Dialogue

His eyes are small. He doesn’t look like he walks much. Neither does he look like he talks a lot. His face isn’t one that you can read and know stories of how long he pored over his work to get it right. Or how his faint wrinkles show long hours of reading. You can’t infer that kind of information. But when he looks at something, you would know exactly what he’s thinking. Like the other day, he was looking at the cat sitting smug on the wall. You could see he was thinking of a yellow house where he’d leave the cat, lock him in and never turn back. His gaze would nonchalantly stride from the cat to his cup of tea, but you’d be sure he was thinking of trapping the cat in a bright yellow house. And one other day we were at the market. A brawl erupted and I held his hand. He calmly held my hand in his and took me aside. We walked past the two men ridiculously trying to grope each other to injure but hopelessly missing each time. I looked at them and looked up at him. He didn’t twitch a muscle but the way he looked at those men told me he was hoping he could be one of them. Just for the sheer boyish candor of it all. Just so that he and his friend could ram a few punches and land a few kicks. When the crowd would try to pull them apart all he would do was walk away with the man he was fighting.

On one night it was raining cats and dogs while we sat in our armchairs snug. I was reading a book and he was toying with his cup of tea I’d made him. I watched him drink a little. He then looked at me and winked. I laughed and blew him a kiss before going back to my reading. While I was lost in the solving of Timothy’s murder, I heard him put more logs into the fireplace. I slid further into my chair, turned a page and looked up. He was watching the flames dance. I saw his round face watch the orange waves in motion and thought of how I’d fallen in love with him. He didn’t look at me, but I knew he was watching the flames and thinking how he’d fallen in love with me too. I smiled and went back to reading about how Timothy was murdered by his wife.

I know he looked at me and smiled.