“Hold out your hands.”
Even with her eyes closed, I could tell she rolled them, but then she plopped her hands out.
I dug into my pocket, fishing out the delicate gift wrapped in tissue paper. I unwrapped it and then pressed it into her palm.
“Okay, open.”
She peeked one eye open and then the next, gaze drifting from me down to what she held in her hands.
A wooden page holder.
“Wait, is this…?” She smiled, holding the trinket up and tilting it this way and that.
“A page holder,” I answered, taking it from her long enough to show her the hole through the middle. I took her hand in mine without hesitation, sliding her thumb through the hole to demonstrate. “So you can hold your paperback open with one hand.”
She let out the most pleased laugh, soft and light, and then pulled the device closer to inspect it. She ran the fingertips of her opposite hand over the script engraving that readjust one more chapter.
“How do you know I even read anymore?” she asked, arching a brow at me. “We haven’t talked about that. Maybe I haven’t read in years.”
I scoffed. “Please. If you were breathing, you were reading. No way could you live without books.”
I smiled wide, my cheeks flushing at the truth of it.
“I still remember the ugly look you gave me when I borrowed your copy ofMeditationsand returned it not in perfect shape,” he said.
“You had bent, like, twenty page corners!”
“I was highlighting the ones I liked most!”
We both laughed, the two sounds mingling to create my favorite old song.
After a beat, Ariana shifted on the hammock, then leaned back slightly, bracing herself with her hands before letting her shoulders rest against the fabric. Her feet stayed on the ground, but her posture relaxed, gaze tipping up toward the sky above us.
I followed her lead a second later, the hammock creaking softly as I reclined beside her, the late-afternoon sun warm on my face. There were clouds in the distance now, slowly rolling in.
She lifted the small wooden page holder toward the sky, holding it up like she was sighting something far away through the hole in its center.
“I still have that, you know,” she said. “Marcus Aurelius always seems to know what to say to calm me when my mind starts spinning.” She turned her head to say something else — and stopped.
Because I was already looking at her.
The moment stretched, quiet and charged. Her pupils flared just slightly, her breath catching before she smoothed it out, and I felt the shift in the space between us as clearly as if she’d reached for my hand.
“Sometimes, I open up to one of the pages you tabbed and try to figure out which one spoke to you,” she admitted softly.
My throat was tight with my next swallow.She’d held onto me, too.
We were so close, our eyes searching one another, our breaths shallow. There was an aching heaviness between us that I wanted so badly to point out, but was afraid I’d lose the day entirely if I acknowledged its existence.
“Well, now you can just ask me,” I said.
The corner of her lips twitched and fell. “I guess I can, can’t I?”
I could have stared at her forever. I could have let the sun set and the night take the city and stayed right there in that hammock with her.
Unfortunately, the moment was cut entirely too short by the clearing of a throat behind us.
Ariana and I scrambled to sit up in the hammock and peeked up over the side to find a young college student, barefoot and holding a notebook under his arm.
