She Knew Exactly What She’d Asked For. Probably.
She Knew Exactly What She'd Asked For. Probably.
Chapter Five
I woke to warmth. The gentle, honeyed kind, not the roaring, consumptive kind I'd spent yesterday trying to outrun and put out.
Sunlight filtered between the blinds in thin stripes across my bedroom ceiling.
I lay still, taking inventory. No smoke in my lungs.
No leftover adrenaline making my fingers twitch.
Sheets soft instead of the over-starched ones from the station.
The absence of a major catastrophe, which in my line of work always felt like a minor miracle worth noting.
The fire felt distant. Like it had happened to someone else, in another lifetime.
Vera, on the other hand, felt immediate. Electric. Like she was still standing in my kitchen in those Powerpuff Girls shorts, violet glasses perched on her nose, holding up a mystery key and looking at me like I was a book she'd already decided to finish.
Ask me tomorrow, she'd said.
Ask what?
Whether you can kiss me.
I stared at the ceiling for approximately four seconds before getting up with more purpose than I'd had in years.
I showered twice. Once for the smoke, once for myself. Then I stood in front of my closet with the rigid intensity I normally reserved for pre-fire briefings.
The options were not inspiring. Military surplus. Work gear. Three identical black t-shirts. A flannel I'd had since the Army that had been one wash away from retirement for three years and kept surviving out of sheer spite.
Dark jeans. Black v-neck. The embroidered leather jacket. If I was walking into Vera's world, I was going in looking like myself. She'd invited this. She'd looked at me with those softened eyes and asked me to check with her tomorrow, like she knew for certain that I would.
She knew exactly what she'd asked for.
Probably.
The San Jacinto Public Library sat at the heart of downtown, a converted adobe building with tall windows and climbing ivy that made it look like something from a story someone wrote down because they didn't want to forget it.
I'd ridden past it a thousand times without once thinking about going in.
I hadn't stepped foot in it since I'd been a tiny kid, gap-toothed before braces, with that Portuguese accent I'd since lost to the passage of time.
Libraries weren't my scene. Too still. Too orderly. Too much like the inside of my head on a day when nothing was on fire, which I wouldn't know what to do with.
But Vera's scene, as of approximately forty-eight hours ago, was now extremely relevant to my interests.
I parked out front, pulled off my helmet, and shook my hair out. A woman walking past with a tote bag clocked the motorcycle, clocked me, and walked slightly faster. Standard San Jacinto response to my existence.
The heavy glass door opened into cool, paper-scented air. Sunlight came in at long, warm angles through the tall windows, casting the stacks in a honeyed amber glow that had no right being as beautiful as it was.
Everything here was quiet and old and organized.
Everything here was Vera.
I felt immediately and completely out of place, which was a familiar feeling and one I had long since stopped letting determine what I did next.
"Now, Mrs. Martinez, that little folder icon right there. Yes, that one. Just click it, and there are all of little Miguel's photos, waiting for you."
I followed the voice. She was bent over a computer terminal at the reference desk, one hand on the back of an elderly woman's chair, the other pointing patiently at a monitor.
Emerald dress under the Antique Bridal Whisper cardigan.
Gold hair twisted up in a loose chignon, with a few strands escaping to frame her face.
Black cat-eye glasses today, not the violet ones from last night.
Professional ones, librarian ones, which made her look, somehow, even more irresistibly attractive.
She looked like a 1950s photograph that had achieved sentience and decided to dedicate itself to public service.
The elderly woman pressed both hands to her cheeks. "Mija. Look at little Miguel with the missing tooth! Vera, you are an angel."
"I really am," Vera agreed warmly, and the woman laughed heartily.
I hung back. This was Vera in her element, all patient and bright and entirely genuine, making someone feel like finding a folder of photos was a moon landing because to her, right now, in this moment, it was. She didn't perform the enthusiasm. She just owned it.
I was so completely in trouble.
When Mrs. Martinez shuffled off, a small stack of printed photos pressed to her chest, I drifted into the science fiction section and pulled a book off the shelf at random. Something about robotic ethics and consciousness. I pretended to read the back cover. I was not reading the back cover.
Then, the quiet sound of books being pulled from the row directly in front of me.
A gap appeared. Then another. Then, framed between Asimov and Le Guin like something that had been arranged specifically to undo me, a pair of cornflower blue eyes.
They blinked.
"Hm," said Vera.
"Hm," I agreed.
"We have a policy," she said conversationally, pulling another book and widening the gap, "about loitering in the stacks."
"I'm not loitering. I'm browsing."
"You've been holding that book upside down for two minutes, Petra."
I looked at the book. It was, in fact, upside down. I turned it over with my dignity not entirely intact. "I was checking the spine quality."
"Of course." Another book disappeared. Now I could see the curve of her mouth, the way she was fighting a smile and losing badly. "Asimov. Are you a secret science fiction fan?"
"I'm branching out. Libraries seemed worth exploring."
"I thought libraries weren't your scene."
"I'm revising my position."
"Based on new evidence?"
"Based on extremely compelling evidence, yes."
She pulled another book. Her face was properly visible now, the emerald dress, the cardigan, the long lashes. She was doing the thing where she looked at me like I was a new library filing system she was still figuring out.
"You look very alert," she said, "for someone who survived a seven out of ten fire yesterday."
"Five and a half."
"You revised it down overnight?"
"The whiskey was worse than the fire, in retrospect."
Her mouth curved. "High praise for the fire." She tilted her head. "How are your hands?"
She asked it lightly, but it wasn't a light question. I held one up, fingers spread. Didn't shake.
"Steady," I said.
She looked at it for a moment. Something passed across her face that was warmer than an assessment from a neighbor. "Good." Then she added, "And the mystery key?"
"Still unidentified. I've narrowed it down to either a storage unit I forgot I had or a life I was living before I lost my mind in a hallway forever and a day ago."
She laughed. "We met two days ago, Petra."
"It feels longer."
"Is that a complaint?"
"It's an observation. You're very—" I searched for the word "—present."
"Present," she repeated.
"Everywhere I look, essentially."
She turned slightly pink, which she covered by pulling out another book. The gap was wide enough now that I could see most of her, which was doing nothing good for my composure. "That could be described as a you problem."
"It absolutely is."
"I haven't done anything."
"You did several things. The Dewey Decimal system. The Antique Bridal Whisper color thing. The pajamas." I paused. "That way you said ask me tomorrow."
The pink deepened. She pressed her lips together and looked at the shelves with immense concentration, like they had said something very interesting. "I was just being clear about timing."
"You were being very clear. I appreciated the clarity. I'm here because of the clarity."
"So you're saying this is my fault."
"I'm saying you created conditions that made this outcome extremely likely."
She looked at me through the gap, eyes bright, chin tilted in that way she had when she was deciding whether to be delighted or impossible. She landed, as she generally seemed to, on both. "You know what the problem with you is?"
"I have a feeling you're going to tell me."
"You're very hard to fluster."
"I'm extremely flustered right now," I lied.
"You don't look it."
"I'm committed to the bit."
She laughed too loudly for the library, and a man three rows over looked up from his periodical and cleared the scowl on his face when he realized Vera had been the one to cause the disturbance. She pressed her free hand to her mouth, eyes bright above it.
"You're going to get me in trouble," she whispered, taking my hand through the gap in the shelves.
"From the job you were clearly born to do? Mrs. Martinez would riot."
"Mrs. Martinez would riot. She's brought me nine tamales as payment for helping her book club pick Circe by Madeline Miller for their most passionate read of the year.
I have leverage." Her thumb traced a small arc over my knuckles, which did immediate and significant damage to my capacity for any coherent thought.
"What are you actually doing here, Petra? "
"Browsing."
"You're holding a book about robotic consciousness upside down in a library you've never been inside."
"I've been in this library before. And I've been inside lots of libraries, I'll have you know."
"Name one."
"The one I'm currently inside, like I said."
"That doesn't count, it's this one."
"I also went to a school that had a library."
"When."
"Various years."
She stared at me. "That is the least specific thing anyone has ever said to me."
"Library science degree. You should be able to extrapolate."
She bit her lip. Hard. The effort required to not laugh was genuinely visible on her face. "Petra."
"Yeah?"
"Why are you actually here?"
I looked at her through the gap between Le Guin and Asimov, at this woman who had walked into a hallway two days ago and proceeded to Dewey Decimal me and wait up in adorable pajamas and say ask me tomorrow like it was nothing, like she hadn't handed me something I'd been turning over in my hands ever since.