“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.”
Michael wants, desperately, to touch her.
Not in some unwholesome way, not as if she is a prey animal and he is a wolf with hungry teeth, but Michael wants to touch her. He wants to smooth the hair back from her brow. He wants to press his lips to her cheek, her jaw, her ear. He is looking at her, so tired and so angry and so unbelievably sad, and he is thinking that there are few things he wants to do more than he wants to lay her down and promise tomorrow over and over, every day, until there is no more tomorrow to go into.
And Michael doesn't say this because Michael doesn't know he feels it until she is answering his question. It is just that one second he is folding his scarf, laying on her table next to the lonely plate, and the next he looks up as she's speaking and he is it so hard with the sensation that it makes him dizzy.
"I wouldn't call it moping." he says, when she's finished. "It's okay to be hurt when people have hurt you. There's no shame in that."
He doesn't say I'm so sorry I've hurt you because she must be tired of it, can only hear him beg for forgiveness so many times before it loses its meaning--and he thinks that, now, if he did any single thing that took the edge off just how sorry he is, for hurting her, for leaving her, and for coming back, crawling on his knees, asking her to want him like he wants her, that he would not know what to do.
Moira comes close, and Michael holds his breath. Moira shoves Michael toward the bed and he starts to fill with a blend of panic and confusion that does not go away when she sweeps toward the other side and tucks herself in. Michael is his again with the feeling, the deep-set ache of dear god, Moira, why that is starting to become familiar. It is a comfortable, if desperate, ache-- and when she looks up at him, wrapped in the soft, black sheet of her blanket, so incredibly tired and so endlessly guarded, it is almost all Michael can do to stay on his feet.
Why did you come back, truly? she asks, and in spite of himself Michael is tired, too. "If you must know," he begins, before sinking to his knees where he stands and leaning his head on the side of her bed, one cheek on a pillow of tangled white hair. He looks at her for a little too long, a little too kindly.
If Neerja is gone, what has Moira been doing? If Neerja is gone, just how sad has she been? The good-ache mixes with the bad-ache and everything in Michael tangles at once, making red and black knots where the should be the cool blue of the ocean. He sighs. It is not nearly as grim of a sigh as he feels.
"Something felt wrong. I mean, something usually feels wrong--I've been alive a long time and for most of that I've had the same feeling--but Isra asked me to go and I didn't want to go because you're here and--" Michael pauses for a moment, collects himself, and continues: "I looked at Isra and I was just incredibly worried for no reason and the only thing that made sense was... coming back. To you."
He tucks one side of his mouth in a smile, looking up at her from the mess of his hair against the dark shape of her bed. "I don't know. The only thing that makes sense is you."
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