After several bites, he asks, “Am I allowed to ask you a few questions this time?”
My stomach drops. “Sure,” I answer, but it comes out flat, doubtful.
His eyes flick toward me, but he doesn’t remark on my tone. “How long have you lived in Seattle?”
Even questions as simple as this are something I try to avoid. But I’m curious about Levi in a way I haven’t ever felt, hungry for him in a way that is shocking and new to me. And if I’m honest with myself, that keeps bringing me here as much as anything else. If I want to know more about him, I have to let him know more about me. “Most of my adult life. You?”
“Born and raised,” he says. “Where are you from?”
“Oregon.” My eyes meet his. “Middle of nowhere on the coast.”
“Must have been beautiful,” he says, watching me, noting, I think, the way the words are forming heavy in my mouth, landing with a thud.
“It was,” I admit. “While it lasted.” An unguarded note of trauma brims behind the words.
“Sounds painful,” he remarks. When I don’t respond he says quietly, “If you don’t want to talk about it, just say so.”
I shrug. Idon’twant to talk about it. Shouldn’t anyway. Butsomehow, with him, it feels different. “It wasn’t an easy childhood,” I confess.
He smiles sadly. “I know all about those.”
When I look surprised, he adds, “My mother died when I was young. My dad was a great father, but no one could take her place. I didn’t have siblings. It was lonely until my grandfather moved in. He did his best to take up the slack, impart a sense of connection to something larger. He’d teach me what to say when lighting the Shabbat candles, how to bake her mandel bread recipe—stuff like that. But at times it just made her absence feel more pronounced.”
“Sounds familiar,” I tell him. “The lonely part. Only for me it was my father who died young and my mother who did her best. And we moved in with my grandfather, not the other way around.”
“Did it help?” he asks.
I finish chewing and swallow, take a very long drink of water, and then wait a moment before saying, “Not exactly.”
He looks like he wants to ask more, but thinks better of it, looking down at his food. “Yeah, well, that’s how I fell in love with books and this store,” he says between bites. “Reading made me feel less…abandoned. And my grandfather liked having me around, always gave me little jobs to do like organizing a drawer in his office or changing the register tape.”
I try to imagine what it must have been like to have a grandfather who wanted you, to have all of this at your disposal as a kid, when I panted for whatever scrap of attention and novels Nina would give me. “I envy you,” I tell him. “No one much liked having me around.”
“That can’t be true,” he says with a good-natured smile, but it falls when he sees my face, reads the truth there.
I could give him the ugly facts, lay it all out in excruciating detail so he understands, so he knows. But I decide against it. I’ve already said too much. “Anyway, I loved books for the same reason, but they were much harder for me to come by.”
He pauses, waiting to see if I’ll say more. When it’s clear I won’t, he replies, “Then I’m glad we found each other.”
A smile plays at my lips.Me too.
“So how did your scavenger hunt turn out the other day?” he asks to lighten things up, finishing his bowl and wadding his napkin into it.
I swallow the beef I’m chewing on and push the rest away, full. “Umm, good, I guess. In fact, I wanted to ask you something else about that.”
His eyes close, and his lips press together. “I knew it,” he says. “Thisisbribery.” Then he looks at me. “And here I thought it might be flattery.”
“It is flattery,” I tell him. “But also bribery,” I admit.
“I know what you’re involved in, Judeth.” He gives me a sly grin, irresistibly attractive on him. I squeeze my knees together.
My heart pauses, skipping a beat or two before resuming a faster rhythm. How could he know? Has he been in on it this whole time? Am I that foolish? “You do?”
His smile widens, knowing, confident. “Geocaching.”
The word hangs between us, expectant. I have no idea what it means. I make a mental note to googlegeocachingthe second I get in the car.
“The look on your face tells me all I need to know,” he says. “It took me a minute to figure it out, but once it clicked, I realized it was the only thing that made sense.”
