"Conversations at my desk are confidential, Darcy. Same as the borrowing records." She slides a spine into place with two fingers. "You know that."
And that's when it fully lands, what I'm watching—my mother, guarding him. Making a fortress out of a circulation desk, the exact way she'd guard any scared kid who finally worked up the nerve to ask her for help.
She's not going to tell me. She'd never tell anyone. It makes me want to put my head on her shoulder and cry, and I genuinely cannot say whether it's for Finn or for her or for the twelve-year-old me he used to torture, who grew up to be the woman standing in this aisle feeling her whole beautiful airtight plan not to love him going soft in her hands.
"I will say this," my mother offers, to the shelf. "People show you who they are by what they're embarrassed to ask for. Most men that age come in embarrassed about a divorce book or a prostate book." She fits another spine home. "That one asked anyway. Sat there with his hat in his hands and asked me careful questions, and took notes he didn't want me to see him take."
"Mom."
"And he talks about you." She says it mildly, the way she'd note the weather turning. "Didn't mean to. It kept happening anyway. Three times in twenty minutes, Darcy. The drama sets, your writing workshop, something about a laugh." She finally looks at me over the returns cart, and her eyes are gentle and completely without mercy. "That boy looks at you the way my Ted looks at me."
I have to set the books down on the cart.
My mother, of all people. The woman who kept a coffee mug in the cabinet for my deadbeat father longer than she kept the man. She looked at Finn Bardot across a stack of large-print books and saw Ted. She saw a good man. The staying kind.
"I'm scared," I tell her, because in this building I have never once managed to lie.
"I know," she says. "You've been scared of him since eighth grade. It was the correct response then." She takes the books out of my arms like I'm eight and it's past my bedtime. "It isn't now."
I hug her tight. She smells like binding glue and the same floral hand lotion she's used my whole life. She pats my back twice and says, "Go on. He parked at the curb around the corner, and I imagine he's been sitting there long enough that people will start returning books just to walk past the truck and get a look at him."
Every step to the door, the old plan I've been clinging to makes its closing arguments.He leaves. Men like him have exits built in. You watched what's left behind.I listen to all of it the way I listen to a student explain why the essay is late. Kindly, yet completely unmoved.
Just as Mom promised, Finn's at the curb in the old pickup truck, driver's door open, one boot up on the running board, reading the pamphlet like it might change if he stares at it hard enough. The late sun glances off his strong jaw and makes his golden-brown hair look like it's glowing from within.
He looks up, sees me, and goes absolutely still except for the pamphlet that vanishes into his jacket in one smooth motion. I pretend with my whole face that I didn't see it.
"Twice in two days," he starts, easy, the showman warming up as I approach him in the open space of the door. "People are going to say..."
I kiss him.
Mid-sentence, on Main Street. In front of the pharmacy window and God and whoever's walking out of the hardware store, I take two fistfuls of his jacket and pull his mouth down to mine.
He goes rigid for half a second. One perfect, stunned half-second in which Finn Bardot completely fails to process being kissed by me in broad daylight on a public sidewalk. Then his hands find me, one sliding along my jaw, the other spreading warm and wide at the small of my back. He pulls me in like he's been waiting through geological time.
His mouth opens over mine and takes charge of the kiss I started. He tilts my head back with the hand at my jaw, finding the angle he wants, and kisses me. Deep and unhurried, like there's no pharmacy window, no town. No clock running down on whatever our relationship is or wants to be.
When my lips part his tongue sweeps in, hot and sure, sliding against mine in a slow, thorough rhythm that calls to mind every delicious, wicked way he ran his mouth over me Sunday night. I lean into the heat we're generating, licking my tongue into his mouth, rising up on my toes to get more of him, catching his lower lip between my teeth until I earn the tormented, then relieved, sound he makes against my mouth. It’s low and rough and completely mine.
I feel that soundeverywhere. Heat pools low in my belly. My fingers curl harder into his jacket, and I kiss him back with tongue and teeth and three days of wanting him, right up to theedge of what daylight allows. God, I want him. All of him, all over again, starting immediately, and the only thing keeping this kiss street-legal is the small remaining part of me that remembers I have to live here even after he's gone.
When our lips part ways, we're both breathing like we ran here.
"Not that I'm objecting at all," he says. His voice has gravel in it now. His thumb is still moving along my jaw like it hasn't gotten the news that the kiss ended. "But what happened to the heavy work week?"
"It's still heavy." I smooth his jacket where I grabbed it, which accomplishes nothing, because my hands don't want to leave. "Tomorrow night. You and me. Dinner."
Something crosses his face that's too honest to be a grin, though a grin arrives right behind it. "Seven o’clock," he says. "I'll pick you up."
"I'll be ready." I step back before I do something that earns us a second headline.
"Let me drive you home now," he says, but I'm already smiling and shaking my head.
"I think we both know where that will end."
His mouth quirks into a crooked grin. "I'm not seeing the problem."
Neither am I, and that itselfisthe problem. "I left a stack of papers back at school that need to get graded tonight."
