Chapter 33
JENNIFER
I'm restless. I have been since I woke up this morning. Some days are like that.
Yesterday I was happy to sit on the phone with Anna and then spend the afternoon with Matteo, but today I need air and movement and the particular comfort of Gerald, so I am in the garden.
Tomas comes down the shell path with his book under his arm and his glasses on. He stops a few feet away and looks at me standing next to the bay tree in the November afternoon and does not say anything about it, which is one of the many things I appreciate about him.
"Come to the library," he says.
He pauses beside my chair, his shadow falling cool across my legs as he blocks the sun. One hand rests in his pocket, the other loose at his side, as if he has merely wandered over and not crossed the lawn with a purpose.
"I'm not a book person." I tip my face up at him without moving.
"I know."
"I've told you that."
"Several times." The corner of his mouth threatens movement. "Come anyway."
I squint at him.
He waits with the serene patience of a man entirely certain he will be obeyed.
"Fine."
Something warm flickers through his expression, nearly a smile. He offers me his hand.
The library is warm.
I have been in it before, the time I opened the wrong door and found Tomas in the armchair looking at me over his glasses with the expression of a man who had been expecting me, but I have not spent real time in it, not the way I have spent time in the kitchen and the herb garden and the living room with its enormous windows and its view of the water.
Tomas holds the door and I go in.
"Sit wherever you want," Tomas says.
I look around.
The shelves run floor to ceiling on three walls and they are full in the way that libraries get full when someone has been adding to them for a long time without removing anything, no gaps, no decorative spaces, just books, spines outward, some with their titles clearly visible and some worn enough that you have to tilt your head to read them.
There is an armchair near the door. There is a window seat along the far wall with a cushion on it, wide and deep, and the window above it faces the water.
I go to the window seat.
I sit in it and look out at the water and the herb garden below.
"Why do you love it?” I ask. "The library."
To be clear that I’m referring to the library and not the island.
Tomas looks up from his book.
He considers this with the seriousness he brings to questions that deserve it.
"The quality of the quiet," he says. "It is different in here.
Quieter than quiet. The books absorb the sound.
The room has been full of thinking for long enough that it has the texture of it.
" He looks at the window. "And the light at this hour. "
I’m sitting completely still, which hasn’t happened today, and my back is not aching, and my omega is so quiet in the warm library air that I can barely feel her, just a low warm hum, the satisfied kind.
"It's the room," I say.
"Yes," he says.
"It's like being inside something," I say, trying to find the right word for it. "Everything outside is still there but it's on the other side of something."
Tomas looks at me over his glasses with those gray eyes warm and steady.
"Yes," he says, simply, and goes back to his book.
I look at the shelves, and I let my eyes move along the spines anyway, the way you look at things that belongs to someone you are interested in, not because you want what they have but because it tells you something. "What's on the bottom left?”
"My grandmother's books," he says. "She gave them to me when I was twelve. I've read all of them many times."
I look at the worn spines.
I think about twelve-year-old Tomas receiving his grandmother's books and reading them many times and keeping them on the bottom left shelf for however many years it has been, and I think about the careful deliberate way he keeps everything, not as performance but as attention, and I feel something warm and certain settle into my chest.
Ihave been in the library for an hour and have read approximately four pages of the bird book, which is, for me, a genuinely impressive pace.
Three birds identified from the herb garden drawings, two more studied on the basis that I intend to find them eventually and will feel extremely good about myself when I do.
Tomas has been reading in the armchair the whole time with the steady unhurried focus of someone who does not need to look like he is reading because he simply is.
The room has held us both in its warm particular quiet.
Rosemary on the windowsill. The water going amber in the last of the afternoon light beyond the glass.
The baby shifts.
I press my hand to my stomach and feel her settle, that small rolling press that still startles me with joy every time it happens, which is a thing I did not expect about pregnancy and have never quite gotten used to and hope I never do.
Then the door opens.
Santos comes in first, sleeves rolled to the elbow, flour dusting one forearm, which means he has been cooking something complicated on purpose.
He sees me in the window seat and his face does the thing it always does, that open helpless softening he will never learn to keep off his face in time, and my omega does what she always does when he looks at me like that, which is absolutely nothing composed.
Matteo follows. His pale eyes find me immediately, take me in with that quiet steady assessment, and then go warm when he decides everything is as it should be.
"Tomas," Santos says, looking at the book in my hands with the expression of a man who has witnessed something miraculous. "Did you put a spell on her?"
I roll my eyes and turn a page.
"Walk on the beach later?" he says, already moving toward me.
"No," I say. "I want to stay here a while."
Tomas gets up from the armchair and crosses to me and presses a kiss to the top of my head, warm and unhurried, entirely his.
"I knew you would like it," he says.
He is right. He usually is.
Though if I am being honest with myself, which I am trying to be these days, it is not really the library or the window or the way the light sits differently here than anywhere else on the island.
It is what the room holds right now. The three of them in it.
The particular quality of an afternoon that belongs entirely to us with nothing asked of it.
I close the bird book on my finger.
I cannot think of a single thing I want more than exactly this.