The Folding Star
“I stared at the long, transparent miracle of his face, the slithering stack of hair, eyelashes still stuck with sleep, that brutally vulnerable lip. He was a slightly kitsch piece of work from an artist who carved in alabaster like flushed hard honey. The sleep-creases, a wisp of towel-fluff on a not yet daily razored jaw.
‘I love you.’ He looked down at his exercise book and aligned his red, black and blue felt-tip pens with its upper edge. I pumped off a few more rounds of silent ‘I love you’...s – it took two or three seconds only. ‘You should have said hello.’ ‘I’m afraid there was no time.’ Had he sensed the clumsy semi-panic of my sudden stride across the square? ‘I was with my friends.’ Oh his friends … I thought of that well-favoured, self-admiring trio and of the trite intimacy of the shorter, darker boy and girl with my Luc, and was almost on the point of telling him about my friends. He mustn’t see me as this lonesome crackpot. My heart was thudding, my own upper lip was dry, curled and stuck somehow to my teeth in a nervous rictus; I felt very warm.MoreLess
‘I love you.’ He looked down at his exercise book and aligned his red, black and blue felt-tip pens with its upper edge. I pumped off a few more rounds of silent ‘I love you’...s – it took two or three seconds only. ‘You should have said hello.’ ‘I’m afraid there was no time.’ Had he sensed the clumsy semi-panic of my sudden stride across the square? ‘I was with my friends.’ Oh his friends … I thought of that well-favoured, self-admiring trio and of the trite intimacy of the shorter, darker boy and girl with my Luc, and was almost on the point of telling him about my friends. He mustn’t see me as this lonesome crackpot. My heart was thudding, my own upper lip was dry, curled and stuck somehow to my teeth in a nervous rictus; I felt very warm.MoreLess
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