“Twelve.”
“Oh, well, twelve. Very reasonable. Very normal amount of rooms for one man and zero pets.”
He didn’t respond to that but I caught the jaw twitch and I counted it as a win.
We turned a corner and I stopped walking. Just stopped, mid-step, my bag sliding off my shoulder.
The room was floor to ceiling bookshelves. Dark wood, two leather armchairs angled toward a fireplace, a reading lamp casting warm gold light across the space. Thousands of books on the shelves, old and new, hardcovers with cracked spines sitting next to paperbacks with soft worn edges. The room smelled like leather and old paper, warm in a way that hit me somewhere deep and unexpected.
“If you’re trying to seduce me,” I said, “it’s working.”
He was behind me in the hallway. “I wasn’t trying.”
“Well congratulations, you accidentally have the best room I’ve ever seen in my life.”
I walked in and ran my fingers along the spines on the nearest shelf. History, philosophy, poetry. The leather was smooth under my fingertips, some of the gold lettering faded to a whisper. I moved to the next shelf, novels, classics mixed with pulp fiction, and there was a rolling ladder on a brass rail that went all the way to the ceiling and I wanted to climb it so badly my fingers itched.
In the far corner I found a section of romance novels. Faded covers, spines soft from being read over and over.
“Whose are these?”
“My father’s mother. She lived here before my parents.”
“Your grandmother read romance novels?”
“Aggressively.”
I pulled one off the shelf. Shirtless man on the cover holding a woman whose hair was defying at least three laws of physics. “I love your grandmother.”
My eyes were stinging and I blinked it away fast because I was not going to cry in front of this man over a goddamn room. But I’d described a room like this to Fin once on the porch, rambling about my dream house while scratching behind his ears. Bookshelves, a fireplace, old books with cracked spines. I didn’t know if Finneas remembered that conversation or if this was just his grandmother’s taste, but either way, standing in thisroom felt like walking into a fantasy I’d had since I was twelve years old reading under my covers with a flashlight.
I curled up in one of the armchairs with my book. He took the other chair with his laptop. Neither of us spoke. The fire crackled, the lamp hummed, and I sank into the chair and forgot to be nervous because this room made it impossible to feel anything except comfortable. My shoes were off, feet tucked under me. The leather of the armchair was soft, worn in the exact right places like a hundred people had sat here before me and loved it.
I read for an hour. Lost track of the pages, lost track of time, just fell into the story the way I always did when the world around me was warm enough to disappear into. At one point I looked up and he was watching me over the top of his screen. Laptop forgotten, his face open and unguarded in the firelight, and my neck went warm. Neither of us looked away for a few seconds. Then I went back to my book before words came out of my mouth that I wasn’t ready for.
Later I padded to the kitchen for water and he followed me. His kitchen was ridiculous, granite counters and a stove with six burners and a fridge that could hold enough food for a small army. I opened it and found beer, leftover takeout containers, and a single sad lemon.
“This is the fridge of a man who eats out every night,” I said.
“I eat at your place most nights.”
“So it’s my fault your fridge is depressing?”
“I’m not calling it depressing. It’s efficient.”
“Finneas, there’s a lemon in here and it’s going soft. This is beyond efficient. This is a cry for help.”
He took the water glass out of my hand, set it on the counter, and backed me against the fridge. The cold metal hit my shoulder blades through my shirt and his body was warm on my front and he kissed me, slow, his hand cupping my jaw, his thumb on my cheekbone. I forgot about the lemon. I forgot about most things. My hands found his chest, the cotton of his shirt warm under my palms, and I kissed him back until my head was spinning and my back was freezing from the fridge and my front was burning from him and I was caught between the two extremes not wanting either to stop.
He pulled back first. His thumb traced my jaw one more time, slow, and then he stepped away and picked up my water glass and handed it to me like he hadn’t just short-circuited my entire nervous system against a refrigerator.
“Your water,” he said.
“I hate you.”
“You don’t.”
I didn’t. That was the problem.
