CHAPTER TWO
Iwake up keenly aware of two things: One, that there’s something I’m forgetting. A dream, maybe, or a fading memory, a word on the tip of my tongue. The harder I try to retrieve it, the further into my subconscious it burrows.
And two, that I slept on the TV remote and it is now embedded into my face.
It’s early, and the bright white of a late-winter morning barges through my gauzy curtains while a lone bird screams shrill wake-up songs outside.
My ability to be a morning person is directly correlated to the fun of the day ahead, and today I’m facing down a headache and eight hours of temping at HillCare Health.
I make the rookie mistake of trying to ease into consciousness by scrolling through my phone.
(This is a mistake I make every morning.) I don’t know what I hope to find there—maybe an email informing me that my office building has burned down, or a news article announcing that whipped cream straight from the can is actually good for you.
Instead it’s all PEOPLE IN POWER ARE DOING BAD THINGS and THERE ARE MURDERERS IN YOUR CITY and YOU STILL HAVE TO GO TO WORK TODAY, ROXIE.
Although I know my sunlit adventuring days are paid for by my fluorescent-lit grunt-work ones, it’s easy to wish my day-to-day were a bit more my speed than keyboard clacking and corporate jargon.
But that would come with its own drawbacks.
A job I cared about would be a job I couldn’t easily leave.
This way, everything may be boring and beige and stuffy, but it’s only boring and beige and stuffy for a few weeks or months at a time.
Then I finish a temping contract, and the world is my oyster once again.
It’s easy to disregard the drudgery as soon as a chance to cliff dive or swim with sharks comes calling.
So I get to my feet—albeit by sliding off the couch like a hungover noodle—pop an ibuprofen, try to rub the remote button imprints out of my cheek, and start the day.
Yesterday’s romance-fest did no favors for today.
In comparison, my life looks like the “before” part of an infomercial.
One big black-and-white montage of spilled orange juice and Tupperware avalanches, of dirty street slush and sardine-packed train cars.
At one point in my commute, I find myself squished against a handsome man in a sharp suit.
Without lifting his hazel eyes from his phone, he opens his mouth, lets out a soft burp right in my face, and turns his back on me.
I’d like to see Anna Matthews write that.
The office is no better; there aren’t many workplace rom-coms set in the marketing department of a geriatric health company, and for good reason.
I don’t particularly like anyone I work with, but it’s less of a sexy, passionate hatred and more an aversion to listening to Mitch and Derek complain about “females” in the break room.
My current boss is not a hunky businessman; she is Miranda, a chronic pen-clicker whose sharp bob always seems to be swinging at me in annoyance over HillCare’s dismal social media stats.
As if it’s my fault people aren’t flocking to Instagram for senior fall prevention content.
It’s a day full of meetings that could have been emails, people droning on about key metrics and conversion rates and deliverables, about KPI and CTR and LMNOP.
I nod when they nod, frown when they frown, take notes that inevitably turn into doodles.
I sit at my desk. I time my lunch break.
I try to ignore the ceaseless mouse-clicking and light-buzzing and the pungent smell courtesy of whoever decided to microwave tilapia.
By day’s end, I’m crawling out of my skin, jonesing for an escape. So when I finally drag myself outside at five o’clock, I do the only sensible thing: I get on the train and schlep my world-weary self to the library.
· · ·
THE BOSTON PUBLIC LIbrARY is my favorite place in the city, and I think it would be even if it weren’t full of books.
Everything outside falls away the second you cross the threshold.
I always find myself a little breathless whenever I walk up the entrance hall stairs and take it all in—the stone lions, the mosaic ceilings, the marbled pillars, all cast golden in the glow of soft orb lights.
Then there’s the courtyard, a big open-air expanse with a garden I would love to take a turn about in a Regency gown with my boobs pushed up to my neck. Highly convenient that the historical romance novels are a mere few rooms away.
I have four of them picked out as I peruse the shelves, plus five or six brightly colored rom-coms. I balance them in a precarious one-handed stack, braced with my chin, while my other hand grabs at anything pink or purple or mint green.
If it’s bright enough to counteract the dreariness of my day, it’s coming home with me.
“Ma’am, we have a five-book limit.”
I whip around to argue, having personally tested the library’s actual seventy-five-book limit before. In the process, my barely contained pile collapses into a shower of books around me.
My defense lurches to a halt. His green eyes are crinkled with amusement behind trendy round-frame glasses, his face lit with a lopsided grin.
He has tousled sandy hair, a sprinkle of freckles, an easygoing stance.
I take in his peacoat and hoodie, and the books he carries casually in one hand. “You don’t work here,” I say.
“Guilty. Just messing with you.” Setting his own books aside, the man stoops to help gather mine. He picks up one powder-pink paperback and squints at it. “I might have to fight you for this one.”
“It’s for book club,” I say hastily, grabbing You, Me second step, Social Security number. “You want to carry my books? Like school in the 1950s?”
“Sure. And if that goes well, maybe we can move on to some”—he leans in closer and drops his voice to a sultry, conspiratorial whisper—“rock and roll.”
It hits me with the delay of a thunderclap after lightning: He’s flirting with me.
At the library. And he’s extremely good-looking.
What’s going on? This kind of thing happens on pages and screens, not in my actual life.
It’s an unsettling collision of worlds, like seeing your biology teacher at the movies or your dermatologist in Thailand.
Fine, okay. It’s slightly more charming than that.
I scoff at him. “Rock and roll? Do I look like a devil worshipper to you?”
He laughs, a warm, unexpected sound that sends a little trill down my spine.
“I’m Jack,” he says, his smiling eyes locked on me.
“Roxie.”
“Like Roxie Hart,” he says, then squints warily. “You’re not going to kill me, are you?”
My mouth quirks into a smile. “Only if you have it coming.”
I let him take a few of my books, just because there are a lot of them and I have my eye on a couple more. Not because of his strong arms or his dimples or the way his laugh reminds me of sun-warmed linen sheets gently billowing from a clothesline on a summer’s day.
He’s been wanting to join a book club himself, he tells me. He used to be an avid fiction reader but fell out of practice over four years of undergrad and three of law school.
“It was just hard to find the time,” he says. “Even more so when I started working in youth advocacy law.”
Wow. A book lover and a defender of vulnerable children? Next he’s going to tell me he rescues lost puppies on the side.
“And the rest of the time I’m busy volunteering at the Humane Society,” he adds.
… Okay, that was weird.
Nevertheless, he tells me, he’s determined to win back his reading mojo. I raise an eyebrow at the thick spines he’s holding beneath my paperbacks. “And you’re thinking The Vast Gray Nothing is the way to do that?”
“What?” He frowns at me. Even when he frowns, he’s smiling. “I heard it was good.”
“I heard it’ll bulldoze your heart and leave you a shell of your former self. But, hey, to each their own mojo.”
We cross back through the courtyard’s cloister walkway, the softly glowing pendant lamps tracing his face in gold.
“Maybe you should give me one of yours, then. Show me what I’m missing.
” He taps a finger on the bright yellow book on top of my stack, A Farce to Be Reckoned With. “This one looks fun.”
I smile and defensively twist away. “You can pry it from my cold, dead hands. I’ve been waiting to read it for months.” I stop at a stone bench to reorder my stack, handing him a worn copy of Two If by Sea. “Try this one. I’ve already read it twice. I should probably just buy it at this point.”
He peruses the cover as we journey on toward the foyer. “Anna Matthews. She sounds familiar.”
“She’s my favorite. I dare you to read any of her books without kicking your feet up and giggling.”
He sets my books down gently at the checkout kiosk, then leans in and, with a low voice that sends those goddamn tingles back down my neck, says, “I never turn down a dare.”