Chapter 34
Chapter Thirty-Four
Phoebe
Jay thinks he was my fifth-grade pen pal?
I smirk at him. “You’re letting the building lore get to you. We would have figured this out already.”
“I’m serious,” he says.
He looks shaken enough that I stop smiling. “Come on. What are the chances?”
“Tell me if this sounds familiar,” he says, forehead wrinkling as he concentrates. “For safety reasons, we could only use our initials, and the letters were delivered in a class batch to the school address. I wrote to PJ, and you wrote to …”
He leaves me to finish the sentence, and I remember him reintroducing himself to me in the library weeks ago. “JP. Jameson Paul.”
He nods. “What does your J stand for?”
“Jane.” I say it faintly, still trying to process this. There’s no way. My mind races to pull up other details from those letters.
“Phoebe Jane. It fits you.” He smiles. “JP and PJ. I remember thinking that was kind of funny. Your city was called Celebration. I thought it was a dumb name, but it had a road that went straight to Disney World, and I was jealous.”
“It is a dumb name,” I say. But how would he know it if he wasn’t my pen pal?
“You said your school should be called Booty School because everyone who went there was?—”
“A butt,” I finish, staring at him with wide eyes.
“I thought that was so funny. I showed it to all my friends in class, and then we got in trouble for laughing.”
“Your teacher emailed my teacher, and my teacher said we couldn’t use inappropriate words in our letters anymore.” I give him a light whack on the bicep. “I got a lunch detention for that, you snitch.”
He catches my hand and holds it, lowering our joined hands to rest on his knee, his thumb stroking lightly over my knuckles. “You believe me now?”
I search his eyes, wondering if he feels the same thing I do. A sense of chaos and bafflement and … wonder. “How is this possible? It’s too much of a coincidence.”
He looks around the roof and shakes his head. “This is what you call serendipity.”
“Happy accident. That’s what serendipity means. I couldn’t remember if it meant fate or good luck or something like that, so I looked it up.”
“Then maybe it’s not serendipity.” He reaches with his free hand to tuck a strand of my hair behind my ear, then cups the back of my head and meets my eyes. “At this point, it seems inevitable.”
So does the kiss that will happen next. I know it, and I want it, even though I don’t have any more answers than I did downstairs in my apartment. I’m tired of fighting my feelings, and with this new revelation, it feels like I’ve been trying to fight something even bigger than that.
I lean toward him, inviting him to close the gap .
He does, brushing his lips over mine, and it sends prickles across my scalp the way only intensely sweet things can. I barely have time to register the feeling before he kisses me again, this time with more pressure, and his lips are just the right amount of full and just the right degree of warm.
His fingers slip into my hair at my nape while his thumb brushes against the corner of my mouth. I don’t know if he pulls me closer or I lean in, but I think it’s both, and I settle my hand over his heart, pressing when I feel its strong beat.
He kisses me for what feels like forever, changing up the pressure to find a new angle, grazing his nose against my cheek, but never breaking our connection. He’s all my senses now, the smell of flowers and summer night air fading, the sound of his breath overtaking the distant city noise, the warmth from his body and the contrast between his soft lips and the friction of the scruff on his jaw sending wildly contradictory and intense signals to my brain, but it’s offline, too lost in sensations to do more than record it all. This will be a permanent record in my archive, one that I might study when I revisit it, but right now, it’s only about the feeling.
He shifts. I make a sound of protest, thinking he means to pull away, and give his lower lip a scolding bite to warn him that I still have more to explore. He laughs—or maybe it’s a groan, or both—and moves both hands to my waist, snaking around me and hauling me into his lap to deepen the kiss.
This is smart. He is so smart. What a brilliant man is Jameson Paul. This new position allows me to rest against his chest, slide my own hand into his hair, and pull him closer to explore his lips, to steal tastes of him while I wind my hand through his hair, his almost-curls twisting like soft spun cotton around my fingers.
At one point, he pulls away to murmur, “This is crazy. Why is this so …” But he abandons the thought in favor of more kissing. So smart. Brilliant man .
It takes beard burn for me to finally draw away, pushing on his chest to create enough space for me to tilt my head and smile at him.
His return smile immediately turns into a frown. “Your skin. Are you okay? It looks like I sandpapered you.”
I cup his jaw and tap my thumb lightly against his lips. “No regrets.”
“But—”
I press this time, and he nips the skin of my thumb, which is how I discover it’s highly sensitive. I draw him in for more kisses despite my chafed skin, but he resists and pulls my hand down to tuck it against his chest.
“No, Phoebe. Let me have you this way for a minute.”
I can’t argue with that. I settle against him, drawing my knees up as he folds his long arms around me and presses a kiss against my hairline.
We stay like that for a long time, letting in outside sounds again, cricket song and snatches of laughter I barely hear over the steady thump of my heart.
Eventually, a siren breaks through. I haven’t heard many since I moved in, and I send up a prayer that whatever is happening, everyone involved will be okay.
It seems to have broken the spell for Jay too, and when he shifts as if to reposition me, I slip from his lap instead to settle on the bench, right next to him this time, our thighs touching. He rests his arm around my back.
“I didn’t come here to do that,” he says after a while.
“I know.”
“I’m not sorry.”
I nod. He doesn’t need to be.
“Are you?” he presses when I stay silent. “Sorry?”
I sigh, and he answers with one of his own.
“You are,” he says.
I shake my head. “No. I’m not. But it complicates things. ”
“Because of the board? They’re happy with your work. It’s not going to be an issue if we tell them.”
“You know that because you speak freely among yourselves. That’s going to change if they know we’re dating.”
His forehead furrows. “But we have to tell them.”
“I know that. If we’re dating.”
“If? Is the idea that we make out, never label it, and then we don’t have to tell them?”
“Of course not.” But I can’t help darting a look at those perfect lips. He catches me, and they curve into a smile. I hate to erase it, but I have to. “I don’t know about dating. If we should.”
Sure enough, the smile disappears, and Jay doesn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then he gets up and paces to the roof’s edge to lean against it, facing me. I miss the warmth the second he moves despite the summer night air.
“Toothpaste,” he says. “This feels like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube.”
“It’s not,” I say. “All of our conversations up until now have been about how we’re not going to date.”
“You mean your monologues?” But his tone has a touch of humor.
“Inevitable. That’s what you said about us kissing,” I add when he looks confused. “You said it was inevitable, and yeah, it kind of felt like it. But at the same time, it’s all coming at me pretty fast. The pen pal thing …” I shake my head. I still can’t believe it.
“Is it weird that it’s not that weird to me?”
I know he’s asking a deeper question, one I’m not ready to answer. “I don’t even know how this would work. You’re going to finish your book and go back to Boston. I’m going to be working constantly. And even if we decide to give this a shot, it won’t look great to the board that I’m dating you a month into the job. ”
“I’m equally responsible for that,” he says.
Did he not hear the whole point of the story with Hayes? “They might rationally acknowledge that, but at some level, they’ll question my judgment, not yours. And that’s not even getting into how Catherine Crawford will react.”
“Then what do we do? Pretend this never happened? That there isn’t something between us?”
I want to ask What is between us ? But I won’t. Because if he feels even half of what I do, I cannot walk away from that. I’m not sure I can walk away as it is, and I don’t even know where his heart is. At best, I have a guess. A hope, while I’m being honest. And that’s too much. More than I should have.
“I don’t know.” I draw my knees up again, this time wrapping my own arms around them. It’s not nearly as satisfying. “But I do know that this will have a major impact on my job, and I can’t just follow a wild impulse.”
Jay studies the ground, and I see a muscle twitching in his jaw. “This job? Or the job you really want?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Come on, Phoebe. Don’t think I didn’t notice that you never gave me a straight answer when I asked you about this two weeks ago. Did you take this job so you could rehabilitate your image and get hired back at the Sutton as a senior curator?”
My silence gives me away.
He gives an unhappy-sounding laugh. “Every time I talk to you, you have a new idea for this place, and you get to do whatever you want. Didn’t you say the Sutton constantly rejected your ideas and told you that you needed to be ‘more professional,’ or more traditional, or whatever it is they were hammering at you for? Why would you even want to go back there?”
“Why do you want to be a professor so badly? You’ve got a million followers already listening to you teach history. Why isn’t that enough?” It’s a rhetorical question. “Because it just isn’t, right? Because you’ve had a different goal for years, and maybe this other thing you do is pretty cool and interesting, but it wasn’t the dream ? Am I close?”
“Do you know you act differently when you’re around the board? You talk differently. Formal. Subdued.”
“Professional,” I shoot back.
“You dress differently. Less color. More conservative.”
“Again, professional.”
He shrugs. “Pretending, because Catherine Crawford convinced you that you weren’t enough at the Sutton. But I know you, Phoebe. I see who you are when you’re letting yourself be happy and climbing through hidden passageways. I see how no matter how professional you try to dress at work, you always include something subversive and bright and fun in your outfit. And I can’t figure out why the best things about you are the things you keep trying to suffocate.”
“You’re not the guy for this lecture, Jay. What about you, leaning into your charming slacker persona instead of showing up in the world as the expert you are? Is it easier to tell yourself that you’re being overlooked because of your influencer stuff if you never put yourself out there as your deeply nerdy history self?”
I hadn’t even known that it bothered me, but I’m hitting back as a reflex.
Instead of a comeback, his shoulders drop. “I don’t want to fight, Phoebe. This doesn’t feel good.”
I press my forehead to my knees. “It doesn’t. I’m sorry. You’re doing cool work, and I shouldn’t have criticized it.”
He comes back to the bench to sit beside me. “I shouldn’t act like Catherine Crawford isn’t a major issue. I saw how she treated you. She’s definitely holding your Sutton days against you. I don’t blame you for trying to figure out how to defang her. ”
I nod to show I appreciate his apology, but I’m not sure what else to say. Nothing is resolved. I don’t know what we do next.
“We had our first makeout and our first fight at the same time.” He shakes his head. “That’s a new one for me. Somehow I’m not surprised it’s with you.”
“It was interesting to watch you lose your temper,” I say. “I was beginning to think nothing ever got to you.”
“All the time, when I care.”
I turn so I can rest my elbow on the back of the bench and study him. “That’s where we are?”
He closes his eyes and gives his head a single shake, like he can’t believe I have to ask. “Yeah, Phoebe. That’s where I am. I care. You, I don’t know.”
I care. Too much. About everything. Especially this job and Jay. They’re all mixed up together. Jay permeates every part of it. I don’t know how to think of them separately. “I need to think. We have a board meeting Tuesday. I’m overwhelmed, and I can’t pick apart all the feelings. I feel like spaghetti inside.”
“Spaghetti?” he repeats, and I can tell he wants to laugh.
“That’s the only way I can explain it.”
“I might understand that.” He reaches out to give my resting arm a gentle tug, repositioning me so he can tuck me against his side, his arm around me again. “How can I help?”
“Maybe give me some time?” I say. “Time to figure this out without feeling like I’m dealing with an ultimatum?”
He brushes a kiss against my hair. “Done. You’ll get no ultimatums from me. I only want to understand what you think we are. The last thing I want to do is talk you into anything. But I want you to know that …”
I wait for him to finish, almost holding my breath. But he doesn’t finish the thought. “What?” I ask softly. “What do you want me to know? ”
“I don’t want this to feel like pressure.”
“It’s okay. Tell me.”
“I got my rooftop clarity. I want to see where this goes between us. I know the stakes are high for you. In a way, they feel that high for me too because I know how it’s going to feel if this doesn’t work out. I don’t want to dig into it any more than that, because you need to think about what’s best for you. But I’m invested.” A soft laugh. “That’s the least intense way I can think of to put it.”
I want to turn my head, pull him to me, and dive into another time-obliterating kiss. But I know at a fundamental level, the core part of us designed to keep us safe, if I do that, my choice will be made for me, and it won’t be my brain making it. My heart has led me to some questionable places, but my brain will try to do what’s best for all of me, not just the part of me that wants to melt in Jay’s arms like nothing else matters.
“Thank you,” I say. “For being honest.”
He nods. “I was thinking … how much prep do you still need to do for the next board meeting?”
“The PowerPoint is ready. I need to practice, and no matter how much I do that, I’ll still feel like I need to practice more.”
“This lead I got on Samuel Davis Brown—it’s up in New Jersey, in a private library. I think I’ll drive out tomorrow and research onsite. I’ll be back by the board meeting. I won’t be in touch, but not because I’m ignoring you. Just so you have some space.”
“Do you really need to go in person, or are you making up a trip as a favor to me?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know how good this information is. The family has some old letters from Brown. They haven’t publicized them because he’s an ancestor, and not the kind you brag about. They may be nothing, but I need to check them out at some point, so it may as well be now.”
I consider that. “Then I’m happy you found a lead. It’s a good time for me to take that space.”
We sit for a while before the sound of the door opening to the roof breaks the spell.
We straighten, and Jay stands to give me a hand up before we turn and walk toward the stairs, close to each other but no longer touching.
Sophie, the woman I’ve chatted with by the mailboxes, steps out and notes us with surprise. “Oh, hello. I didn’t know anyone was up here. I was just coming to check on the drip system.”
“Sophie, right? You’re the one who keeps up the garden?” I ask.
“That’s me.”
“It’s stunning. I’m Phoebe, and this is my friend, Jay. I’m the director of the museum opening next spring, and I’m looking for a landscaper. Would you be interested?”
“That’s so flattering! Thank you, but I’m moving soon. I do have a great person I can recommend for the job.”
“That would be great,” I say. “I’m in 3E if you want to drop a business card in my mailbox or something. Oh, and I was wondering if you could tell me what that plant is?” I turn to point at one of the dwarf trees and drop my hand in surprise. A single blossom blooms on a vine at its base, and I can’t believe I missed it. “I didn’t notice that before. It’s beautiful.”
Jay follows my gaze to the flower. It looks like a cross between a lily and an orchid, with white petals and a deep pink center. “Whoa, yeah. What is that?” he asks, turning toward Sophie.
Sophie’s eyes are wide as she looks back and forth between us. “It’s a … special hybrid. ”
“It’s gorgeous,” I say. “I wonder if it would grow well on the museum property.”
Sophie shakes her head. “No, this one seems to need the microclimate up here on the roof to thrive. Floris amoris is selective.”
Jay gives her a sharp look, and she smiles. It has almost a knowing quality to it, but before I can decide for sure, she gives us a friendly nod and continues into the garden, and Jay guides us out.
When we reach the third floor, instead of turning toward my apartment, he stops at the landing. “This is where I leave you,” he says. “Turns out I need to pack for a trip.”
“Right.” I’m at a loss for what to do next. Hug him? Wave? Jay settles it by leaning down to press a kiss on my forehead before he continues down the stairs without a word.
As I watch him disappear, I feel more at a loss than ever.