Page 34 of Alone With You in the Ether

“Cold?” Aldo asked.

Something like that. “It’s very… austere, isn’t it?”

“That’s a cold word,” he noted with half a smile. “And yes, it is. I find it sort of refreshing.”

He leaned forward, picking up one of the paperback missals from the chair in front of him. He wore no jewelry, she observed. He was notably unornamented. He didn’t bite his nails (Regan did, sort of, but painted them regularly to keep herself from it). Instead, Aldo’s fingernails were neatly trimmed, possibly even filed in addition to clipped. They contained those little pale half-moons she rarely saw on her own fingers. He smoothed his hand over the cover of the book, setting it squarely on his lap, and promptly commenced his fidgeting.

He fidgeted a very specific way. It wasn’t knee-jiggling. It was closest to a finger-tapping, though it transitioned very quickly to what Regan thought at first was aimless drawing but then realized was purposeful writing. Scrawling, actually, in numbers. Math equations? Probably. He moved with a sequential rhythm from tapping to drawing to scribbling. She nearly missed it when they were supposed to stand, occupied as she was with her attempts to translate his motions.

Mass was familiar, the words and refrains all the same. The psalm that day was about wings; Catholicism yearned for flight as much as it championed a healthy sense of fear. The institution was particularly human that way.

At some point during the homily, Regan returned her attention to Aldo, who was definitely thinking now. His lips were a different shape when he was considering something, almost as if he were on the brink of mouthing it aloud to himself. His fingers fluttered, then stilled for a moment, and then returned to drawing. A hexagon, she noted. He drew the same shape, over and over, and then paused.

He turned his head, looking at her.

Caught, she registered with a grimace.

His mouth quirked up with a question, accompanied by a furrow of his brow. All the energy he’d expended on whatever problem he’d been solving transferred to her, and she felt the impact of it like a blow, landing squarely in her chest. She tried to think what it was that made his mouth so appealing and couldn’t.

She reached out, tentatively, and every inch of him went still.

He was skittish, she realized, half-charmed, and she considered retracting her hand, only she’d never been the ease-in sort of person. Instead she rested her fingers on his knuckles, briefly, and lifted his hand to transfer his palm from his left thigh to her right. Not in a sexual way, in her opinion. There was a certain area of space she considered utilitarian, and though Aldo had gone slightly rigid with uncertainty, she made a gesture she thought he’d recognize:Continue, she beckoned, and he frowned at her for a moment, then nodded.

He drew a hexagon carefully against the fabric of her skirt. Beneath his touch, she felt her skin pebble, a little chill settling around the cage of her ribs. She nodded again, dismissing it.

Then Aldo started writing numbers; she recognized the shape of the number two, then a five (he crossed the bridge of it at the end), then eventually recognized the letter z. He was one of those people who drew a horizontal line through his letters and numbers. He drew something like a sigma, more scribbles, then a broad horizontal line. He was definitely doing math, and she reveled in her possession of it; in being the instrument to channel his thoughts.

Then the shape of his formulas changed, his energy shifting along with it. He was drawing faster now, as if he’d caught onto something. She could see that his hesitation had faded; he was no longer concerned with the fact that he was touching her, which she wasn’t sure whether to find exciting or insulting. The flame of his thoughts picked up and she rapidly lost track of what he was writing. Every now and then, she caught a number. A triangle. Once or twice she felt certain he’d drawn a question mark, as if reminding himself to come back later, only he wouldn’t come back later. The medium of her skin—of her limb, in fact, which she was holding uncharacteristically still, not wanting to disrupt him—would likely not be there when he came back to it. His touch was quick and light. It fluttered over her and she fought the urge to grab his hand, to place it somewhere else that would benefit from this degree of frenetic concentration. Either it was cold in the church or something else had made her keenly aware of the warmth radiating from his touch.

He was left-handed, she realized belatedly, pondering the rarity of that for a moment. It occurred to her that Aldo Damiani was probably something of a rarity himself.

Then the homily ended and Aldo stopped scribbling, registering the shift in atmosphere and taking his cue from the people around him. He wasn’t totally oblivious, then, though he hadn’t seemed to notice that his leg was now pressing into hers. They were touching from hip to knee, a straight line of joint conjecture. He lifted his hand in the air, his fingers curling into his palm for a moment with indecision, and then he carefully retracted it.

Regan felt a spark go out of her, rising, ironically, to profess her faith.

Beside her, Aldo continued reciting things from memory. This was something he did every week, she recalled, so that made sense. This was part of his ritual. He had done it every Sunday before her, and he would do it every Sunday from this point on. She wondered how often he let other people in, considering for a moment that perhaps she was not the first, but then she dismissed it nearly as quickly. She knew, after all, which of his motions looked practiced and which of them did not. He wasn’t accustomed to someone being this close to him. This was visibly unrehearsed.

She wasn’t sure what to do with that revelation.

The priest blessed the body and blood of Christ and Regan thought nothing of it. In fairness, she thought little of vampirism, either. Nothing in her world was really grotesque. Her mind wandered elsewhere (a sin, surely, but the least of them), and it wasn’t until Aldo reached for her hand that she remembered, suddenly, the way this usually went.

His palm was warm and dry, closing gently around her knuckles. This prayer she knew. This one even Marc probably knew, WASP that he was. Regan held Aldo’s hand loosely, not quite breathing. She lamented not being able to take stock of him in further detail until she remembered there was no compelling reason to hold back.

She would have only one more conversation with Aldo Damiani after this one.

Regan slid her hand forward, traversing the peaks and valleys of his knuckles with her fingers. She felt him look at her, a little surprised, but she was looking at his hand. There were scars on his knuckles; faint ones. One or two on his fingers. She drew over them horizontally, then vertically, down each of his fingers and up to the beds of his nails, tracing the cuticles.

The prayer ended.

He didn’t let go.

She turned his palm over, inspecting it. She ran her fingers over his life line, which curved from the side of his hand and branched off in two, possibly three, before ending around the tendon of his thumb. She closed her hand around his wrist, measuring it, and looked up to find his eyes, gauging his reaction.

He was watching her with curiosity, but not confusion.

She returned her attention to his hand.

Above the life line was the head line, then the heart line. She remembered this from a book she’d read as a girl, never removing it from the library. Her mother had Old World superstitions, but Regan hadn’t been able to stop herself from seeking out whatever new ones she could find. Both lines stretched broadly across his palm, neat and orderly. Not like hers, all splintered and webbed. She always thought hers meant she that had two hearts, two heads, two faces. She stroked her thumb over his knuckles, an expression of gratitude-reassurance-apology.

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