Never apologize

[Emily] It is overcast and cold, tonight, and the moon hangs slip-thin behind a blanket of clouds. The moon would be little more than a fish hook if Emily could see it and somehow that sat right with her, this half-hidden false moon, the pretension of luna-light, this weakened pull on the moonbright that sloshed about in the marrow of her bones. It is cold, but not freezing. She's been here long enough to appreciate the nuance.

Emily wears no hat. No gloves. Her heavy winter coat has been left, closeted, tucked away for another time. Tonight it is her leather jacket, fast becoming and favorite and staple in her wardrobe (and not only for what it can conceal), over a soft amethyst-hued sweater. Dark slacks. Boots with a slight heel that left an audible click with each footstep's passing.

Her messenger bag is slung across her body, its bulk nestled against one hip, moving with her in a practiced and easy way while she walks. There's purpose in her strides today, even if that press and certainty has to be feigned at times. Her hair falls in loose curls and waves to just beyond her shoulder blades. There is something composed about her that wasn't there a year ago. Time changes a person; time passes quickly.

There is a bench, here, in the park, where they'd first seen each other again. After he'd gone away. After he'd come back. It'd been a time of uncertainty, of reacquaintance, of shifted and shifting expectations. This is where she says she'll meet him, watching the fountain which is still and silent in the darkness. Remembering.

[Jarod] Time changes a person; time passes quickly.

This was the month he'd left, a year ago. This was the month he'd gotten Rada's letter, the month he'd found Ilana. This time last year, he'd still been working full time as a model. He'd still spent most of his weekends flying back and forth between here and Asia. He hadn't had to think of the welfare of any person besides himself. He had not been accountable.

He'd been drifting.

This time last year, he'd have greeted Emily differently. He'd have touched her - put his hand on the small of her back, leaned into her space, kissed her temple affectionately. This time only a few months ago he'd have greeted her this way. He didn't do any of those things today. Instead he approached with a slow, thoughtful gait, and sat down beside her on the bench with a polite bubble of space between them. Not close, not distant. The kind of space that acquaintances kept.

He'd been reserved when she'd called him earlier. Aloof, but not unfriendly. And now... here they were in the park, at night, while winter's breath touched the landscape once more. And it felt... both like and unlike many times before.

He'd been on campus today. The clothes he wore reflected this much: a black wool knee-length coat, left open in the relative warmth, a pair of tailored black pants and a burgundy sweater layered over a white collared shirt. It made him look both professional and academic.

"So how turns the world of Emily Littleton?" he asked with a soft smile.

[Emily] They both knew how tenuous anyone's hold on another person was. He'd left, this time last year, for whatever the reason. He'd come back six months later, to a city that had changed. They had been close, in some certain ways, when he'd returned but she had never been the same. There was a sadness in Emily that she kept close, bundled up and buried. Tonight it was all but invisible; he caught glimpses of it in the silences between what they said and what they didn't dare to.

Last year she had been warmer. Bright and untested. But time passed, and Emily had grown closer to winter herself, colder, a little more rigid and concealed by the first blush of frost.

And still, somehow, there's a flicker of something at the corners of her mouth when he joins her on the bench. Kept distances, or not. Personal space bubbles, or not. It is just the ghost of a smile, something subtle and tinged with regret and tarnished with time -- but still, a small smile, delicate thing, incompletely hidden. His.

"Smoothly, some days, and on others like a thing off-kilter," she replies, keeping her voice likewise soft, falling into a cadence more like what she might keep with Kage. It feels like dancing, this, and she has forgotten all the steps.

"I hope you and Ilana are well," she says, with less guile and trickery than she might have managed. It is not playful but rather genuine, stark and honest and bare beneath the moonlight. It is a step toward center without pretenses.

"I have your Christmas gift," she says, curls the last word with sadness and amusement, coddles it like a broken thing, fragile. This admission reminds them both of how long it has been, and perhaps it is the wrong thing to say, but once it's out in the open she cannot bring it back, swallow it down again. It is. It turns, like her world. How? Well, that will be up to him tonight.

[Jarod] [Starting with the subterfuge already are we?]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 3, 5, 5, 5, 6, 8, 9 (Success x 2 at target 8)

[Jarod] Emily hoped that he and Ilana were well. Jarod offered a small nod of response to this. An acknowledgment. "Ilana's well. She'll be done with elementary school come summer." (And everyone knows what that meant. Middle school. Puberty. Boys. Teenage rebellion.) "The company is doing well. I retired from modeling last month." He paused before continuing. "And I'm back in school." Like her.

A Christmas gift, she said, and it brought with it memories of the woods, of crisp, frozen air (not like tonight, when the cold in the air was just this side of freezing and humidity lingered.) Christmas was a letter written in verse (not his own - he wasn't a poet) and white roses that existed beyond the laws of nature, because sometimes memories had enough force and meaning and will behind them to take up roots and leave a lasting mark. At least, for a time.

They hadn't spoken of Christmas gifts this year. It had come and gone.

But she had one for him now, evidently. Christmas in March. There was a long stretch of silence before he raised an eyebrow curiously. "Oh?"

[Emily] [Rarely-rolled dice pool, don't fail me now!]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 4, 4, 5, 5, 10 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Emily] He tells her about Ilana, and the impending end of her elementary school career, and Emily's smile softens a little further. She had always cared for his daughter, since their first tentative meeting, when he handed her a red-stemmed leaf and stepped away to talk to the strange Singer woman in private. Ilana and Jarod, together, had drawn more warmth out of Emily last Fall than most had seen in her during the latter half of the year. Certainly more than any had seen this winter.

So it is a fight to keep the familiar walls from slamming up again, pushing him out. She's only gotten better at it since last year, the half-truths, the misleading smiles. Emily slips a hand into her messenger bag and pulls out a small, rigid box. It's about the size of her palm, on each side and is almost perfectly cubic. If he opens it, there will be a small, delicate thing, wrapped in paper to excise, to unwrap and then: a faintly blue cut glass bell. Tuned perfectly to the key of A, not even a fraction of a step off perfect pitch.

"I owe you an apology," she says, hands emptied now that he's taken the box from her. Emily takes those blank plams and rubs them along her thighs for a moment, then settles them, hands clasped, in her lap.

"I went to Praha this Winter and I thought that I would just be able to come back," she says, and there's a clear accent to how she says the place, like she'd learned its name from a native speaker. There's also a little art to how she lays out the words, faint but telling. She is trying to communicate more than she is trying to obscure.

"I thought I would either hate the city, find nothing redeemable, convince myself that I have not been missing all these years and write it off wholesale -- or find something to love in it, and that maybe by facing what happened there I could come home again." She says the word without reservation. Nestled in it was the broken hope that she might come back, to him, a bit more whole.

"I thought of you and Ilana when I saw this, and I got it for you without even thinking..." Emily's voice trails off for a moment. She breathes in a little, lets it go. "But when I came back I..."

A longer pause.

"I didn't call. I didn't know how to, and I'm sorry for that."

[Jarod] And there it was. There was the thing, you see. It was care. It was gentleness. It was thoughtfulness. Mostly, it was honesty when honesty was the last thing he'd been expecting.

The last time he'd seen Emily, at Ashley's, there'd been this impossible span of distance between them, as if they were speaking to each other from very far away. Perhaps he'd expected more of that tonight. Perhaps he'd assumed she would pretend that nothing at all had happened last year, between the months of October and December.

But she didn't. And she'd gotten him a present. He took the box from her slowly and opened it, unwrapping the bell carefully. He held it in his hand. Rang it once, very softly. It looked like it was made of ice. It looked like it should burn him like ice - a frost burn - when he held it. It didn't. He smiled a little, softly (nostalgically.) "Thank you. It's lovely."

Then she said she owed him an apology. He looked at her while she spoke, wrapping the bell back up and placing it inside the box once more for safe-keeping.

He kept his eyes on her until she said the last... that she didn't call because she didn't know how to. He glanced away then, looking out at the empty park. At the fountain in its stillness.

"I know," he said. Simply. Quietly. Not cold, but understanding. I know. Because he did know. Because he understood better than he wanted to. "It's alright, Em. Never apologize for looking after yourself. However you need to."

But the tone of his voice had a slight echo of sadness in it. Something he couldn't entirely keep hidden.

[Emily] [... Pause! ... Only one subterfuge roll so far, I'm proud of you kids. ;) ...]