“I’m afraid,” she said.

“What are you afraid of?” he asked.

“Does it matter?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered.

“I’m afraid of loving you,” she replied.

And he looked at her across his coffee. And she looked out the window at a leaf still clinging to a branch long after it should have fallen.

After a while, he got up and took his cup to the sink.

“I am also afraid,” he said, with his back to her, “of loving you.”

And she looked at him now. She looked at the way his hair stood up in an unruly hedge in the morning; and she thought of the way his eyes seemed always to stay so shyly behind his lids. Then he turned around and he looked at how the one wrinkle had deepened on the side of her mouth where her smile mostly went, at how she slipped one finger through the handle of her cup as she encircled it and lifted it to drink.

“But,” he said, “I am not at all afraid of being loved by you.”

And she smiled. And he smiled.

“No,” she said. I am not afraid of that, either.”

And they agreed to live in what they were not afraid of. And after a time, they came to realize that they were no longer afraid at all.