THE TROUBLE WITH BEAUTIFUL THINGS is that they’re so rarely seen — let alone heard, let alone touched — that attention becomes anathema to them. She lingers on the fringes of the room like wildflowers pressed between the pages of an antique book, lovely and forgotten and lovelier for being impossible to touch without ruin. There’s a looking-glass veneer quality to the evening, the chill of glass and mirror peering through endless refractions of your own reflection.
Once, she would have longed to come in from the cold, to be a part of something, to drink laughter like ambrosia and soak in the easy warmth of meaningless chatter. Oh, how she’d ached for it. With every unwilling, relentless inch of her. And yet over time, as summer spun onwards into fall and winter and the days grew long and indigo-veined, she found herself acclimatising to being alone.
It turns out you can survive almost anything if the only thing you need is you.
Lost somewhere in between thought and dream, she doesn’t see Eugene coming until he is paces away and already opening his mouth to speak. The shutter of her lashes betrays her astonishment, a momentary disarming. The arc of her chin as she considers him is pensive and perhaps even a touch playful.
❛ I suppose this would make me your knight in shining armour. ❜ Her gaze flickers to the small circle of dancers across the room, their eyes trailing him like fireflies in the dark. ❛ We shall have to keep you from stepping on my toes if we don’t want to indulge our audience’s expectations. ❜ She lifts her hand for her Eugene to take, slender fingers tapering instinctively like butterfly wings. ❛ But I suppose that’s why you came to me. ❜
WITHOUT A SECOND THOUGHT, Eugene takes her hand into his own and rests his other on her back carefully. She’s warm, and like a man who had been frozen he begins to melt. Whether it was due to her distinct American accent, or the feeling of not being brushed aside as he had often felt before, Eugene began to ease the tension held tightly in his shoulders.
“I see you have the arrogance of a knight as well,” he chuckles, “It is presumptuous of you to think I came to you specifically and not because you were the first person I laid eyes on.”
There is a camaraderie between them that is born from the feeling of mutual distrust. Like all Americans Eugene talks with, he feels a sense of normalcy. The music swells around them and for the first time in weeks, Eugene does not mind being drowned in a cacophony of sound. A man can only listen to Tchaikovsky so much before he too feels as though his head might roll off his body.
“Are you enjoying Moscow, or are you like me and simply tolerating it until we can be freezing in New York.”
He doesn’t step on her feet, but he does not dance with the grace of those surrounding him. As they twirl, so does he; as they glide across the room, he tries to follow. He does not lead so much as he imitates that which is already hard to decipher.