Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Back to David’s face. Hands locked around my cup. Spine straight, heart doing whatever it wants because I can’t manage it anyway.
At 3:45, David checks his phone and says he’s to get to practice. We stand. I gather my notebook, my bag, my coat. The tractor coat, which I’ve been wearing every day because its weight on my shoulders feels like being held and I need that right now.
“You sure you’re okay?” David asks at the door, and his face is so open and worried that I almost tell him everything.
“I’m fine. Go hit baseballs.”
“Terrible hitter, but I appreciate the confidence.” David pushes through the door, cold air flooding in, and he’s gone.
I should leave. I should walk through that door and into the cold and away from the man who hasn’t looked up from his book in forty-five minutes and hasn’t read a single word.
My hand reaches for the cup I left behind. That’s what I tell myself. I left my cup on the table and I should bus it because I was raised by Martha Lively and Martha Lively didn’t raise a girl who leaves her dishes for strangers.
His table is empty.
He’s gone. The chair is pushed in, the book is gone, and I didn’t see him leave, which means he left while my back was turned, while I was saying goodbye to David, and the absence of him is a physical thing, a sudden vacuum in the room that makes my ears ring.
But his table isn’t empty.
There’s a napkin. Folded once. Sitting where his book was, weighted by the salt shaker, and there’s writing on it. Small, angular, European script. The same handwriting that was on the note that’s still folded inside the back cover of my notebook, the one that says My office. 4 PM. in ink so dark it looks like it came from somewhere deeper than a pen.
I pick it up. My hands are shaking.
Non posso più stare lontano da te.
Italian. I don’t speak Italian. But I’ve a phone and I’ve fingers that are shaking so hard it takes me three tries to type the words into the search bar, letter by letter, checking the spelling against his handwriting twice because I can’t afford to get this wrong, because whatever he wrote on a coffee shop napkin and left for me like a confession he couldn’t make out loud matters more than anything anyone has said to me in three weeks.
The translation comes back.
I can’t stay away from you anymore.
I sit down. Right there, in his empty chair that’s still warm from his body, and I press the napkin flat on the table and read the translation again, and again, and each time the words hit different.
I can’t stay away from you anymore.
He sat here for forty-five minutes. He walked into this coffee shop where he doesn’t belong and sat six tables away from me and pretended to read a book and watched me laugh with David and he couldn’t leave without telling me. Not out loud. Not to my face. On a napkin, in Italian, in his own handwriting, because his first language isn’t English. His first language is the one he reaches for when his control fails.
My finger finds the napkin. Traces the edge of his handwriting. One circle. Two.
I fold the napkin and put it inside my notebook, next to his other note, and I sit in his warm chair for a long time, and the coffee shop closes around me and I don’t notice.
THE NOTE IS UNDER MY door when I get home.
Not slid under, exactly. Placed. Positioned with the same care he uses for everything, the envelope aligned flush with the bottom edge of the door frame. Plain white. No name on the outside. No postmark, no stamp, which means someone brought it here. Someone walked into my building and up four flights of stairs to this specific door and placed this envelope with a care that borders on reverence, and I know who, because his men do what he tells them and they do it exactly as he would.
I pick it up. My apartment is cold. The radiator makes a sound it’s been making since October, a low metallic ticking that I’ve never bothered to fix. The water stain on the ceiling watches me like Iowa has an opinion about this.
My bag lands on the bed. My coat stays on. I’m still wearing the napkin in my notebook like a wound I’m not ready to dress.
I open the envelope.
His handwriting. No signature. Eight words.
My office. Tonight. 8 PM. Please.
I read it four times. I hold it under the lamp on my desk and I read it four times, and each time the word that stops me is the last one.
Please.
I set the note down. I press my finger to the paper and trace a circle around that word, around the four letters he doesn’t use, has never used, because please is a word for people who ask and he’s a man who commands.