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)
“You’re staring.”
His voice, behind me. He closed the door and I didn’t hear it. I never hear him.
“Your apartment has books.”
“Most apartments have books.”
“Yours has more.” I turn around, and he’s leaning against the door with his arms at his sides and his sleeves rolled and something new on his face—not quite the controlled mask, not quite a smile, but closer to a smile than I’ve ever seen. The expression from the garden bench. Still learning how to stay. “It looks like your office. But bigger. And it smells better.”
The corner of his mouth moves. Closer every time.
I’m wearing the blue dress.
I put it on this morning with hands that shook, standing in front of my closet in my apartment with Iowa watching from the ceiling. The gray one was right there—safe, memory-free, the dress of the wilderness. But my hand reached past it, and my fingers closed on the blue cotton with the small flowers that Mama hemmed last Christmas, and I buttoned it and I cinched the belt and I looked at myself in the mirror and I thought: I’m done wearing the color of not-him.
His eyes tracked the dress the moment I walked in. I saw the recognition cross his face—a flicker, fast—and he didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything, and the blue flowers said everything.
IT’S BEEN THREE DAYS since the garden bench.
Three days since he sat at the far end of an iron seat and told me about a stone room and a stolen baby and a man who teaches because he’s afraid of what he is when he stops. Three days since I drew a circle on his palm and he closed his fist around it and pressed his mouth to my knuckles and had no words left.
Three days of fragile, rebuilt normalcy. He texted the first night—not Italian, not a napkin, just a message at 10:14 PM: Your scholarship is reinstated. Agnes signed the paperwork this morning.
I stared at it for a long time. Then I typed: And the F?
Removed from your record. Dr. Malvar has been notified.
I imagined Agnes in her office, with her lilies and her brass lamp, signing forms with a hand that trembled. I imagined what he said to her behind that closed door, what words he chose, what register of his voice he used.
I didn’t ask him what he said. Some doors are better left closed.
The second text came a minute later: Your thesis defense has been rescheduled. You’ve two additional weeks.
And then, twenty seconds after that, a third: Come to dinner. Saturday. My apartment.
No please this time. But the asking was in the invitation itself—he’s asking me into the one room where his containers don’t exist.
I typed yes before I could overthink it.
SATURDAY. HERE. STANDING in his apartment that looks like his office but bigger and warmer and full of books, and he’s leaning against his own door looking at me in my blue dress, and neither of us has moved.
“Are you going to keep standing by the door?” I ask.
“Are you going to keep standing by the bookshelf?”
“You’ve a first edition.” I’ve spotted it—spine cracked, leather faded, Italian text. “On the third shelf. Is that—”
“Elsa.”
My name. His voice. The Italian in the vowels.
I stop talking about books.
He crosses the room, and I forget about first editions and bookshelves and warm apartments, because his hand finds my jaw—fingertips, light—and he tilts my face up and his thumb traces my cheekbone and he’s looking at me with those dark eyes, and I’ve missed this face from six inches away with an ache that turned my hands to stone.
“You wore the blue dress.”
“Yes.”
“You stopped wearing it.”
“Yes.”
His thumb moves. Along my cheekbone. Down to the corner of my mouth. He traces the edge of my lower lip and my whole body goes taut and my hands find his shirt and grip, because the sensation of his thumb on my mouth is doing things to my central nervous system that would concern a medical professional.
“You’re wearing it now.”
“I am.”
He kisses me.
Not any of the kisses that came before. This is something new. His mouth is warm and unhurried and his hand cradles my jaw and his other hand finds the small of my back, pulling me against him, and there’s no desk between us, no podium, no institutional furniture, no campus, no office door that someone might be standing outside of. There’s just his mouth and mine in a room full of books, and his hand on my back.
I pull back. Not far. An inch. My lips still feel him.
“Dinner?” I manage.
His hand tightens on my back. “Later.”
I should insist. I should be the sensible Nebraska girl who eats at proper hours and keeps her hands on appropriate surfaces and doesn’t let a thirty-six-year-old man with a jaw like carved marble pull her against his body in an apartment she’s never been to before.