Le Guin, Patron Saint
Chapter Seven
Three blissfully beautiful weeks had passed since that first night, and somewhere along the way, the line between my apartment and Vera's had blurred into something remarkably indistinct.
It had started with her lavender-colored electric toothbrush.
She'd left it in my bathroom holder after staying over, and when I'd texted her about it the next morning, her response had been characteristically Vera.
Guess I'll just have to come back tonight then (:
Is that right?
Damn straight :P
She came back that night. And the one after. And every one after that.
The toothbrush was now the least of it.
Her vanilla-coconut shampoo lived in my shower caddy.
Her sundresses hung in my closet between my work uniforms and band t-shirts—an explosion of florals and pastels that made me smile like an idiot every time I opened the door, which I was doing with suspiciously increasing frequency.
My leather jacket had taken up permanent residence on her coat rack.
My boots lined up next to her collection of Mary Janes and modest heels by her front door, like they'd always been there, like they belonged.
Which, apparently, they did.
It was the small things I noticed first. The way she'd reorganized my kitchen after the third time she couldn't find the colander, leaving a sticky note on the new cabinet that said colander lives here now, you're welcome with a little drawing of what appeared to be a triumphant stick figure holding a pasta strainer.
The way I'd started buying oat milk without being asked because she made a specific face when she had to use regular milk in her tea, a face I could only describe as personally betrayed.
The way she left books everywhere: on my nightstand, on my kitchen counter, once memorably on top of the toaster, which I told her was a fire hazard, and she'd smiled, patted my arm, and poured me another cup of coffee.
She never did it again.
These were the soft, unremarkable things I'd never known I wanted.
Then there were the other things. The way she looked at me across a room when neither of us was saying anything and said everything anyway.
The sounds she made when I bent her over the kitchen counter at seven in the morning before either of us had properly woken up, my fingers curling inside her, making her shatter all over my palm before we'd even gotten coffee in us.
The distinct way she said my name when she was about to ask for something, and was deploying a calculated level of charm to get it.
The look on her face—patient, fond, entirely aware of her own power—when she'd figured out exactly how to make me absolutely come apart.
Three weeks. We'd known each other for three weeks, and she'd already unlocked me like she had a key.
I was, to put it plainly, absolutely done for.
"Listen to this one," she said one evening, cross-legged on my couch in her pajamas, glasses on, a worn copy of The Dispossessed open across her knees.
"Is this homework?"
"This is culture. Pay attention." She cleared her throat and read a passage about revolution and the nature of freedom, her voice doing the thing it did with text she loved, going slightly slower, letting the weight of the words settle properly.
I looked up from the gear report I was not successfully completing. "Le Guin."
She pointed at me with one finger without looking up. "Le Guin. Who, I'll remind you, witnessed our first kiss."
"Le Guin was not a factor in that equation."
"She absolutely was. It's a cherished memory. She was right there." Vera turned a page. "I've also decided she's your patron saint. The hawk tattoo, the Rilke, the fact that you kissed me in her section—"
"You made me come around that shelf."
"Collaborative effort. Le Guin, patron saint. I've filed it."
"You've filed my patron saint."
"You're in the public library system, Alves. These things get documented." She finally looked up over her glasses. "How's the report?"
"Not done."
"How not done?"
"Most of it."
She held out her hand. I stared at it.
"Give it here," she said. "I'll proofread while you finish."
"You're going to proofread a fire operations report."
"I proofread everything. It's a compulsion. Hand it over." She wiggled her fingers. "You write better when someone's waiting on you. Admit it."
She was, irritatingly, correct. I handed it over.
She produced a red pen from somewhere and read with undistracted focus while I worked, and when she handed it back it had two embarrassing grammatical corrections and one marginal note that said heroic and extremely attractive forewoman who also does other things very well in her neat librarian handwriting.
I did not report this to Rodriguez.
"Your turn to pick," she announced the following Tuesday, standing in front of my kitchen shelf with her hands on her hips, conducting a census of my condiment situation.
"Pick what?"
"Tonight. Dinner. I've cooked the last three times." She turned around. "Your kitchen, your call."
"You reorganized my kitchen without asking."
"I reorganized your kitchen because you were storing your olive oil next to the stove, which degrades it, and your colander was in the cabinet above the refrigerator, which is insane. That's not a power move, that's basic food safety."
"You made a map."
"I made a diagram." She produced her phone and showed me a small, hand-drawn chart of my kitchen cabinets with everything labeled in her immaculate handwriting. "It's for reference. So you can find things."
"I could find things before."
"You asked where your own colander was four separate times." She put the phone away. "What are we making?"
Twenty minutes later, she was perched on the counter watching me cook, which she'd decided was her preferred position for kitchen supervision.
Her feet swung. She'd stolen my station hoodie at some point in the last week and was wearing it now over her pajama shorts, her hair loose, glasses on, the picture of someone entirely comfortable in a space.
"You're using too much heat," she said.
"I've been cooking for most of my life, baby."
"And yet." She gestured at the pan.
I turned the heat down. She made a small noise of satisfaction that was almost exactly the same sound she made in entirely different contexts, and I briefly lost my train of thought.
"Stop doing that," I said.
"Doing what?"
"Making that sound."
She looked at me with perfect, weaponized innocence. "What sound?"
"You know exactly what sound."
The corner of her mouth curved up. "I have no idea what you're talking about." She stole a piece of red pepper from the cutting board. "I think the heat's still too high, actually."
"The heat," I said carefully, "is fine."
"You're getting that look."
"What look?"
"The one you get when you're deciding whether to put down the spatula and put your tongue between my thighs." She bit the pepper, watching me. "For the record, I'm not opposed to dinner being delayed."
I put down the spatula. She looked extremely unsurprised, and also immediately slid off the counter, and I had her against the wall inside of four seconds.
"Dinner's going to burn," she informed me breathlessly, ten seconds later.
"I turned the heat down."
"You did," she allowed. "Very competent. Very—" I found the spot below her ear. "—oh—very—"
The pepper situation on the stove received a brief intermission. It was fine. The vegetables were fine. Everything was, in the end, fine.
We ate twenty minutes later, slightly rumpled, not discussing the delay, which was its own form of communication we'd developed.
Two weeks later, I showed up at the library on my lunch break with a paper bag from Rosie's and the explicit intention of disrupting her afternoon.
"You can't eat in the library," she said without looking up from the cart she was shelving.
"It's a bag. I'm not eating yet."
"The bag smells like onion rings."
"The bag contains onion rings."
She looked up. Looked at the bag. Looked at me. Tracked her gaze from the bag to my face in a way that was doing something that was not purely about the onion rings. "You brought me onion rings."
"I brought myself onion rings. You're welcome to some if you take a break."
She took a break.
We sat on the bench outside the library's side entrance in the shade of the climbing ivy, the afternoon hot and dry and quiet, and she ate exactly half my onion rings with the comfortable, unguarded appetite of someone who'd stopped performing indifference around me sometime around day four.
"Mrs. Martinez asked about you," she said.
"What about?"
"She saw you drop me off last Tuesday and came directly to the desk to ask if the motorcycle woman was my girlfriend." She dipped an onion ring in ranch. "I told her you were my neighbor."
I looked at her. "Your neighbor."
"My very good neighbor." She took a bite. "She didn't look convinced."
"Mrs. Martinez is a perceptive woman."
"She's sixty-three and she told me you have very nice arms." Vera ate the onion ring with perfect composure. "Exact words: sixty-three, not dead."
I laughed. "I like Mrs. Martinez."
"Everyone likes Mrs. Martinez." She glanced at me sideways. "For the record. I didn't know what to call you. When she asked."
"You could've called me what I am."
"And what's that?"
The ivy behind her shifted in the breeze. The afternoon light did what afternoon light always did around Vera, which was make everything around her into a supporting cast. "Someone who brought you onion rings," I said. "And will probably keep doing it."
She smiled and didn't push it further. We sat in the shade and she told me about a seven-year-old named Marcus who'd come in that morning and checked out four books about volcanoes and one about butterflies, and when she'd asked about the butterfly book, he'd said I like things that change, and she'd almost cried at the reference desk.
"You almost cried at the reference desk," I repeated.
"He was seven and he said he liked things that change." She looked at me. "You try keeping it together."
"I would've been fine."