Her head turned back and her gaze fell away from the happy couple seated near our table, drifting downward into her empty, chipped little teacup. A pale sadness shown in her eyes, even while the slightest curl of pleasure graced her lips.

And then she looked up at me, as if she'd intended to move onward, perhaps expecting nothing from me at that moment. She caught me watching her, and oh Celestia I stopped breathing.

I couldn’t move my eyes away, not as I would have had she not trapped me. It was as though I’d just walked up to her and laid my racing heart bare for her to see, to react to, to judge its specific worth, and hoped that her eyes wouldn’t say no.

Do you know what it is to confront a dragon? To battle the Nightmare in her fury? I’ve never been so frightened in my life as I was at that moment, at what I might see in her eyes. I was just fine, before, hiding my feelings away from myself and from my friends, like a rare book I’d concealed in the library stacks; tricking myself into believing that it was always there for others to find, keeping it only for myself until somepony came looking for it. It wasn't until that moment that I realized how profoundly lonely I’d been.

I watched her eyes as a breathless eternity ticked by, and I felt but didn’t hear all of our friends' conversations continue unchanged around us. Heat bloomed in my face as her expression – in that sideways, lengthening look – changed. Until the instant she'd caught me, I had no idea I was even looking at her with that... longing I knew she’d seen. She looked into me at precisely my most vulnerable moment, and in an instant she knew.

The subtlest widening of her gorgeous blue eyes; the slightest parting of her lips; the first instant glow of blush coloring her white cheeks. Her breath caught, her pupils dilated—

Surprise.

Damn!

I bit my cheek hard, lashing at myself for being so stupid. I turned my head and fixed my traitorous eyes on the less than comforting grain of dark wood paneling just over Pinkie’s shoulder, as though my attention had been casually drawn to the thread of her animated conversation with Fluttershy.

My racing heart, laid bare? Well that sounds pretty gruesome, doesn’t it? Now I’ll probably find myself looking up some detailed anatomy text, tonight; probably something sterile and surgical, just to see how long the heart can survive like that, laid bare. I feel like the answer is ‘too long’ when I’m distracted as I often am, or maybe it’s only that fraction of a second whenever I see her smile. Of course the real answer is that I don’t know, couldn’t know until now because I’ve always been a coward when it was my own heart that was in danger and not the lives or hearts of my friends. I’ve never truly shown my heart to anypony before.

It really was racing now, my traitorous heart. It had hurt so long before this moment, I realized – a constant ache for her that it had never fully shared with my intellect – and I knew that it would be a vivid agony in me from now on.

If I let it.

There was no turning back from that moment, but my fear would forever keep me from what I was so painfully aware of... if I let it.

I couldn’t observe, now, without changing her. I couldn’t know her heart without asking her if she even... desired me. Oh, desire. That word rolled around in my head and pushed a few more big red buttons, all marked ‘Panic!’

I turned back and stared down into my own teacup, a fragile little thing – empty and worn but still capable of holding something vital – and compared it with hers. I realized that I was shaking, and it hurt to breathe. But I willed myself to act, forcing my eyes upward to capture her blue-eyed gaze once more. I was terrified to see what I'd feared, perhaps unfairly, of her; disdain, sadness, pity, anger, or worst of all, apathy.

But my heart was in danger, and I knew that this time I would listen to it.

I stared into her eyes, still wide and beautiful and surprised, and I reached my shaking hoof across the table toward hers.