She Knew Exactly What She’d Asked For. Probably. #2
"You told me to ask you something today," I said. "And I decided I'd better do it before you revoke my library card."
"You don't own a library card."
"You're losing focus here. I have something to ask you."
Her breath caught. Not dramatically, but just a small catch. Her fingers, still linked through mine, tightened slightly.
"I think," she said, her voice a fraction quieter than it had been, "you should come around to this side of the shelf."
"Yeah?"
"I think so."
I released her hand and walked around the end of the row.
She was waiting for me, back against the books, cheeks already warm, her face tilted up.
Not performing composure. Not performing anything.
Just standing there in the amber light, with her escaped curl and her black cat-eye glasses, looking at me like I'd parted the Red Sea for her and her people. Worshipful. Devoted.
How was I going to survive this woman?
I stepped into her space. Close enough to smell the vanilla-coconut of her shampoo.
Close enough to watch her chest rise and fall faster than the library's quiet had any right to make a person breathe.
Close enough to see that the exact shade of her eyes wasn't a single color at all—it shifted, depth and light rearranging themselves, impossible to fully land on.
But blue. Endlessly, beautifully, fiercely blue.
I braced one hand on the shelf beside her head.
"Vera."
"Yes."
"I have a question."
"Yes, I remember."
"I've been thinking about asking it since five this morning."
Her lips parted slightly. "That's—very early."
"I'm an early riser."
"You are," she said softly, "also extremely annoying."
"Can I kiss you?"
I watched it happen, the way the question landed in her, moved through her, settled somewhere that made her exhale slow and close her eyes for exactly one second.
Then she opened her eyes and grabbed my jacket lapels with both hands, and pulled.
I went.
I braced my forearm on the shelf above her head so the whole Le Guin section didn't come down on us, and pressed my mouth to hers, and this was—
This was the first kiss I'd meant to give her. Soft. Careful. Preliminary. The kind that knocks once before asking if it can come in.
She had absolutely no interest in preliminary.
She made a small sound against my lips, urgent and entirely unselfconscious, and pulled me closer by the lapels, and whatever careful intention I'd arrived with dissolved like pink and blue cotton candy in warm summer rain.
Her lips parted against mine. I tasted coffee and the ghost of something warm and spiced, like cinnamon mints, and the low, insistent heat of wanting her rolled through me like a pressure front.
Like the moment before a wind shift, when you feel it before you can name it, the air changing character, everything about to move differently.
I kissed her properly. Thoroughly. My hand found her waist through the soft fabric of her dress, my thumb tracing the curve of it, and she arched into me slightly, her small body finding mine like she'd done the math on this already. The shelf behind her shifted faintly with the weight of us both.
When I grazed her lower lip with my teeth, she made a sound—brief, involuntary, swallowed almost immediately, like she'd tried to hold it and couldn't—and heat shot straight to my pulse points.
Her fingers tightened on my jacket. Her nails found the edge of my collarbone.
The man with the periodical three rows over had long ceased to be a concern I was capable of holding.
I pulled back. Just enough to look at her.
She looked like someone had rearranged her.
Lipstick migrated. A lock of hair escaping the chignon and curling against her cheek.
Chest rising and falling like she'd been somewhere far away and was only now returning.
Her eyes were dark and marveling and fixed on my face with an expression that had no production left in it at all.
We were both breathing like we'd forgotten how.
"Oh," said Vera.
"Yeah," I said.
"That was—"
"Yeah."
She blinked, very slowly. "I had a whole list of things I was going to say after that."
"What happened to the list?"
"You happened to the list." She looked up at me with enormous eyes and the ruins of her lipstick. "The list is gone, Petra. The list is simply gone."
I laughed, which was not how I'd expected to feel thirty seconds after kissing someone for the first time, and also exactly right. "Do you need a moment to rebuild it?"
"I need several moments." She reached up and tried to wipe the lipstick from my mouth with her thumb, which was an optimistic effort given that her hands weren't entirely steady. "Hold still."
"You're smearing it."
"I'm fixing it."
"You're distributing it more evenly."
"I'm doing my best." She stepped back and inspected her work and winced. "Okay. You might need a mirror."
I cracked an entirely involuntary grin. "Worth it."
She looked up at me with those ink-dark pupils and the ruins of her lipstick and smiled back, slow and private, just for me, the smile that had no other audience and didn't need one. "Yeah," she said softly. "Worth it."
She straightened my jacket lapels with both hands and smoothed them down, the way she probably handled a library acquisition she was particularly pleased about. Then she glanced at her watch, and her whole face changed.
"It's almost noon."
"Is it now."
"My lunch break is in ten minutes." She looked up.
"There's a café on Second. The Fitzgerald.
Good prosciutto. And there's a used bookstore next door I've been meaning to go into for two months, but every time I walk past it, someone inside looks at me through the window and I feel like I need a better reason than I was nearby. "
"What reason would be good enough?"
"Someone to go with. So it's less like a haunting and more like browsing."
"I'm an excellent browsing companion."
"You've been in a library for eleven minutes and you're already holding the wrong book right side up."
"Progress," I said.
She pressed her lips together. Losing. "And—sorry. You probably have somewhere to be."
"I have exactly nowhere to be." I watched her try to tuck the escaped curl back into the chignon and fail twice. "Let it down."
"My hair?"
"You've got lipstick on your chin, your hair is losing an argument with Newton's law of gravity itself, and you look like someone knocked over a card catalog.
" I reached up and pulled the pin holding the chignon, and her hair fell in a gold wave over her shoulders.
"There. Now you look like you meant to."
She blinked at me.
"Like you meant all of it," I said, and held the pin out.
The smile that crossed her face was slow and luminous and struck me right in the heart.
She reached out and took the pin from my fingers.
"Petra Alves," she said.
"Vera Montgomery."
"You absolutely have to take me to lunch."
I smiled. "Copy that."