31. Juliette #2
But I only have eyes for one person.
Zachary pushes through the crowd, his face wet with tears he’s not trying to hide, and when he reaches me I hand him the bookmark.
The one I made weeks ago. The one I hid behind the register. The one with a single word in my handwriting.
Stay.
He reads it.
He closes his hand around it.
And he doesn’t say anything at all - just pulls me into his arms and holds on like he’s never letting go.
Then his mouth finds my ear, underneath the noise of the whole island cheering.
“You never filed,” he says. “So by my own rules, I’m not qualified yet. But you just changed the rules in front of two hundred witnesses, so I’m paying up anyway.”
“Paying up?”
“The church doors. What I mouthed at you down the length of the aisle.” His arms tighten. “You’ve wondered for six years. Wonder’s over.”
“Tell me.”
“I’m the lucky one.”
The floor tilts.
My mother, in a vestibule six years gone, with her hands steady on my veil: He’s the lucky one, Juliette. Don’t you ever forget it.
They said the same thing. On the same day. Down to the word - and I’m the only one who never knew, the only one who spent six years believing I was the one who’d been chosen out of mercy.
I’m crying into his coat in front of the entire island, and for once in my life I don’t try to be composed about it.
“She knew,” I manage. “She said the same thing. That morning. Word for word.”
“Then it’s unanimous,” he says into my hair. “Motion carries.”
The last customer leaves at eight.
I lock the door behind them, flip the sign to CLOSED, and lean against the glass. Every muscle in my body aches. My voice is hoarse from talking. My feet are screaming for mercy.
It was perfect.
“Rosie went home?” Zachary appears from the back, two glasses of wine in his hands.
“She said if she had to answer one more question about return policies, she was going to commit a crime.”
“Fair enough.” He hands me a glass. “To your first day.”
“To surviving my first day.”
We clink glasses and drink.
The shop is quiet now, the chaos of the day reduced to the soft glow of the reading lamps Zachary insisted on leaving on. Makes it look like someone’s home, he’d said, and he was right.
“Walk with me,” he says.
“Where?”
“Poetry section.”
“Why poetry?”
“Because that’s where we’re going.”
He takes my hand and leads me through the stacks, past fiction and mystery and the little nook where Walt held his thriller seminar, until we reach the small alcove in the back corner.
The shop after hours is a different animal - lamplit, lowered, the day’s chaos settled into the shelves like snow into a field. Our footsteps have the room to themselves. He walks like a man who knows exactly where he’s going, because he built half the route.
Poetry. My smallest section, barely two shelves, but I’d been stubborn about including it.
“This is where you shelved the Neruda,” he says.
“I shelved Neruda everywhere. There’s a lot of Neruda.”
“This is where you shelved the specific Neruda.” He pulls a volume from the shelf, a slim collection I recognize immediately. “The one you quoted on our third date. About wanting.”
My throat tightens. “You remember that?”
“I remember everything.” He opens the book to a marked page. “I just didn’t know how to say it.”
He reads aloud, his voice low in the quiet shop. I want you. I need you. I don’t know how to not want you.
When he finishes, he sets the book aside and pulls me closer, palms settling warm and sure at the small of my back.
“Quiet, Mrs. Dean.”
The name hits different now. Not a prison. Not an erasure. Just a fact, like my heartbeat, like the way his hands fit against my waist.
But I don’t want quiet.
“No,” I say, tipping my chin up.
He blinks, thumbs stilling on my spine. “No?”
“I spent six years being quiet.” I rise onto my toes, bringing my mouth close to his ear so my lips brush the shell of it. “I’m done being quiet.”
I kiss him, and it’s not quiet at all. It’s loud and messy and exactly what I want, right here in the poetry section of my bookshop, surrounded by words I’ve loved since before I knew what love cost. His mouth opens under mine, heat and the faint taste of the whiskey he drank earlier.
I press closer until the edge of a shelf digs into my back.
Books shift. Somewhere a slim volume of sonnets tips and thumps softly to the floor. Neither of us looks.
He groans against my mouth, one hand sliding up to cup the nape of my neck. “Juliette-”
“No one’s watching.” I push his jacket off his shoulders, feeling the flex of muscle as it slides down his arms and hits the floor with a whisper of wool. “The door’s locked. The lights are low.”
“You realize what you’re doing?” His voice roughens while his fingers trace the curve of my hip through my dress, slow enough to send a shiver racing up my spine. “Half this island was just standing where I’m standing, telling you they always believed in you.”
“And now they’re gone.”
“Now they’re gone.” His forehead drops to mine, and he goes still. “Six years, Juliette. Six years I couldn’t touch you with the lights on. I’d sit across a table from you and I couldn’t even-” He doesn’t finish it. “Look. If we do this, here, tonight, I’m not going to be careful about it.”
“Good.” The word comes out steadier than I feel. “I’m done being careful.”
“You’re playing with fire.”
“I’m finishing something.” I splay my hands over his chest, feeling his heart slam against my palm. “Pay attention.”
My fingers find the buttons of his shirt. Cool air meets the warm skin I uncover. He catches my wrists, not hard, just enough to still me, and the restraint lands low in my stomach. His eyes are dark, almost black in the low light.
“Six years ago I told you to be quiet in a library,” he says, gaze dropping to my mouth.
“And I was. For six years.” I twist free just enough to take his face in both hands so he can’t look anywhere else. My thumbs stroke the stubble along his jaw. “Ask me to be quiet now.”
He doesn’t. His jaw goes tight under my palms, and the only sound in the whole shop is the clock above the register, ticking through a silence neither of us is willing to break first.
“I dare you.”
“Not a chance.” He leans into my touch, breath warm across my lips. “I want the whole island to know exactly how this story ends.”
“The windows-”
“Are in the front. We’re in the back.” I tug his shirt the rest of the way open and push it off, palms sliding over the plane of his chest, the sparse hair, the ridge of an old scar. Heat rolls off him. “Do you want me to stop?”
“I want you to never stop.” His hands return to my waist, fingers flexing like he’s afraid I’ll disappear.
“Then shut up and kiss me.”
He does - for three heartbeats. Then he turns his head so my mouth lands on his jaw instead. The denial is soft, deliberate, and it pulls a frustrated sound from my throat. His hands settle firmer at my hips, thumbs stroking the dip just above my hipbones.
“Not yet,” he murmurs against my cheek, lips dragging down to the hinge of my jaw. “You don’t get to rush this. Not after everything.”
“Zachary-”
“You said you were done being quiet.” He walks me backward until my shoulders meet the tall bookshelf that holds the Neruda and the Dickinson.
The wood is cool through my dress; his body is blazing.
He keeps his mouth just out of reach, close enough that I feel every exhale, far enough that when I stretch for him he leans away.
The teasing brush of his chest against my breasts makes my nipples tighten. “Prove it. Tell me what you want.”
“You,” I breathe. “All of you. No more careful. No more distance.”
His fingers find the zipper at the back of my dress.
The sound is obscenely loud in the hush - metal teeth parting inch by inch - while his free hand traces down the length of my spine, raising goosebumps in its wake.
Cool air kisses bare skin as he peels the fabric forward and down until it pools at my waist, baring the black lace I wore like a secret.
His gaze drops and darkens; I watch his throat work.
“Christ, Juliette.” The words come out rough. He traces the upper edge of the lace with one fingertip, following the swell of my breast, the valley between, the place where heat pools low in my belly. “You’ve been walking around all night like this. Driving me insane.”
“For you,” I manage, arching into the touch. “Only ever for you.”
He hums, low and almost pained, and lowers his head - not to my mouth, but to the side of my throat.
Open-mouthed kisses, the scrape of teeth, the soothing drag of his tongue.
I tip my head back against the spines of books and feel my pulse hammer against his lips.
His hands keep moving, pushing the dress over my hips until it falls.
I step out of it, kick it aside, and stand there in lace and heels while he shrugs fully out of his shirt.
The loss of even that small distance makes my stomach flip.
When he drops to his knees in front of me, I forget how to breathe.
The thin carpet gives under his weight. Big hands span my thighs, thumbs stroking the soft skin just below the edges of my underwear in slow arcs, and my legs go unsteady. He looks up once, checking, and whatever he sees on my face makes his mouth curve, hungry and tender at once.
“Hands on the shelf,” he says, voice quiet but firm. “Don’t let go. If you do, I stop.”
I obey, fingers curling around the wooden edge above my head hard enough that the grain bites into my palms. He presses a kiss to the inside of one knee, then higher, the other side, mapping me with maddening patience.
Each brush of his mouth makes my muscles jump.
When he reaches the lace he doesn’t pull it down - just hooks a finger in the crotch and draws it aside.
The first touch of his tongue is a flat, hot stroke right up the center of me. The sound I make is nothing like quiet.
“Oh - God-”