“Unfortunately?” he echoed.
“Yes,” I said. “Because now I have expectations.”
He settled back against the pillows, and his relaxed posture did dangerous things to my internal balance. The bed was nice and toasty, and the wine had softened everything. Arthur’s gaze stayed on mine, like I mattered.
I tried very hard not to read into that.
“Your turn,” he said.
And there it was. The rush. The good one. The one where my brain lined up shelves and cross-referenced footnotes and reached instinctively for something obscure and precise and entirely mine.
I sat up straighter, already smiling despite myself.
“Oh,” I said. “You are absolutely not prepared.”
And for the first time since he told me he didn’t have time for romance, the confusion eased just enough to make room for something else.
Joy.
Pure, nerdy joy.
I did not even pretend to think about a random, obscure fact.
My brain had already leapt the shelves, scaled the ladders, and landed on something feral and perfect.
“Okay,” I said, tucking my legs under me and squaring my shoulders like this was an exam I had been studying for my entire life. “Ready to lose?”
His brows lifted a fraction. “I have not yet lost.”
“You have,” I said. “You just don’t know it.”
I took a breath.
“Chained libraries didn’t exist merely because people were stealing books,” I said. “The chains were mostly installed because readers kept altering the texts.”
He stilled with interest. That alone was satisfying.
“Correcting them. Arguing with them. Crossing things out. Writing alternative endings. Adding commentary in the margins so aggressively that librarians started finding multiple conflicting versions of the same work circulating at once.” I gestured vaguely, because my hands had opinions too. “The fear wasn’t loss, but contamination. Someone else’s certainty overwriting the original.”
The curiosity in his gaze sent a delicious shiver down my spine.
“So the books were restrained,” he said slowly, “because readers could not be trusted?”
“Because readers were too confident in the knowledge they possessed,” I corrected. “Which is objectively worse.”
He chuckled, but it was a sound of awe.
“There’s a reason marginalia makes archivists nervous,” I continued, because now I was caught up in it. “It’s not damage. It’s evidence that a book mattered enough for someone to argue with it instead of just absorbing it. Archivists are taught to preserve texts as fixed records. Marginalia disrupts that. It shows a book was not just read butengaged with, altered, and argued against.”
I paused, then added, “Most of the most valuable reader notes we have only survived because someone ignored protocol and decided not to erase them.”
“That,” he said finally, “is an extraordinary fact.”
“Thank you,” I said, trying and failing to sound casual. “I warned you.”
He looked at me like he was seeing a familiar map in a new light. Like something had clicked into place that he had not realized was missing.
“And,” he added thoughtfully, “it explains why you were so careful about explaining the marginalia to me.”
