"No—" she said, angling closer, her dusty skirts rustling like a thousand whispers. "Not there. Here." Her words poured out in staccato breaths, nervous to speak of the affection, though she moved to show it: she withdrew the traveling pack, and instead guided his head to her knee, a motion that both begged patience and trust. Her voice might as well have been a breath; it was his, and his alone. "You could have stumbled upon a softer, and gentler, and more affectionate being than I, ser. And perhaps one with greater secrets to lend you.
"But for now, I hope I'll do."
What it was she wanted to show him came, like his, from the edge of her fingers. It started with great care, as if measuring the reactions and allowance in him. Her thumb touched across his brow, and her fingers to his temples, where they brushed through folds of his hair. Over, and over, and over, a soothsayer's repetition. She watched him, her dull, iron-colored eyes seeming to question, Is this alright? Sometimes she altered the angles of her hand, and sometimes — with an almost wistful tilt of her head — she drifted into a quiet, half-hearted hum of old choir-music.
He had given himself distance. She wanted to traverse it.
"Fascination, I think, combats fear — and confirms it," said Gloria, down to him. "I cannot stand in your shoes, or — or demand but one string of words change your mind about how you ought to feel about this—" How to speak of it, I wonder? "—about this u'ulgazh inside you. But I am unafraid of it, and unafraid of touching you, or being near it. To starve yourself closeness or touch, it unravels a man, and blunts and fogs and dulls.
"And if you will permit me, I wish to help. In understanding it, or studying it with you. To aid in giving it what I presume you were never offered by its creators: definition," she said, "and familiarity and belonging."
Her callused fingers touched his head, combed through his hair, and stroked it like it were a child's. What she wanted to show possessed but a fraction of the wondrousness of his own secret: only that she wanted to be nearer to him, and suffered no hesitation to hold him. That even a man may rest a weary head, or be reminded that gentleness, like breath, is necessary to life.
Then the question came from her, words like smoke, and to speak it sent her heart racing:
"Can you hurt someone, Proctor," she asked, "by — by telling them that you believe you love them?"