She tried to close her eyes just so she didn’t have to see it happening, but of course when she did she just went right back to the thing she shouldn’t have mentioned. His hand going for the spine of a book, hers going for it at the same time. Their fingers brushing in a way that had felt strangely electrifying, until she’d looked up and realized who it was.
Just a little static, she told herself, in the here and now.
And wondered if he was telling himself the same thing, too.
Kind of sounded like it, when he finally punctured the silence.
His voice was low, a little hoarse. “It was just a coincidence.”
But she couldn’t let that stand. Maybe because eventhe urge to squabble had now turned against her. Maybe because of that hollow little laugh she’d done, when talk of rules to limit themselves had restarted.
“And then the other three books. The ones we both reserved.”
“I told you that wasn’t me. They had the name wrong.”
“Your name isn’t ordinary enough for that to happen.”
“Well, we had the same classes. Maybe we just needed them.”
“Do we also need to like the same singer, completely independently?”
“But we don’t. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You will when I go—” she started to say, and he tried to cut her off. He told her not to, but it was already too late. She clumsily tried to make that sound, that ululating sound that Chappell Roan made—or at least, it felt like she was clumsily trying. And it felt like she’d done it just to prove him wrong.
But it came out of her differently somehow.
Heartfelt, in a way she couldn’t explain. Like someone calling out for help—and so dead-on it sort of shocked her. She hadn’t known she could do it at all, and now she had, and the car was full of strange, yearning music. It rang out, strongly enough that she cut it off before she got to the last note, and laughed.
She even thought she’d sold it as funny.
It was what she turned to him expecting—chagrin, an eye roll.
And instead found him holding his breath. He had to scramble to disguise it with a cough and a quick lookaway, but she had caught it. She caught something even more unnerving, in fact—his eyes, before they flicked to something else. Wide, they had been. Wide, and almost haunted seeming.
He saw the ghost of emotions past, she thought.
Or maybe the ghost of feelings from the future that he never wants to have.
Then before she could tell herself she was wrong, he started the engine.
He drove like the hounds of hell were on his heels.
Eight
They didn’t talk for a long time after that. Truthfully, she didn’t really know what to say. They had covered a lot of very weird ground way too quickly, and it was all fighting it out inside her head. Like the fact that they had way more in common than she had always imagined, before she’d accidentally spewed out all the ways they were similar.
Or maybe not so accidentally.
She didn’t know.
All she knew was that those books were now dancing in her head.Come Closer, Parable of the Sower, Little Children, she remembered, but got no nearer to the reason he had wanted or liked any of them. They were so disparate, so random, and so full of moments she couldn’t imagine him enjoying.
My love is like a fever, she found herself thinking.
Then closed that thought up, like a book.
She had others to go over, anyway. Like the absolutely bizarre fact that he had been hurt by something she had done, even though she’d never thought of himas someone who could be hurt at all. She’d seen other people call him an old man without any impact.
