He handed her back her heart.
“It didn’t fit,” he said looking down at the organ.
“Are you sure?” Claire shook her head in confusion.
“Yeah,” he half smiled in awkwardness, eyeing the curl her head tilt had knocked loose.
Claire tucked the heart away in her messenger bag. She carefully arranged a clean handkerchief around it. It would be expensive to have the heart reattached, she thought. She wasn’t sure that she had the funds at the moment. Claire could feel Corey continuing to watch her.
“Oh. Okay,” she muttered for something to say. She thought that she should walk away now, but continued to stand still. Stock still. She was wearing the polka dotted skirt Corey had said he loved once. Wearing it made her sway.
She’d smelled like pennies, he though, not all the time, but when she wore this copper necklace that she loved. She shone and smelled like change. That night listening to the sounds of the mist stand still he drank his too hot cup of coffee. Held his cigarette between two stained fingers. Unlit. He let his heart beat. Beat against his healed ribs. Against his unworked chest. Corey couldn’t swallow her away, couldn’t leave her either, couldn’t cut her off the wall. The cheap mug burned him. It was satisfying at first, until it wasn’t and he had to set it down. Save himself. He rubbed his hand roughly against his face, pulled slightly at his hair, slouched forward curling his spine over his knees.
They’d arrested two generals the newspaper he’d borrowed from his neighbor’s welcome mat informed him. Two war heroes who had slaughtered a town of old women to hold the line. Arrested them in exchange for chocolate and cigarettes. For trading rights. The right to sell something other than their memories and second daughters. They looked good, he noted holding the paper closer to his face, these bartered goods. They looked tailored and well fed. Corey’s own stomach fumbled audibly and he took a gulp of coffee. Slightly cooler. Bearable.
Claire had been in love with a coworker when they met.
“Corey, this is Claire,” Marie had introduced them as an after thought at her birthday party.
“Delighted,” she teased and curtsied after he’d ducked his head to bow slightly by accident. He’d been taken off guard.
Corey was in love with a woman named Jane.
“So, how do you know Marie?” Claire asked in a disarmingly confident manner.
“She’s married to my brother.”
“You’re Tom’s brother!” she’d exclaimed with genuine joy.
Tom had told Corey about Claire, of course. Mentioned her in passing a few times and pointedly at least once. She was a friend and coworker of Marie’s. She laughed loudly, baked, and had nice hair.
“How’s her ass?” Corey had asked his brother in jest.
“Yup,” Corey responded to Claire’s exclamation, “as far as I know.”
Claire smiled to one side and rolled her eyes. She was pretty he noted, but thought nothing of it.
Jane was gone by the time he got home that night. She’d cleared out her side of the closet, pulled her shoes from beneath the bed, and left a note. “I need space to think,” it read each time Corey read it over the coming months. Never said more or less. He hung it on the fridge next to the Bai Mint Thai take out menu.
“Marie saved me from death by boredom,” Claire offered over cappuccinos. It had been three months since they’d met. Corey needed out of the apartment and Claire owed Marie a favor.
“Boredom?” he challenged, one dark eyebrow arched in doubt.
“Sever,” she emphatically confirmed. “We worked together at the bank before everything went wonky and the world collapsed.”
“Ph, that does sound terribly boring,” Corey teased.
“Well, that part wasn’t so bad. Or, really, that part was awful if not terribly boring. It was everything leading up to the apocalypse that bored to tears.”
“And, now?”
“And now we’re real friends.”
“And you?”
“And we what?”
“No, you do what now that you don’t work at the bank?”
“Oh, I consult.”
“Hm,” he nodded. Claire liked this answer because people rarely questioned it. “So you consult and she moms now,” Corey stated.
“She does indeed. And you?” Claire questioned, scrapping the foam from the edge of the cup before placing the tiny spoon in her mouth.
“I read.”
“You read?” Claire looked up in surprise.
“And paint.”
“Wait, what? For a living?”
“Marie really didn’t tell you anything about me did she?”
“No, not really,” she smiled and shrugged slightly. “So you paint? Like, what?”
Corey took a deep drink of his cappuccino, enjoying the brief bitterness. He hated this question, but knew that it could not be avoided. “Canvases.”
Claire drew her eyebrows together in annoyed confusion.
He wondered if she groomed them. They looked too perfect to be natural, but just wild enough to be real. This early observation would later amuse Corey, after he became too well aquatinted with the diligence of Claire’s body hair routine.
“Paint what on canvasses, Pablo?” Claire fired back with snarky precision.
Corey laughed. Everyone had been so delicate with him since Jane left. Had carried him around like a hallow egg shell, handing him carefully from friend to friend in clear terror of dropping him. No one had used sarcasm around him. No one had snarked. “Mostly trees and faces recently,” his eyes smiled back at Claire in silent gratitude. “And things I want to remember.”
Claire enjoyed the hiss of the electric kettle, the moment the swirl of milk conquered the tea, and the slide of melting butter across the toast. She thought of continental drift.
Their first breakfast together was a revelation to Corey. It was like witnessing a benediction or a practiced act of contrition. Each movement in the pink gray of Claire’s kitchen was measured and precise. Her body hummed with efficiency and grace. Her bare feet tapped the floor in patterned step.
He had stayed over on her couch the night before. They had been out to dinner, pizza at some corner place, and gone back to Claire’s for wine and privacy. Claire and Corey had been seeing each other for two months. Had been seen together. Had sat publicly in communal contemplation and conversation. But never touched.
When Corey thought back on this first breakfast together, he remembered that her lips had looked bruised and her curls had refused to keep away from her eyelashes. And she glowed.
