She looked up at him -- he was tall in the way of the garden, in the way of something built for a scale the room was slightly too small for -- and whatever moved through her face was not performance.
Not the composed expression of a being delivering a moment. The expression that arrived before the decisions did.
The face of someone standing in front of the whole point of everything, and finding the point to be exactly what they had believed it would be, which was not a small thing to find.
She put her arms around him.
He went very still.
Not the lesson-stillness. Not the catalogue-building attention of the forty-five degrees.
The stillness of something that has just encountered a category of experience it has never had access to and is receiving it with every available part of itself because no part of itself knows what to do except receive it completely.
The warmth came through the contact.
