Idiopathy

wanted; he needed to be needed, and the only type of need he understood was the most obvious kind, the kind that flopped into his arms with matted hair and a tear-streaked face and said
I love you. Help me
. Christ.
    She looked at Nathan, who had clearly just been looking at her. She thought again about the burden of it all; the responsibility. She thought about Daniel and Angelica, and how pointless her pride in making Daniel angry appeared in the face of Angelica’s ability to make him care for her, and how nice it looked, actually, being cared for, knowing you could arrive in a state of distress and someone would help you, hold you, patch you up. And she thought of all the mornings she’d woken up sad. She
was
sad, she thought. It was a sad thing to have to admit, but it was true. She was a sad person; a
lonely
person, and, far from drawing anyone near, she’d pushed everyone further away because she couldn’t bear the thought of needing anyone to be nearby, and she was going to get sadder, and lonelier, and then she was going to have an abortion, and there’d be no one to tell, so she’d sit at home for however long she needed to sit at home, on her own, in pain, and no one would run a shower for her, or find her some clean clothes, or put the kettle on, because no one would know they had to, no one would feel they needed to, and that would, she thought, be very sad indeed. It would be the life of a sad person, because she was a sad person and that was the life she’d made. So what if Nathan had baggage? It wasn’t like she didn’t have baggage of her own, for God’s sake. And all that stuff about physical attraction, what did that really amount to in the end? Wasn’t that for your twenties? Wasn’t that something you were supposed to grow out of? He
cared
for her, for God’s sake. Take it, she thought. It was so easy. Take it and be glad.
    Except, of course, it was too easy. How, she thought, looking over at Nathan and waiting for him to catch her eye, as he surely would, could anything this easy ever be trusted? How would she ever really
know
how dedicated he was? He would enter her life, she thought, untested, with exactly the kind of ease that, while thrilling in the short term, would calcify into mute distrust just months down the line. No, she thought. You had to make people work, make them fight. You had to
know
, and you wouldn’t find anything out by just collapsing into someone’s arms.
    He looked up, then away. Angelica waltzed through wrapped in a towel.
    ‘Is Daniel upstairs?’ she chirruped.
    ‘I think so,’ said Nathan.
    ‘I’ll be down in a minute,’ said Angelica. ‘Are you both alright for drinks etcetera?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Nathan, ‘absolutely fine.’
    ‘Fine, thank you,’ said Katherine.
    She watched Angelica leave, then turned her attention back to Nathan. She might not have been able to break her patterns, she thought, but at least she knew what they were.
    ‘OK,’ she said, almost, but not quite, experiencing a tangible click in her core as some old and profoundly integral part of her mechanism locked into its reliable and well-oiled groove. ‘You can speak now.’
    Nathan looked blank.
    ‘You were going to tell me something earlier,’ said Katherine. ‘I’ve decided now’s as good a time as any.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Nathan. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
    ‘Yes it does,’ said Katherine. ‘What was it?’
    ‘No, really,’ said Nathan. ‘It’s nothing.’
    ‘Really,’ said Katherine.
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘So tell me anyway.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘I’m interested.’
    He leaned back in his chair and sighed.
    ‘We don’t have to do this,’ he said.
    ‘No,’ sighed Katherine, putting her feet back up on the neighbouring chair. ‘But let’s do it anyway.’

    N athan had watched Katherine and Daniel’s display with a sense not only of discomfort, but also of fierce, crashing disappointment, which in turn had magnified the discomfort to the point where he was so uncomfortable he was unable even to stand and leave, and so had merely sat rigidly in his chair, willing it all to be over. He was a lot of things, he thought; he’d been a lot of things over the years and he was the first to admit that not all of those things had been positive, but he was not stupid, and he was not so out of touch with humankind as to be unaware that when Katherine had seemed to begin an argument with him but then very clearly thought better of it, she had done so out of pity,