Chapter 11 #2
“You want to know what those parties are really like?” He pulled the measuring tape from around his neck and passed it around my ribs, measuring a Regency waistline.
“I get waved under the velvet rope at ten p.m., snap a few pics at the VIP table for Insta because the shop account needs social media content, bolt half a glass max of that Cristal, and then duck out. I upload everything to Instagram and TikTok in the Uber on the way home, and by ten forty-five I’m back to embroidering crystal stars on gauze for some socialite dressing as Arwen for her boyfriend’s LOTR birthday bash.
” Holding up a swatch by my face. “I don’t have time for parties, Alix.
I just make it look like I do on social media. ”
“So when do you finally get to”—I looked around at the shop and all its glittering signs of success—“enjoy all this?”
“Hell if I know.” That cynical tilted smile again, his hands stilling briefly against my waist where he had the tape overlapped.
“Maybe after Belle . . . In the meantime, don’t believe everything you see on my Instagram feed.
Or anybody’s Instagram feed. Perfectly curated bullshit, most of it.
Now, some proper Regency stays, nothing will hang right without the correct underpinnings . . .”
Twenty minutes and I was transformed: fine muslin in pale lavender skimming over my hips, one of those little rib-hugging spencer jackets in deeper indigo, matching reticule, a straw bonnet with broad blue-violet ribbons and cream feathers curled around the crown.
I’d never thought Regency was a good look on anyone who wasn’t wand slim, but Beau laced and pinned until the fit was perfect, and I couldn’t resist a delighted grin as I gazed at myself in the mirror.
I looked like I’d stepped out of Pride and Prejudice, ready to promenade Bond Street and go for an ice at Gunter’s.
I looked like I matched Beau, in his impeccable breeches and waistcoat.
He’d always looked so impossibly glamorous to me that he might as well have been a different species—now, framed by the mirror, we looked like a Bridgerton spin-off.
“When I was a kid I liked to think about past lives. Who had I been, what had I looked like, what had I worn . . .” Beau’s voice was warm on my shoulder; he stood behind me adjusting the angle of my bonnet.
“Trying on a historical outfit is about the closest we can get to walking back in time, I always thought.”
Oh, honey, no, I thought, wishing I could tell him about margin-traveling.
He’d have swooned for all those seaside muslins in Dracula, the lace-swagged dinner gowns in Jane Eyre, the feather-laden hats in Sherlock Holmes.
I glanced at the clock and saw that I had twenty minutes to get back to the Astral Library in time to make my hour deadline—but still couldn’t resist tilting my head to watch the feathers on my bonnet dance.
This place had its own ability to hold time in place, freeze a beautiful moment in a mirror so you longed to stay inside it forever.
“Maybe I was a Regency viscountess in a past life,” I mused.
“And maybe I was one of Beau Brummell’s dandies.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “Maybe we waltzed at Almack’s—”
“And scandalized the ton?”
“Look at you with the Regency slang.” He grinned, watching me transfer my few belongings—Dawn Treader paperback, a few odds and ends—from the blue moiré handbag to the indigo-weave Regency reticule now hanging at my wrist. “I thought you were a fantasy girl through and through.”
“Listen, I read everything. I think Jane Austen could have stuck in a few dragons to liven things up, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t read—Whoops,” I added as the crumpled bumper sticker from my childhood bedroom door slipped out of my hand mid-transfer.
Beau picked it up. “‘They Got the Library at Alexandria—They Aren’t Getting Mine’?”
“My mom’s,” I said, smoothing it out as I took it back. “From when she was a library page . . . Pretty much the only thing of hers she left me when she skipped town.”
“Where is she now?”
A shrug. “I don’t really know. Last time I saw her she was headed for LA.” I wasn’t counting random hallucinations in Cole paintings or Conan Doyle stories.
“I’m sorry,” Beau said simply.
I shrugged again. Like any foster kid I’d had The Dream: the fantasy that whatever loser parent threw you to the mercies of the system, they’d finally clean their act up—ditch their taste for bad boyfriends or slot machines or meth—and swoop back into your life with hugs and apologies, home-cooked meals and parent-teacher conferences and good-night kisses, forever and ever amen.
For me that dream had been dead a long time.
Random hallucinations aside, my last maternal sighting had been her handwriting on a card arriving two weeks after my thirteenth birthday: Love you heaps, see you soon!
And that was it. I’d made a few attempts to look her up over the years—searched for her name on social media, reached out to those of her old friends I could still remember—but only hit dead ends.
Either she’d changed her name or fallen off the map.
Or died . . . which gave me such a queasy feeling, all I could do was shove it away, hard.
It doesn’t matter where she is now, I reminded myself, stuffing the bumper sticker into my reticule.
Alive or dead, she never chose you. But the Astral Library did.
“Thanks for letting me swap dresses, Beau. Do I owe you a cleaning fee for the other dress?” I asked, hoping he’d say no.
The grip Libby Bibb probably still had on all my bank cards . . .
“Discount me a free hour when you do my data entry.” Beau examined the hem on the moiré gown where it lay folded over a chair, and I cringed—I’d tried to be careful, but margin-traveling through fictional worlds could be a grubby business.
“You said you hadn’t gone to your costume party yet—but I’m seeing mud spatters here, and it didn’t even rain yesterday. ”
“I’m sorry—”
He waved that away. “Historical clothing replicas are for having fun in, not sticking in a glass case. I’m just wondering what kind of night you had that this dress came back twelve hours later with mud spatters, orange dust—this is country dust, not Boston dust”—I thought of Tom Sawyer and those Missouri roads; the stone dust I’d picked up from Thomas Cole’s ancient Rome—“and seawater droplets,” Beau finished, pointing out dried salt residue where ocean spray from the pier at Bram Stoker’s Whitby had splashed my hem. “Where did you go last night, czarina?”
It was pure impulse—mad, crazy impulse born of the fact that I couldn’t explain, couldn’t stay (fifteen minutes now to get back to the Library!), couldn’t do anything but duck his very reasonable question.
And maybe it was because for once I didn’t look like I belonged to a different species from Beau.
I stood on tiptoe, placed my hands on his impeccably garbed shoulders, and brushed my lips to that curious, beautiful mouth.
“Beau Sato-Jones,” I said once I pulled back. “I truly, sincerely, honestly wish I could tell you.”
“Alix! There you are, I’ve been worried about you. Are you sure you’re—” Elizabeth, my BPL boss (ex-boss?), broke off mid-sentence, blinking through her purple-framed glasses at the sight of my Regency finery. “Did you change again?”
“Afraid I can’t talk right now.” I’d managed to duck Library Security on my way back into the BPL—Chester and his aviator shades were off duty, leaving his counterpart Chad at the security desk, and Chad wouldn’t get off his ass unless you lit it on fire or took his Cheez Whiz away.
I tried to steer around Elizabeth into the barrel-vaulted hush of the Reading Room—my hour deadline to return to the Astral Library was ticking down to the last minute, and I couldn’t help fearing the Librarian had already left me behind to go margin-traveling again—but my former boss about-faced and came along with me, brows creasing.
“Are you sure you’re all right, Alix? The way you’re coming and going outside of your work hours, and these costumes—”
“Jane Austen party!” I said brightly, swinging my reticule.
“You know Chad didn’t even notice this getup?
HR has got to hire some better Library Security than Chad and Chester; you know people call them Tweedledum and Tweedledumber?
” I called them that, anyway. Chester had not been amused.
Chad just didn’t get it. “Really, you don’t have to worry about me.
I’m totally fine, right as rain. Just off to my Austen party, so—”
“You know, that’s one writer I’ve somehow never gotten around to reading.
” Elizabeth shuffled a clipboard, a walkie-talkie, and a stack of paperwork in her tattooed arm, still not looking 100 percent convinced at my sudden reversal into good cheer.
“I’ve seen the Pride and Prejudice movie, of course—”
“Elizabeth,” I groaned. “Seeing the movie doesn’t count. And she wrote other things besides Pride and Prejudice!”
“I never remember what. Emma? Wasn’t there a movie of that too?”
I could practically hear the Librarian sniffing, Really, is that what a library degree is worth these days?
“Must dash,” I said, picking up my pace, ignoring all the stares from the Reading Room studiers at my feathered bonnet and muslin skirts.
I wondered if all those eyes could see the mark of a man’s hand at the back of my waist, because I could practically still feel it burning there: as brief as the kiss I’d planted on Beau had been, he’d had time to caress one lean, long-fingered hand across the small of my back—no hero on the cover of a seventies Avon romance novel could have done it better.
I’d kissed the most beautiful man I’d ever met, and he’d kissed me back.
My smile was so wide I probably looked deranged; no wonder Elizabeth still seemed concerned.