15. Calliope #2
Mara’s mouth twitches, but her eyes move past me toward the doorway before she answers. Dash is in the hall, one hand resting against the frame and my campus umbrella hooked over his wrist. I forgot it in his office yesterday, and the sight of it there makes my hand pause inside my coat sleeve.
“I’m early,” he says, staying outside the room. “I can wait downstairs.”
Mara looks at the umbrella, then at me. She does not perform a reaction. She only picks up her folder and walks toward the door, pausing long enough to take the tote strap from where it has slipped again.
“You should both leave before Norris finds either of you,” she says. “He’s still looking for someone to sit on that review subcommittee, and I’ve sacrificed enough people I like this week.”
Dash steps back so she has room to pass. “I’ll keep an eye out.”
“Do that.” Mara glances over her shoulder at me once more, her expression softening before she looks away. “Sunday, Callie.”
“I’ll be there.”
She leaves with the quick, purposeful steps she uses when she wants everyone to believe she isn’t tired.
Dash waits until her footsteps fade before he comes in. He is still dressed for campus, his dark sweater pulled over a collared shirt and his glasses sitting low on his nose. My umbrella dangles from his wrist while he bends to pick up the pen someone left beneath the front table.
“She brought enrollment numbers?” he asks, setting the pen near the stack of handouts.
“She did.” I slide my other arm into my coat and reach for my satchel, but Dash is already lifting it from the chair. “You saw the page?”
“I saw the course code.” He shifts the strap over his shoulder, then offers me the umbrella. “Your seminar filled faster than Norris expected.”
“Norris expects nothing good to happen unless he schedules it badly first.”
Dash’s mouth moves, though he turns toward the board before the expression becomes a smile. The last ghost of my handwriting still sits there, faint under the fluorescent lights.
“I heard the end of class,” he says, touching the edge of the front table as he passes it. “Talia was in my intro course last year. She used to send me emails longer than the papers because she wouldn’t ask questions in the room.”
“She asks them now.” I check beneath the table one last time and turn off the lights. The hall looks dimmer once the classroom falls behind us.
“I saw.” Dash walks beside me, our steps lining up on the tile as we head toward the stairs. “You made Leon wait long enough for her to finish.”
“He needed the practice.”
“He always does.”
Dash holds the door at the bottom, and cold air slips in from the lobby before we step through. “You still want to stop at the bookstore?” he asks as we cross toward the side exit. “They’re holding the Marlowe edition behind the counter until six.”
I turn toward him. “They’re holding it?”
Dash keeps his gaze ahead as he pushes the door open with his shoulder. “You said the bookstore copy online disappeared before you could order it. I called this morning and asked if they had another.”
I take my umbrella from him, though the rain has stopped and the pavement only shines with what’s left of it. “You remembered the edition.”
“You were annoyed about the footnotes for most of lunch on Tuesday.” He glances down at me once we reach the steps. “I remembered the footnotes.”
The parking lot stretches beyond the academic building, full of wet windshields and students hunched inside their coats. I follow him toward his car with the umbrella closed in one hand and my satchel on his shoulder, the strap held securely beneath his fingers.
The bookstore is twelve minutes from campus, tucked between a stationery shop and a narrow restaurant with steamed windows.
Dash parks behind the building, and we go in through the front because he says the back door sticks badly enough that the owner has declared it a personality trait rather than a maintenance issue.
A bell rings above us when we enter.
The shop is warmer than the street and too crowded near the front tables, where new releases sit in tidy stacks beneath handwritten cards.
The older shelves begin halfway back, their labels taped along the wood in uneven rows.
Somewhere deeper inside, coffee beans grind behind a counter I can’t see yet.
Dash takes my coat when I unbutton it, adding it to his over one arm without reaching for the rest of me. “Used academic section is upstairs. Literature is in the back left corner.”
“You know this place well.”
“I hide here when campus gets unbearable.” He nods toward the narrow staircase. “The owner pretends not to notice if faculty read for two hours and buy one thing.”
“That seems unwise as a business model.”
“It works on guilt eventually.”
Upstairs, the ceiling sits low enough to make the shelves feel taller than they are. The aisles are narrow, the books packed tight, and a small table near the window holds a leaning stack of journals with a handwritten sign that reads TAKE THEM BEFORE WE RECYCLE THEM AND FEEL HAUNTED.
I stop in front of the literature shelves while Dash sets my satchel on a chair near the window. The Renaissance drama section is exactly where he said it would be, and the first Marlowe copy I pull from the shelf has blue ink in the margins and a cracked spine that opens too easily in my hands.
“Someone fought this editor personally,” I say, turning a marked page toward him.
Dash leans in enough to read the notes without crowding me. His scent reaches me first, cedar warmed by the bookstore heat and something darker beneath it that lingers after he straightens.
“That’s a lot of underlining.”
“They underlined an entire paragraph.”
“Committed.”
“Unwell.” I slide the copy back into place and crouch to check the row beneath it. “There’s a difference.”
Dash crouches at the other end of the same shelf, setting our coats across his knee while he scans the lower titles. He finds the second copy wedged behind a book of essays shelved in the wrong section and passes it to me across the narrow space.
The cover is worn, but the binding holds when I open it. Pencil marks sit lightly along the introduction, and the footnotes are clear enough that I don’t have to tilt the page toward the light.
“This is better.” I turn to the historical section and check the order of the materials. “Much better.”
Dash rests one shoulder against the shelf. “You’d assign the introduction first?”
“Part of it.” I hold the book toward him, keeping my finger against the section I mean.
“The other edition expects them to understand the historical pressure before it gives them enough context to discuss it. Then I lose the first class giving them what the editor should’ve given them before page one. ”
He reads the paragraph I indicated and stays quiet long enough that I know he disagrees before he says anything.
“I’d give them the chronology and make them read this after the first discussion.” He turns the book slightly, pointing to the editor’s framing near the end of the page. “This gives them too much shape before they’ve had to name the problem themselves.”
“They’re not coming in with nothing, though. They’ve had the survey prerequisite.”
“Which means some of them remember the plays were written before electricity and one of them will confidently misidentify a monarch.” Dash hands the book back to me. “Let them be wrong where you can see it.”
I look down at the page again, irritated by the fact that I understand his point. “That is exactly the sort of answer I’d expect from someone who teaches philosophy.”
“I’ll try to recover.”
“You seem calm for a man being accused.”
His eyes meet mine over the top of the open book. “I’ve had practice.”
Someone comes into the aisle carrying a basket, and I shift closer to Dash to make room.
My knee brushes his as I stand, and his hand comes briefly to my elbow when the movement puts me too close to the shelf behind me.
He lets go once I’m steady, but my skin remains aware of the place his fingers touched.
I close the book and tuck it against my chest. “I’m buying it.”
“That seemed likely.”
“Quiet.”
His gaze drops to the book for a moment before he turns toward the next aisle. “Philosophy is over here.”
I follow him toward the philosophy shelves which are less organized than literature, with several books stacked sideways where there isn’t enough room and an entire lower row that seems to have surrendered to gravity.
Dash moves directly to the end of the aisle and crouches in front of a section near the floor. I browse the titles above him until he pulls out a faded green hardcover and stills with it in his hands.
“That the one you came for?”
“One of them.” He opens the front cover, then turns to the table of contents. The paper has yellowed at the edges, and someone’s name is written in careful ink across the inside page.
“You used to own it?”
“I did.”
I lean one shoulder against the shelf across from him. “What happened?”
“My brother took it.”
The answer comes without strain, though his eyes stay on the page.
“Older or younger?” I ask.
“Older.” Dash turns another page and finds something near the middle. “Five years. He took things when we were kids, usually because he wanted to read the parts I cared about without asking me why I cared.”
“That sounds annoying.”
“It was.” His thumb smooths over the edge of the page. “He’d leave books in the wrong rooms afterward, which made it worse. This one vanished before I left for graduate school.”
“Did he like it?”
“One essay.” Dash’s mouth softens as he looks down at the table of contents. “He thought the rest was pretentious, then spent three weeks arguing with me about the only piece he enjoyed.”
I look at the book rather than his face. “Do you still talk?”
“Sometimes.” He closes the cover and rises, holding the book at his side. “We know how to reach each other.”