Concerning the Response

  “Kevin. . . .” She was crying openly now, the sting of minute, crystalline miracles dropping onto hands he looked down to see were clasped in hers. “Kevin, let me help. Let me go with you. Or stay with you. You DO need me, because I need you. I love you.”

  And there it was. Like an electric jolt. All the hours spent pouring over innocuous words, searching for distilled hints, leading him here. And maybe it was that sense of liberation that gave him resolve, cards on that table that whatever else she did love him, empowering him. And because he loved her, he went back to the house alone.

Concerning the Poem

  Kevin cringed the moment his lips stopped moving. He’d said too much, revealed more than he should have, and Ivy was just looking at him. He started a faltering apology, promise to never bring that up again, then stopped himself. He saw saline gathering at the corner of her eyes. He didn’t know quite what else to say, so much needed to be said. And like relaxing a muscle he let it flow.
  “I was here earlier,” he told her quietly. “The other waitress said you had traded days, so I left, but anyway.” He made the effort to look her in the eyes, but between the rivules cascading down her cheeks and the army of emotion he always battled when he looked at her, he had to focus on the untouched plate of beignets instead. “I. . . . I wanted to ask you to come with me. I needed to. . . . go away. And more than that, I need. . . . I need you.”
  “Kevin –“ was all she got out before he cut her off.
  “But I don’t feel I can do that now. Leave, I mean. Or ask you. I mean, I need to work this out. Because you mean this much to me. I want you to have more than I am.”

Concerning Rilke

  Andrew the waiter appeared as if summoned, bestowing coffee and beignets. “Someone sent these back so you might as well have them.”
  “You’ve been well-trained, Dublin,” Kevin said with the ghost of a social smile.
  “Look, this kind of relates to when we talked earlier,” Ivy told him as Andrew left. “I’m sorry. I didn’t have the words I wanted to say.”
  “It’s okay,” Kevin said, and he meant it.
  “Rilke says you’ll live your way into the answer,” she continued. “Without realizing it.”
  “Nothing like a good German existentialist for hitting the nail.”
  “But it takes living in the question now, and the point is to live in everything. And that’s not something you see, just something you know among everyone’s interpretations. Like, well, like with love. I don’t really have a better example. There’s no destination, you just recognize where you are, and whatever lines other people draw don’t matter.”
  Kevin was silent, not from a lack of words but too many, jostling for a purchase in his mind. Then a sliver of poetry fell into his brain like a shaft of pure sunlight, and maybe he no longer feared but he felt his lips forming the words into quotation. Nerdua.
  “I love you as certain dark things are to be loved:
  “In secret, between the shadow and the soul.
  “I love you as the plant that never blooms,
  “But carries in itself the light of hidden flowers.”