She plucks it from my hands, opens it somewhere in the middle, and reads for a moment. Her eyes move down the page, and something crosses her face that she quickly controls.
"You brought me to a bookstore to buy me a romance novel?"
"Not entirely."
She puts it back. "I would never read that in a million years."
I reach for the one beside it.
She shakes her head before I've fully lifted it.
I move to the next table. Fantasy. Something with a map on the inside cover and a title in embossed gold letters.
She shrugs, drifting back to the dark romance table, running her fingers along the spines.
I come up behind her and cover her eyes with my hands.
She goes still. "What are you doing?"
I lean down and speak close to her ear. "Choose one blindly. Whatever you land on, that's the one."
"That's—" She laughs slightly. "That's not how you choose a book."
"It is today."
She reaches forward, both hands out, navigating by touch. Her fingers tap along the spines — one, the next, the one after. She pulls one out and holds it for a moment.
"Too thick," she says, and puts it back.
She moves her hands to the opposite side and picks one up.
"Is that the one?" I whisper.
I feel her smile under my palm. "Yes."
I take it before she can look at the cover and tuck it under my arm. Then I take her hand.
The philosophy section is a few aisles down.
She looks at the shelves; her eyes moving across the spines the way they move across annotated margins — slowly, reading everything.
"Are you going to show me the book?" she asks, looking at it tucked under my arm.
"Not yet." I point at the shelf in front of us. "Do you know philosophy?"
"I love philosophy." She runs her finger along a row of spines and stops on one and tilts her head slightly and says, "The life of wisdom must be a life of enquiry." She glances at me. "Plato. I wrote it on my wall freshman year of high school, and my mother made me paint over it."
"Why?"
"She said it implied the answers weren't already decided." She almost smiles. "Which, in our house, they were."
I pull a book from the shelf and hold it out.
"No." She looks at me with that look — the one that is trying to figure out what I'm doing and enjoying not knowing. Then her eyes move to my shoulder. The front of my shirt. Back up to my face. "You're really tall," she says, like she's just noticed.
"So they say."
Her eyes trace my shoulders again with an expression she doesn't fully close off in time. Then her gaze snaps back to mine.
