through the first of her divorces. It had been a messy battle that had claimed much of her energy. I’d felt alone, and lonely. And in one of my computer science classes, I’d met Gary.
He’d been captain of the rugby team, a golden boy in every way, blond haired and so incredibly good-looking that the first time he had spoken to me I’d assumed he’d done it by mistake. But he had asked me out and taken me to dinner and he’d danced with me and kissed me and by half term I’d been totally in love. So when he had assured me that a programming assignment we’d been given was supposed to be collaborative, I’d believed him. I had reasoned I must simply have misunderstood the lecturer’s instructions, wrongly thinking we were meant to work on that assignment independently. Instead I’d worked with Gary and another classmate, Erica.
She’d been a friend as well. We’d worked together as a team before, and Erica had commented on how well Gary treated me, and I’d said I was honestly amazed that he had chosen me at all, and even more amazed he hadn’t left me yet, as all the others had. We’d talked of past relationships, and Erica had told me that I ought to have more confidence. “He really likes you,” she had said of Gary. I’d believed her, too. And being—as I often was—the first to solve the problem of the program we were working on, I’d freely shared my code, only to find myself called up before the head of the department, charged with cheating.