Le Guin, Patron Saint #2
"You kissed a scar on my shoulder the other night and then immediately tried to act like you hadn't. Don't talk to me about composure."
I had nothing to say to that. She was entirely correct. I ate the last onion ring.
By the end of the third week, we had a routine.
I hadn't had a routine since before the Army. I hadn't particularly wanted one. And now I had one, and the most alarming thing about it was that it felt completely inevitable, like the routine had always been there waiting, and we'd just walked into it.
Tuesday and Thursday mornings, I brought coffee to the library on my way to the station.
She was always already there, fifteen minutes before opening.
I handed the coffee through the staff entrance; she handed back the previous night's book if she'd borrowed one, or a new Post-it with a passage she'd flagged, which I kept in the breast pocket of my jacket.
I was not examining why. I had made a decision not to examine why.
Wednesday evenings, she came to mine and supervised my cooking with that bossy authority of someone who had strong feelings about knife angles and heat management and the moral necessity of fresh herbs.
I julienned things correctly now. I didn't love that this was a sentence I could say with a straight face.
"You're cutting against the grain," she'd told me the first time.
"Carrots don't have a grain."
"Everything has a grain." She'd moved around behind me, hands over mine on the knife, adjusting the angle, her chin near my shoulder. "There. Feel the difference?"
"I'm being corrected by a librarian about a root vegetable."
"Feel the difference?"
"Yes," I admitted.
She kissed the back of my neck and went back to the couch. I stood at the counter holding a correctly julienned carrot and conducted a brief survey of the trajectory of my life and concluded: no notes.
Weekends had no structure, which mostly meant she ended up on my couch in her pajamas and one of my hoodies—the Station 19 one was her current favorite, which I was registering a protest about and not acting on—reading while I did gear maintenance or paperwork.
"You're reading it wrong," she said one Saturday, lying across the foot of my bed with Housekeeping held above her head.
"I haven't said anything yet."
"You made a face."
"I was thinking."
"Your thinking face on that passage specifically means you're about to say something reductive about the ending. Don't."
"I was going to say it was sad."
"It's supposed to be sad. That's the point." She turned a page. "The leaving is the point. You of all people should understand choosing to go rather than staying in something that doesn't fit."
I looked at her.
She went back to her book like she hadn't just quietly dismantled something I'd been carrying for years.
"You read me too well," I said.
"You're in the system," she said absently, turning another page. "I've been thorough."
I went back to my paperwork. Neither of us said anything else about it.
The evening light came through the window and settled over her where she lay at the foot of my bed, her hair loose, one foot kicked up behind her, and I looked at her for one long, private moment before looking back at my report.
This. This was the thing I hadn't known I was looking for. Not the action. Not the adrenaline. Not the grand gesture. Just a Saturday afternoon and someone in my bed who wanted to be there.
The attractive soccer mom showed up on a Thursday.
I'd come by on my lunch break, as had become customary, coffees in hand. Rodriguez had cut morning drills short when a harness check flagged an issue, and two hours of recertification had put me ahead of schedule and ahead of myself in the direction of Vera's library.
I came through the staff entrance, settled at a table in Vera's eyeline with the coffees and a gear manual, and was three pages in when someone pulled out the chair across from mine without being invited.
She was, objectively, attractive. Mid-forties, dark hair, a smile that had clearly been successfully deployed thousands of times before and knew it.
"Hi," she said. "I don't think I've seen you in here before."
"I come in most days."
"I must have missed you." She settled into the chair with the comfort of someone who had decided this was happening. "I'm Dana."
"Petra."
"That's a beautiful name." She leaned forward slightly. "Do you live in San Jacinto, or—"
"I was born in Braga, Portugal, but I immigrated here with my family when I was three and have pretty much been here ever since.
" I was aware, in my peripheral vision, of Vera at the reference desk.
Her patron had just left. She was reshuffling something on the surface with an energy that was not quite natural. "You?"
"Born and raised in the U.S. of A. Eight months in San Jacinto, though. Still finding my bearings." She smiled again, the practiced version. "Maybe you could show me around sometime."
In my peripheral vision, Vera had gone very still. She was doing the thing where she pretended to be very interested in a display she'd already arranged three times this week.
"I appreciate that," I said, "but I'm seeing someone."
Dana's eyes moved briefly toward the desk. Back to me. "Our cute librarian?"
I looked at Vera, who was absolutely not looking at us. Which meant she had heard every word.
"Yeah," I said. "Her."
Dana received this with good grace, said it was nice to meet me, and took her drink and her smile to another table. I picked up both coffees, walked to the reference desk, and set Vera's down in front of her.
She looked at it. Looked up at me.
"Dana checks out historical fiction," she said. "Every other Thursday. She brought me a plant for the desk at Christmas."
"Kind of her."
"She's been watching you since you walked in." Vera picked up the coffee with both hands. "I noticed."
"I know you noticed."
"I wasn't going to say anything about it."
"I know that, too." I leaned on the desk. "Vera."
"Mm."
"I told her I was seeing someone."
Something almost unreadable moved through her face. "You did?"
"Felt like accurate information." I held her gaze. "Is it accurate?"
She set the coffee down. She took off her glasses and cleaned them, which I'd learned was her tell for I'm feeling something and I need three seconds. Then she put them back on and looked at me with those clear, direct blue eyes.
"I haven't wanted to see anyone else," she said. "Since approximately the hallway."
"Since Preppy."
"Don't." She pointed. "That was my best guess. But yes." Her chin tilted up slightly. "I've been yours since before I understood what that meant. That's the honest version."
The reference desk between us felt suddenly very irrelevant as a concept.
"Mine," I said.
"Yours." Steady. Sure. And then, with the particular composure of someone aware they're making me insane, she said, "So. Are we doing this with a name?"
"We've been doing this."
"I mean officially."
Three weeks of her toothbrush next to mine and her dresses in my closet and her Post-its in my jacket pocket.
Three weeks of onion rings and carrot corrections and Tuesday coffee through the staff entrance.
Three weeks of her pressed against my kitchen wall and her voice in the dark saying I've got you and her sleep-warm and certain beside me every morning I'd been lucky enough to wake up to her.
"Yeah," I said. "We're doing this with a name."
The smile that came over her face was slow and luminous and worth every single word.
"Then, for the record," she said, picking her coffee back up with that preternatural composure, "Petra Alves is my girlfriend. As of today. Logged, filed, and cross-referenced under best decision I've made in San Jacinto and see also: the Le Guin section."
"Vera Montgomery is my girlfriend," I said. "Also logged."
"The system has been updated."
"Is Mrs. Martinez going to hear about this?"
"Mrs. Martinez is going to be thrilled. She's going to bring tamales." She paused. "Multiple tamales. We're talking a significant quantity of celebratory tamales."
"I'm not opposed to that outcome."
"Neither am I." She looked at me over her coffee mug, warm and bright and entirely mine, and said, very softly, "Hi, girlfriend."
I grinned. "Hi yourself."
I walked back to my table and sat down and opened my gear manual and read exactly nothing for the next twenty minutes.
Vera, at the reference desk, was smiling at nothing in particular and every time I looked up and saw it, I looked back down at my manual and felt something flop in my stomach in that same ridiculous way it had been doing for three weeks.
Outside the windows, San Jacinto conducted its afternoon without fanfare, entirely indifferent to the fact that something had just been named that had been true for twenty-one days.
The desert light came through the tall windows and settled over the shelves and the books and Vera at her desk, amber and ordinary and exactly right.
I was going to be so useless for this gear report.
It was the best I'd felt in years.