i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)
~e.e. cummings

She calls him on his bluff. All cards on the table, tossed in his face with a resounding smack, but what he doesn't expect to see is her heart. Her heart, laid bare as she brings a hand to her chest, glaring at him with eyes filled with a mixture of hurt, anger, and determination.

"Even while you were gone, you were right here!"

His world narrows down to a single moment. A pinprick, a word. Here. It catches him, keeps him rooted, loosens his tongue. He opens his mouth to speak, his mind racing at a hundred words per minute.

The train crossing signs lower, the air filled with the dull roar as one rounds the tracks. To him, it sounds like progress. Moving forward.

He thinks, in the aftermath, that there should be something to mark this occasion; something like dust settling to the ground after a great battle, something momentous, because the revelation—her ferocity, her "here," ends his internal struggle. His composure breaks, but there is a relief to it. Acceptance.

Home is where the heart is, and as he looks at her—really looks—he thinks: Maybe I do have a home, after all.

He gives her an answer—or a semblance of one, at least. Lets her know that her feelings have reached him from across the train tracks running between them. Even though she turns away, trying to recover her mask, complaining and calling him "so condescending!" he smiles because he knows.

He knows what it is like to bury feelings deep, to reach and reach and always fall short. But he also knows an offering when he sees one: a line tossed to him from tender hands, reeling him back to shore.

"Thanks," he says.

And he thinks: A girl my age.

It's a start.