Daro is vacuuming, and the thrum of the machine is like a blanket against the storm outside.
When she looms into his peripheral vision, he halts, startled, and switches off the cleaner, standing with one hand pressed to his chest. “Oh, my heart’s going like a rabbit!” he gasps.
They’re the first words he spoken to her.
“At least it’s going,” she says, with the hint of a smile.
He blinks, and laughs. “Oh yes, at least…”
She looks different when she smiles – less closed in, somehow. Daro sees her most evenings in the bookshop café, drinking something fragrantly spiced and milky that makes him think yearningly of his childhood in Assam. She sits at the window, freckled with raindrop shadows, sipping her chai. He observes her making spidery notes in the margins of books that seem randomly chosen: poetry, sci-fi, natural history, cookery.
In her hands now she has a book titled ‘Henri Matisse Cut Outs’. The cover art shows a curved white shape rather like a rabbit’s head with three upright rectangular ears. He watches as she eases it between the spines of a pair of antiquitarian atlases, touches her finger to her lips and whispers, “Sshhhh.”
He blushes, wordless, as she meanders away between the towering shelves. His hand wavers towards the art book, but he resists the urge.
There’s no rush, he tells himself. She’ll be back tomorrow.
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