Chapter 5 #3
I sit in the wingback with my legs tucked under me.
I drink the cold tea. I let myself just exist in the room with him for — I do not know — twenty minutes.
Half an hour. Long enough that the redness goes out of my face and the puffiness in my eyes goes down and the breath comes back into my body the way it normally sits.
When I finally stand up, he stands up too.
He says, "I'll walk you home."
I say, "Rhett, you don't —"
He says, "I know I don't. I am going to."
I look at him.
I say, "Okay."
I lock the library. He waits on the sidewalk. I come out, and he is standing with his hands in his jacket pockets and his back to the wind, and he looks at me with the same look he has been looking at me with all evening, and he says nothing.
We walk to my house.
My house is six blocks east of the library, on Larkspur Street, a small narrow Victorian I rent from a widow named Mrs. Cavanaugh who lives upstairs in the carriage house.
The walk takes nine minutes. We do not talk during the walk.
The sky is the deep navy of after-sundown.
The streetlamps are on. The early-summer fireflies have come out in the front yards along Larkspur — the first ones of the season, the ones that arrive in the last week of May and announce that the season is turning — and the small green-yellow lights blink on and off in the hedges around the porches as we walk past them.
At my front gate he stops.
I open the gate. I go through. I turn back.
He is on the sidewalk.
I say, "Thank you for walking me."
He says, "I will check the library locks at closing tomorrow."
I say, "You don't —"
He says, "I am going to. Until I am not worried anymore."
He looks at me.
I look at him.
He says, "Goodnight, Nora."
I say, "Goodnight, Rhett."
He waits until I have gone inside and closed the door before he leaves.
I know because I look out the front window after I close the door and he is still standing on the sidewalk, and he stays standing there for another twenty seconds until the porch light comes on, and only then does he turn and walk back down Larkspur toward Main.
I stand at the window in the dark of my front room for a long time.
—
He keeps his word.
He checks the library locks at closing every night for the next six days.
He does not come inside. He just walks past as I am locking up, and he tips his chin at me, and he stands across the street with his hands in his jacket pockets until I have come out the front door with my keys in my hand and waved at him, and only then does he go.
He walks me home twice more — the first time I let him, the second time I do not even think to refuse, and the third night I do not lock up at six because I am waiting for him to come in and we have tea before we walk, and by the fourth night he is sitting in the wingback for an hour before close and reading the new book I have set aside for him and we walk to my house together in the small careful comfortable silence we have begun to make between us.
He sits in the reading garden with me on the warm evenings.
The peonies are coming on. The roses are heavy.
I plant another row of cosmos along the back fence with him watching me from a folding chair, and when I am done and my back is hurting from the bending, he gets up and presses his thumb into the muscle along the top of my hip without asking — gently, just enough to break the knot — and then he sits back down without comment, like it was a small obvious thing.
The town notices.
Elara stops me at the post office on Wednesday. She squeezes my arm. She says, low and laughing, "Sweetheart. He looks at you like you're the only book he wants to read."
I blush so hard my glasses fog up. Elara laughs, kindly, and walks off with her bills under her arm.
Briar brings me a bouquet on Thursday — peonies, dogwood, a single sprig of something purple I still do not know the name of, the same bouquet, almost exactly, that she brought me the day she told me to call the club.
She sets it down on the desk. She does not say anything.
She just gives me a look. I give her a look back. She winks at me. She leaves.
Wren texts me on Friday: Mav heard from Knox who heard from Hawk that Colt is reading Neruda. We are losing our minds over here. Do you need brunch on Sunday? I think you need brunch on Sunday.
I do not answer the text for an hour.
Then I write back: Sunday brunch, yes. Please.
I sit at the circulation desk with the phone in my hand. I look at the green-glass lamp on the cart by the periodicals corner. I look at the wingback chair where he has been sitting most evenings for a week. I look at the south windows where the late-spring light is going gold at its slant.
I think, with the kind of small startled clarity that has been arriving in me more and more often since the Saturday I told him about my family —
I am in love with him.
I file that.
I file it carefully.
I shelve it in the place inside me where I have started, very gently, very deliberately, to build a card catalog for the things I am only now learning I have room for.