Chapter Twelve
Maggie had never wished more for an off switch for her brain.
Her thoughts were always a jumbled mess of to-do lists, bits of poetry translation, and ideas for exam questions that she’d inevitably forget to write down.
But now? She couldn’t get Arthur Taliesin out of her head, or the anxiety-inducing catalog of every single text message she had sent him over the weekend.
She wasn’t sure, exactly, how they’d fallen into this rhythm.
When she left him on Friday afternoon, wholly unsure whether he’d make it back to Atlantia without wrecking that rusty old truck, any shred of confidence and certainty she had about their agreement vanished.
As she’d walked back to her apartment, she’d repeated a steady litany of worries: I made a deal with Arthur Taliesin.
No, I forced him to agree to it. Arthur Taliesin!
Is this technically blackmail? I need to look up the definition of blackmail.
Then, when she didn’t hear from him for over an hour, she panicked and sent him that first text.
She imagined having to drive along the winding highway to Atlantia, searching for the burning wreckage of his truck in swampy ditches.
And because she’d never been able to keep quiet when she was nervous, she just kept texting him until he finally responded with that picture of his hand.
And, gods below, what had possessed him to do that?
Maggie had a sudden understanding of what men were trying to achieve with pictures of other parts of their anatomy.
Clearly, they should have been sending pictures of their hands all along.
She had stared at the photo of his long, tapered fingers, his wide palm, the glimpse of his corded forearm beyond his wrist with her mouth agape.
It was a work of art. It made her think inappropriate thoughts about what that hand could do, the places those fingers could go. It was absolutely ridiculous.
At least she could blame her frazzled brain for the text she sent him later in the evening when he asked her what she would be doing on Thursday night.
Ideally, I’ll be horizontal…The moment she hit send, she yelped as she realized what she wrote and felt an overwhelming urge to dive into her phone to retrieve it before he read it.
Unfortunately, it was marked read instantly, like he’d been staring at the screen waiting for her to message him.
She swore, biting her lip as she waited for his response.
Even though he took a very long time to type out an answer, he had ignored any accidental double entendre, to Maggie’s relief.
The rest of their conversation managed to be relatively normal, and she had finally sent a good-night text, vowing to not send him any more messages all weekend.
But then, at an absurdly early hour on Saturday morning, he sent her an inexplicable picture of a little boy with a surprisingly large fish.
Maggie didn’t see the photo until she woke up, hours after he sent it.
She didn’t know what to say back. It couldn’t have been meant for her.
Could it? And if it wasn’t meant for her, shouldn’t she make him aware of the fact that he sent her a picture of a kid with a fish?
She thought she recognized him as the same boy in the photo on Taliesin’s desk, the one who had Taliesin’s smile.
Was this his way of revealing he had a son?
Could Arthur Taliesin have a son she was unaware of?
Finally, as she deliberated what to say, an explanation arrived.
A. Taliesin: Sorry. Accidentally sent that to you.
Maggie: I see you’re getting this kid started young with the time-honored tradition of Men Posing with Fish.
A. Taliesin: I take my job as uncle very seriously.
Uncle. The other man in the framed photo on his desk must be his brother, then. She felt strangely relieved by the response, a feeling she didn’t want to explore. She was curious, too. What was Arthur Taliesin like as an uncle?
That thought had occupied most of her weekend, especially since no additional text messages came in from Taliesin, accidental or intentional. It was for the best, of course, but she still found herself checking her phone more than once to see if she missed anything.
Now, sitting at her desk on Monday morning, Maggie dreaded Taliesin walking through the door of their office.
At least before she had known how to act around him.
She had known what to expect. But, suddenly, the ground had shifted.
Between their agreement, the texts, that photo of his hand…
Maggie took a giant sip of coffee to calm her nerves just as Taliesin walked in, and promptly choked on it.
And then his hands were on her back, his palm hitting between her shoulder blades as she coughed. “All right?” he asked as she regained control. He had stopped patting her back, but he hadn’t removed his hand from between her shoulders.
“I’m fine,” she managed to croak as she glanced up at him. She gently shimmied her shoulders and sat up straight until he removed his hand. His lips quirked in a slight grin before he went to his desk and then seemed to immediately get lost in his own work.
She was relieved she didn’t have time to dwell on the way he’d touched her.
Like they were comfortable with each other.
And they definitely were not. But, soon, there was a steady stream of students, both hers and Taliesin’s, in and out of the office, turning in last-minute assignments and asking for help with exam prep.
Maggie had made a sign-up sheet for fifteen-minute increments so there was little overlap, but if two students did show up at the same time, Maggie and Taliesin took turns holding meetings in the hallway.
It was all very orderly. If anything had really changed between them, it was this effortless way they shared their space without any of the push and pull that had plagued Maggie since he moved in.
Taliesin’s students made themselves feel at home in Maggie’s office.
She heard more than one compliment the warm lighting, and they all sank into her couch, snuggling with the handmade granny-square blanket she had draped across the back.
She bit her tongue against gloating to Taliesin about how much his students seemed to love the fainting couch, and she was exceedingly proud of herself for her restraint.
His students also found the cart of goodies that she kept stocked with extra treats around exam time to help ease nerves.
Taliesin first tried to keep them from taking anything, but the allure of Mothman-shaped stress balls and candies that burst through with lavender jelly was impossible to deny, and Maggie told Taliesin to go ahead and let them.
After one of his students left, Taliesin held up the remaining stress ball. “Where does one purchase bug man stress balls? I need to refill your cart.”
Maggie’s first, annoying instinct was to tell him not to worry about it, but she squashed it. “I found them at Glinda’s,” Maggie explained, naming the tchotchke shop downtown that always had a delightful and strange assortment of treasures.
“Huh,” Taliesin said, turning a Mothman in his hand and squeezing it until its eyes bugged out. “I’ve never been there.”
Maggie thought about being mean to him. She really did.
Oh, that’s because you hate fun, she could have said.
Glinda’s is for people who know how to smile also crossed her mind, even as she remembered Taliesin’s knowing grin.
Instead, she found herself saying, “If you stop by, tell Glinda I sent you. She keeps a special stash of lavender candies behind the counter for me at exam time.”
“Why lavender?”
“It’s soothing.” She held out one of the candies. “Calms the nerves.”
He took the candy from her, his fingers grazing her palm, and suddenly the air felt full of static, like their sweaters could spark and ignite.
She held her breath as Taliesin unwrapped the pale purple cellophane and placed the candy on his tongue, sucking on it and swirling it around in his mouth.
Maggie couldn’t stop staring at the way his lips pursed together as he sucked on the candy.
“Is it working?” she asked in a breathy whisper she barely recognized. She had no clue what was happening between them. His own gaze was trained on her mouth as she licked her lips. She couldn’t breathe.
He just hummed his assent, not taking his eyes off her mouth.
This was a hard lurch toward something she didn’t want to acknowledge. It was electric. It was inconvenient.
Maggie wished she could say she was the one who broke the gaze between them, but it was Taliesin.
He tore his eyes from her lips like it pained him to do it and turned back around.
For a moment, Maggie just stared at the back of his neck, at his shoulders, at the comical way his legs scrunched beneath his desk, breathing deeply.
The way he’d been looking at her, the way he rolled that tongue over the candy, the ghost of his hand still between her shoulder blades, and the strange charge between them…
She wanted him to turn back around, lean across her desk, and just kiss her to put her out of her misery.
And where had that come from? So she picked up her bags and left without saying goodbye.