Re: carnival: sparrow/matt
He knew what he wanted, but it didn't come with a price tag. He was working that out in his own mind, struggling against it. That could be old-fashioned, too, or modern. It was something he felt, either way, that resistance and low warning. He could thoroughly expose himself tonight if he wasn't careful. Not that anyone needed to send a beautiful woman looking for him to reel him in, he didn't suspect that of her.
He hadn't given it a second thought, standing up with her. He'd been thinking about her offer, about the shoes, about telling her she didn't need to wear them, but he had, hadn't he? He'd stood right up. That was something men didn't do much anymore, he knew that. "Guess I did," he said.
He watched as she sifted through layers of cloth to find the shoes, worn but intact and very pink. She lifted them out like a treasured artifact, like she thought that they might bring something back. She was sharp, observant. He would watch out for that.
These shoes weren't like the pair he remembered, which had never touched anything, he suspected, but the wood floor of a studio. He looked at her pink fingers hooked around the heels, but there was nothing.
"I might have made her up," he said.
The dancer who wore the shoes might have been part of a story he couldn't tell anymore, or he never have met her at all. Memory was arbitrary, at least his was. Of the things he could still remember that weren't strictly tactical, few made any kind of sense. He figured those pieces hung in because they were stronger, more vivid, maybe tied to something, but without any connective tissue there was no way to prove that. He filled in the blanks on his own, swapping out phrases and ideas as it suited the story. The ballet dancer was a partner, or a lover, or a bystander caught in the crossfire on the street corner outside her studio. Or she was no one, just a shade in somebody else's story, someone unrelated, in whose company his eyes had fallen on a pair of shoes on a shelf, and now that was all he had left of them.
He didn't know what had possessed him to answer that question honestly, but he didn't think she'd think he was crazy for saying it. People weren't supposed to admit that their memory had holes wide enough for a person to slip through, or that they lied to patch the gaps. It wasn't professional to admit that, or safe.
He had no excuse, except a long year of numbly scraping together something resembling an identity, a jumble of parts that didn't all fit, and a long, long time before where it didn't matter, even to him, whether he had one. He was of little risk to himself now, considering that he had no story, and nobody to tell it to. Except, apparently, pretty perfect strangers.
He looked at the shoes. They weren't the ballet dancer's shoes, whatever they were. She said she wanted to know what he wanted. "No," he said. "You dance better without them." And he offered her a hand to help her up from the floor.