She didn’t know. She shook her head. His words sounded like they were coming through mist.
“We’ve talked about this.”
She shook her head again. The inertia felt good. She wanted to keep shaking her head forever, but a headache was pulsing up her neck. Lai sighed.
“Please say something,” Maria said.
“What do you want?”
“I asked you.”
“I want to hear what you have to say.”
She wiped at her cheeks, but it was no use. New tears got caught in her sleeve. “Don’t make me leave,” she said.
She felt the air move sharply around him as he looked at her. “What do you mean?” he said. “I wasn’t going to ask you to leave.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Maria.” He hooked his feet around the legs of his chair, his torso tilting forward. “Is that what you’ve been thinking about?”
“What?” Maria looked up and rubbed her nose. “What’s wrong?” Her sleeve came away shiny with mucus.
His mouth was soft, turned down in a flattened O. Maria wasn’t sure what had softened it. She felt her legs go rigid beneath her. His face was open with what she would only later recognize as disbelief. His hands spread wide against his knees, palms pressing so hard into his corduroy pants that she thought they must’ve been striped by the time he moved to touch his face as he said, “Even after all this time, you don’t know.” Fingers grooved the skin of his cheeks. “How could you not know?” His voice yielded as a pinky slid against the edge of his bottom lip.
He continued to stare at her. He was like the person Maria had once been, who she hadn’t been even for some years before she met Lai, who she saw reflected in the way his shoulders thrust forward even as the rest of his body strained away from her, chest collapsing, stomach caving inward, a hunched person drinking alone at a party, frightened, disdainful, glazed over with stubbornness, unable to see anything but what came through her own eyes. She realized she hadn’t done what he’d wanted from her, but she’d also never fully known what he wanted—although she doubted if Lai would’ve known had it been him—and now he’d seen all the corners of what she didn’t know. She sniffed. She sandpapered her sleeve across her nose once more. The mucus from before rubbed a wet trail into her face, sticky, and she wiped it away with her fingers, touching them together to feel the viscosity before brushing it onto her pants, the scraping against the fabric almost as loud as the dread that filled her, knowing that Lai was waiting for her to speak.