even here, even at the beginning of love,
her hand leaving his face makes
an image of departure
and they think
they are free to overlook
this sadness.

And she comes to his hand
but she's not really tame
she longs to be lost,
he longs for the same.

She came back with the glass and her fingers, cold from holding the glass, touched mine, and I held them for a moment and then let them go slowly, as you let go of a dream when you wake with the sun in your face and you have been in an enchanted valley

He pulled the other hand from her eye. The handkerchief dropt: He might see that it was wet and heavy with her tears. Fain would she have turn’d her blubber’d eye from him. He held both her hands, and burst out into a laugh

She already knew that he’d decided to leave — knew before he opened his mouth to speak. But for one last minute, she could pretend that he was hers to keep. For one last minute, she held him, and let him hold her.

. . . she'd seen a flicker of something in his face that wasn't mere friendship, and they'd hugged, and she'd felt . . .

Best not to dwell on that hug, on how like home it had felt, on how a kind of insanity had gripped her at that moment, and she'd imagined him saying 'come with me' and known she'd have gone if he had.

Another sigh came from the window — quite a resigned sigh. 'She's life and hope and happiness, my whole world now.' He felt the quiver of a tear on his eyelid.

He almost told her everything right then, that very moment. But you grab a moment, or you let it pass. He let it pass.

In a while he reached across the table and took her hand in his. He could not have known that he was trying to comfort a building that had been struck by lightning.

A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free.

He knew it would come, and soon, maybe even this 12:07. The moment she would slip from his grasp, no matter how tightly he held on.

He snatched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his burred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.

Sorry for her loss. And he had hugged her. Like he knew what she was holding inside, this secret grief that had hardened where her hidden love once lay.

It was as though her woman's hand was assisting him to make some minute readjustment of the machinery of his life.