Lydia adjusted the strap and smiled when Graham looked away.
That was the part she liked. Not the looking. Men looked. They had been looking at her, in one way or another, since she was old enough to know what a mirror could do. What caught her attention was the way Graham tried to be decent about it.
She was forty-six, sitting in a quiet lounge where the lamps made everyone look softer. Her green dress was modest enough for dinner and close enough to make silence feel warm. Graham stood beside the empty chair with one hand around his hat, sixty-nine and trying not to seem pleased that she had asked him to stay.
The strap had shifted while she laughed. Nothing showed. Nothing indecent happened. Still, Lydia let her fingers rest on her shoulder a second longer than necessary.
Graham studied the floor.
You missed it, she said.
I was trying to.
That answer made her laugh under her breath. A careless man would have bragged. A lonely man might have rushed. Graham did neither. He held himself in that old-fashioned place between wanting and behaving, and Lydia found it more dangerous than boldness.
She told him he could sit if he stopped apologizing with his eyes.
He sat slowly, leaving a respectful inch between the chairs. Lydia noticed the inch. She liked it. Then she touched the strap again, though it no longer needed fixing, and watched him understand that the evening had become a conversation without many words.
Outside, rain hit the windows. Inside, Graham finally looked at her shoulder, then her face. Lydia smiled because the second look was honest, and honesty, at their age, could still make a room feel young.
