He was watching her with an expression she couldn't entirely categorize—something attentive and warm and slightly arrested, as though she had said something that landed in a place he hadn't expected it to reach. "It doesn't sound ordinary at all," he said.
"It's simple."
"Simple isn't the same as ordinary." He held her gaze. "Simple is usually the hardest thing to find."
She looked at him for a moment. "I suppose it is," she said quietly.
He smiled—that slow, one-sided thing that appeared on his face when he was genuinely amused rather than performing amusement. "I think I might know someone who fits that description," he said.
She blinked. "You do?"
"I do." He nodded with great seriousness. "I'll introduce you later. But right now—" He glanced toward the horizon, where the last light was fading into the deep blue threshold between day and evening. The temperature had dropped a degree or two, the beach wind picking up slightly as the sun went down. "I think I should get you home. It's getting late."
He stood from the beach chair and held out his hand. She looked at it—at the warm, open offer of it—and then placed her hand in his. His fingers closed around hers and she felt the warmth of his palm immediately, solid and real, and her pulse made a small, involuntary comment about this that she did her best to ignore.
They walked back from the water's edge toward the restaurant and then to the car, their hands separating naturally as they reached the vehicle—the easy, unforced way of two people who had spent an afternoon becoming comfortable with each other without making a project of it. The drive back through the city was quiet but not empty; it was filled with the particular quality of two people who have run out of the need to fill silence, which is its own kind of intimacy.
She caught herself glancing at him twice on the highway. Once when they passed under a streetlamp and the light moved across his face in a way that made his jaw look very defined and his eyes very green. Once when he said something quiet and half-laughing about the traffic, and she realized she already recognized the particular shape his voice took when he was being self-deprecating. Both times she looked away before he could catch her looking.
Both times she was fairly sure he had already caught her.
He pulled up outside the dormitory building and parked along the side, and she was already reaching for the door handle when she heard his door open. She paused. By the time she had gathered her bag from the footwell, he had come around to her side of the car and was standing at her door, his hand extended.
She looked up at him through the open door with an expression that was half-surprised and half something softer than that. He waited without impatience.
She took his hand and stepped out of the car.
What happened next happened in the compressed, slow-motion way that accidents and beautiful things tend to happen: too fast to prevent and too vivid to forget. Her foot came down at the wrong angle on the edge of the curb, her balance tipping forward before she could correct it, and she was falling—not dramatically, not dangerously, but certainly and suddenly—directly into his chest.
His arms came around her before she had finished falling.