“Okay,” he says, his tone a little more reticent. “There’s one on fly-fishing.”
The corners of my mouth lift at the thought of Jack in plaid and wader pants. “I didn’t know you fish.”
“I don’t.” He takes a beat. “I figured your dad and your brother did, so… I picked this up at a bookstore on the corner.”
Oh my, he might be the sweetest man I ever met. “Jack,” I say. “If I was there right now, I would do very, very naughty things to you.”
He groans. “You’re into fishermen?”
“I’m into men who want to find things in common with my father and brother because they know it will make me happy to see you all get along.”
As I say the words, I realize how much him even thinking about my family makes me like him more. I fell for Jack a while ago, but with every conversation like this, I fall for him a little more. What a sweet, sexy, thoughtful man. “I wish I was with you in New York.”
“I wish you were here too.” He doesn’t ask me to join him, and I won’t offer.
“We’ll figure this out,” I say, as much to myself as to him. Isn’t that what he said to me? That we’d figure things out.
“The last book is an old book I’ve had since college.” His tone’s changed. It’s brighter. I can’t tell if he’s pleased that I’ve told him we’ll figure stuff out or if he’s faking it. Somehow it makes me feel farther away from him. “It’s a book of poetry. I had it from the library for an assignment and I must have forgotten to return it.”
“Jack!” I say, half shocked.
“I’ve paid the fine, you don’t need to worry about that.”
“How big was the fine? You’ve been out of college a long time.”
He chuckles. “Yeah. Well, it might have been in the form of a donation. I’m pretty sure I have a building named after me on campus. I’m sure they’re not worried about an overdue library book.”
“You’ve only just found it?”
“I came across it on the bookshelves in my office earlier. It’s a collection of poetry of the British romantics.”
“Like Byron and stuff?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Although Byron was never my favorite—don’t tell his namesake. Coleridge is my favorite.”
“Read me one,” I say.
The sound of him turning the pages of the book between his fingers comforts me somehow. “‘The Nightingale’?” he asks. “Or ‘Frost at Midnight’? They’re probably my two favorites.”
I grin at the idea that Jack would have a favorite poem. My exposure to poetry stopped at Dr. Seuss. “Both of them.”
My limbs sink into the mattress as I listen to him recite first “The Nightingale” and then “Frost at Midnight.”
They’re beautiful, atmospheric poems. I don’t necessarily understand them, but I can appreciate how beautifully the wordshang together and how Jack’s voice somehow conveys meaning in the words.
The more of Jack I have, the more of him I want. Seeing the side of him that has a favorite Coleridge poem and wants to learn about fishing… it makes me feel like New York might as well be the moon, he’s so far away. I want him back, here, next to me.
“The next time you read me those poems, I want us to be wrapped in blankets around a fire.”
“That sounds nice,” he says, and I recognize the sound of Jack closing the book and sliding it back onto his nightstand.
He doesn’t tell me he’s going to make that happen. He doesn’t promise that when he gets back to Star Falls, we’re going to drive out to the lake and he’s going to read us poetry while I make us s’mores. He doesn’t counter that he’s going to read it to me in bed before he puts his head between my thighs and makes me come. He doesn’t say anything else at all.
And I can’t help but think that in that silence, he says so much more. The silence is full of doubt and impossibilities. It’s full ofI don’t knowsandifs. It feels dangerously like the beginning of the end.
THIRTY-TWO
Jack
