Slime Evolution

Chapter 490 - A Shy Goodbye

The way back was made almost entirely in silence.

It wasn’t the kind of silence Lohan knew from the other moments of his life, the heavy, empty kind that settled in when no one had anything to say, nor the tense silence of the days when the guild was under pressure.

It was something new, warm, that filled the whole space of the car like a third presence, and that made every small sound take on a strange weight, the hum of the ion turbines, the creak of the leather when one of them shifted, the soft sound of Isabella’s breathing beside him.

He kept his eyes fixed on the route drawn across the windshield, his fingers firm on the wheel, and made an enormous effort to look like a normal person, someone who drives a car and thinks about anything else.

But his heart was beating so hard that he was, for a moment, genuinely worried she might be able to hear it, and the blue light on his forehead, which he was trying to keep dark, pulsed faintly every time his gaze slid toward the passenger seat.

Isabella, for her part, was looking out the window with a concentration out of proportion for a landscape she had already seen hundreds of times.

Her hands rested in her lap, and her fingers moved now and then, lacing together and coming apart, and he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, that she was biting her lower lip to hold back a smile that refused to go away.

The white ear closest to him, which she had tried to hide under her hair after the garden, and which still refused to stay still, turned toward him when he cleared his throat, and turned back when he went quiet.

’She’s listening to everything I do,’ Lohan thought, and the idea made him smile to himself at the dashboard.

At one point, her hand, which rested on the center console between the two seats, came within a few centimeters of his.

He noticed it with frightening clarity, as if the centimeters had turned into kilometers, and stayed there, with his left hand on the wheel and his right hand resting on the gearshift, calculating, with the precision of someone planning an attack, the best way to make a simple gesture without taking his attention off the route and without breaking anything.

She was the one who solved the problem.

Without looking at him, without saying a word, Isabella slid her pinky finger along the console until it touched the side of his hand, and left it there, still, as if planting a small flag in new territory.

Lohan nearly slammed the accelerator by reflex.

He controlled his breathing, and thought of the egg, and closed his hand slowly, a fraction of a millimeter at a time, until her pinky was caught between his fingers, and the two of them stayed like that, holding hands through the smallest of connections, without looking at each other, staring with all their might out of the car, their faces so red that an outside observer would have concluded the heater was broken.

That lasted until the mansion.

The Porsche landed in front of the wrought iron gate, and Lohan, before he had even shut off the engine, did what had become a reflex: he swept the landing space with his eyes, searching for a patch of red, a Rolls Royce, an elegant figure with a curious smile.

Nothing.

Only the garden, the low sun painting the leaves gold, and the silence.

"She’s not here," Isabella said, softly, as if she had read his mind, and her voice came out a little hoarse. "My mother. She’s on a business trip until Sunday."

"I wasn’t looking," Lohan replied, and the two of them looked at each other for the first time since leaving the restaurant, and began to laugh at the same time, a short, nervous laugh that broke part of the tension.

He got out of the car, walked around, and opened the passenger door, this time without the exaggerated bow, only with his hand held out, and she accepted it, and stepped down slowly, with her shoes in her hands and her bare feet touching the warm stone of the courtyard, and stood before him, her face lowered and her hair falling around her cheeks.

"Thank you for today," she said, and raised her eyes for a second, and lowered them again. "I... it was the best day I’ve had in a long time. Maybe the best of all."

"For me too," he replied, and the sincerity of the sentence surprised him. "Thank you for taking me. And for the garden. And for the..."

He stopped, because the word that came next was one neither of them was ready to say out loud on a sidewalk, and she understood, because her ears flattened slightly and the pink in her cheeks climbed up to her forehead.

The silence that followed was the longest and most charged of all.

Lohan saw, with an almost painful clarity, the way she looked at his mouth, and the way she leaned in a fraction of a centimeter, and the way his whole body wanted to answer that, and for a moment he thought it was going to happen again right there, in front of the gate, in front of the whole world.

But then Isabella took a step back, with a trembling laugh, and raised a hand in a small, clumsy wave.

"I need to go in," she said, quickly. "Before I do something stupid. Or before I do another stupid thing, I mean. Good night, Halon. I mean, good afternoon. Good afternoon!"

"Good afternoon, Isabella," he replied, and couldn’t stop the enormous smile that spread across his face.

She turned and walked toward the door, at a pace much faster than her usual elegance would allow, and went up the three steps almost running, and before disappearing inside, glanced over her shoulder one last time, and Lohan saw her golden eyes shine, and the white ear quiver, and the door close.

He stood there a few more seconds, looking at the spot where she had vanished.

There was no kiss, and he realized he wasn’t the least bit disappointed about it.