Read Online In Between Frames by Judy Lin - Free Book Online

Miles?”
     
    “I wanted to see you,” he said.   “I couldn’t stop thinking about you all day today—and you know the camera I told you about?   I shot off another roll with it, hoping to see you appear on it.”
     
    “You have a crush,” she said.   “It’s just a crush.”
     
    “Probably,” he admitted.    “But I haven’t been this smitten since I dated my…late wife.”
     
    “You’re a widower?” she asked, her expression softening.   “You didn’t tell me that last night.”
     
    “She died seven years ago,” he said.   “I’ve had some time to get used to her absence, but until last night, I didn’t think it was possible that I could get past it.”
     
    “I’ve been wondering how anybody could do that,” Sam said.   She poured the boiling water into the mugs, and brought them to the table.   She took the chair that Mabel had occupied.   “After David died, I couldn’t imagine being with anybody else, but it was all I could think about.”
     
    Miles reached over and took her hand.   It wasn’t something he usually did with women because of all the sexual harassment lawsuits these days, and he was embarrassed by how tentative the gesture was.   But Sam didn’t fight it.   She was looking into her mug, swirling it with her free hand while she spoke, “David truly had a perfect life.   He was the chief doctor at Charing Cross, on his way to becoming the head of the hospital.   He had Mabel, and we were talking about a second child   We were happy and our lives were so perfect that when he died I didn’t know if I could be with anybody else even though I also knew that   I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life alone.”   She wiped a tear away.   “I’m sorry, I’m not making any sense.”
     
    Miles shook his head.   “You make perfectly good sense,” he said.   “I remember feeling the same way when Nellie died.”
     
    “So seven years go by, and you never found anybody?”
     
    Miles smiled sadly.   “It wasn’t for a lack of trying, at least not at first.   My friends tried to get me back into the dating game, but I just wasn’t able to let her go.”
     
    “And now you think I’m the one?” A smile played at the edges of her lips—she was being coy.   Miles couldn’t resist smiling back.
     
    They stayed up late, talking and sipping at their mugs of tea.   Sam offered him their futon, and Miles accepted.   She went to the bedroom to get sheets and the extra pillow, and then came back, grinning.   She beckoned him to follow her:
     
    Mabel had indeed stayed up reading in her mother’s bed, and she’d passed out, folded into an anatomically improbable position—Miles didn’t think that it was possible for an arm to bend that way.   Sam pointed at the spiral staircase that led to the attic.   Miles understood, and gently picked up the sleeping girl.   “Daddy?” she murmured.  
     
    Miles didn’t know what to say.   He carried her up the stairs and tucked her into the little bed she slept in, but it felt incomplete to leave her there like that, without kissing her on the forehead, so he did.   Mabel smiled in her sleep, but for some reason, as he tiptoed back down the stairs, Miles felt like he was the one who received the benediction of grace.
     
    ~~~
     
    Sam woke up early the next morning, vaguely recalling the long conversation with Miles and how nice it was to be able to connect with someone who knew what she was going through.   There would be something she could use in her book in that, she thought:   the relief, the opening of a floodgate of emotions she didn’t even know she had, the almost bodily pleasure a conversation could give.   Today would be a good day for writing, she decided, and she stumbled, bleary-eyed, into the kitchen, set up the coffee, slid a few rolls into the toaster oven—
     
    “Oh my god,” she gasped.  
     
    She’d forgotten he was sleeping on pull-out sofa.   And she was out here,