Chapter 22
DARCY
By last period I've given up pretending this is a normal Wednesday.
The grading week I’m hiding behind is real.
The stack waiting on my desk is real. What's also real is that I've read the same paragraph of Lisa's essay half a dozen times and retained none of it, because my brain keeps leaving the building and driving back to yesterday with Finn.
To a nearly empty parking lot and him with his hands in his pockets, saying, I didn't come back for the kids, Darcy.
He said it gently, as if he knew exactly how hard I was holding my own rules together and had decided not to make it a fight. You know why I'm here. And then, while my whole body leaned toward him like a plant toward a window, he let me off the hook. No response required.
I have thought about nothing else since.
It's been three nights since I learned the sound Finn Bardot makes when he comes, and my body has not stopped suggesting that I need to hear him make that sound again.
Standing in that parking lot with him, I wanted to kiss him so badly I had to hold my own elbow to keep from reaching for him.
Then I drove home aching, yearning, and sat in my car outside my own apartment for seven whole minutes arguing myself out of turning around and driving to the vineyard to find him.
Reason won the argument. Reason is a selfish bitch. The rest of me has been moping like a sore loser ever since.
So after the last bell, I do what I often do when I'm feeling confused and lost in a way I can't explain to anyone. I go find my mother.
The library at four on a Wednesday is church-quiet, sun coming through the tall windows onto the reading tables, the whole building smelling like aged paper and crisp lemon floor polish. My favorite scents of my entire childhood.
It takes me only a second to realize that Finn is here.
He's at the corner table by local history, my mother sitting across from him. And between them is a stack I can read from the door because I've spent my life knowing this room. Large-print editions. Matching audiobook cases. A pamphlet I'm too far away to see what it's about.
What's he doing here with my mom in the middle of the week?
I step behind the biography shelf before either of them sees me. I'm not proud of sneaking and snooping as a full-grown adult. I do it anyway.
Finn is sitting very still. Not the stillness that happens when I walk into a room. This is the careful, serious kind, one hand flat on the table like he's holding it down, his broad shoulders set. His voice when it reaches me is low and even.
"It's to help one of the workers at the vineyard," he says.
My mother, who has run that circulation desk since before I was born and been lied to about overdue books, water damage, and who really tore the maps out of the atlas in 1987, does not blink.
"Reading struggles are far more common than people think," she says, and slides the pamphlet back across, face-up, like it's a boat-repair manual.
"The adult reading program two towns over is excellent.
Evening sessions. Very private." Her hand rests on the audiobooks.
"And these go home with you today. Same book, two formats.
The fellow you're trying to help can listen while he follows along on the page.
It's not a workaround, whatever anybody says.
Audiobooks are reading. Tell him the librarian said so. "
Finn looks at the stack for a moment. "He'll be glad to hear it," he says. And the jokes are gone. There's no wink in it, no stage anywhere in the building. Finn Bardot without jokes is Finn Bardot being braver than anyone ever gets to see.
Except me. And, now, my mom. Even if he's giving her a more cautious version of brave.
The man across from my mother spent yesterday afternoon hanging a sky for my drama kids. Now he's here, in the building where I watched him charm an auction crowd without breaking a sweat, quietly doing the one thing on earth that scares him the most. And he didn't tell me.
He was never going to tell me. That's the part that gets all the way in. This isn't for my benefit. It’s for himself. I was never supposed to see it.
It lands somewhere I have no defenses built, because it never occurred to me to build them there.
My mother walks him to the door the way she walks favored patrons out, which is to say she comes around the desk, something she does for maybe four people on this earth.
At the door he pauses. "Thank you, Mrs. Gable."
"Clara," she says.
He smiles at that, then he's gone through the front doors with the pamphlet, the book, and the matching audiobook case, and I am standing in the biography section with my chest aching from a tenderness I have no idea where to put.
My mother returns to the desk, picks up a stack of returns, and says, without turning around, "You can come out of biographies now, sweetheart."
Shit. Twenty-six years at that desk. The woman has seen it all. I never had a chance.
"How long did you know I was there?" I ask, coming out.
"You walked in at 4:09." She hands me half the returns. "Shelve these with me."
We shelve. It's muscle memory, the two of us moving down the aisle, and I last almost a full minute before I crack.
"What was that about?"
"A patron consultation."
"Mom."
"Conversations at my desk are confidential, Darcy. Same as the borrowing records." She slides a spine into place with two fingers. "You know that."
And that's when it fully lands, what I'm watching—my mother, guarding him. Making a fortress out of a circulation desk, the exact way she'd guard any scared kid who finally worked up the nerve to ask her for help.
She's not going to tell me. She'd never tell anyone.
It makes me want to put my head on her shoulder and cry, and I genuinely cannot say whether it's for Finn or for her or for the twelve-year-old me he used to torture, who grew up to be the woman standing in this aisle feeling her whole beautiful airtight plan not to love him going soft in her hands.
"I will say this," my mother offers, to the shelf.
"People show you who they are by what they're embarrassed to ask for.
Most men that age come in embarrassed about a divorce book or a prostate book.
" She fits another spine home. "That one asked anyway.
Sat there with his hat in his hands and asked me careful questions, and took notes he didn't want me to see him take. "
"Mom."
"And he talks about you." She says it mildly, the way she'd note the weather turning.
"Didn't mean to. It kept happening anyway.
Three times in twenty minutes, Darcy. The drama sets, your writing workshop, something about a laugh.
" She finally looks at me over the returns cart, and her eyes are gentle and completely without mercy.
"That boy looks at you the way my Ted looks at me. "
I have to set the books down on the cart.
My mother, of all people. The woman who kept a coffee mug in the cabinet for my deadbeat father longer than she kept the man. She looked at Finn Bardot across a stack of large-print books and saw Ted. She saw a good man. The staying kind.
"I'm scared," I tell her, because in this building I have never once managed to lie.
"I know," she says. "You've been scared of him since eighth grade. It was the correct response then." She takes the books out of my arms like I'm eight and it's past my bedtime. "It isn't now."
I hug her tight. She smells like binding glue and the same floral hand lotion she's used my whole life.
She pats my back twice and says, "Go on.
He parked at the curb around the corner, and I imagine he's been sitting there long enough that people will start returning books just to walk past the truck and get a look at him. "
Every step to the door, the old plan I've been clinging to makes its closing arguments. He leaves. Men like him have exits built in. You watched what's left behind. I listen to all of it the way I listen to a student explain why the essay is late. Kindly, yet completely unmoved.
Just as Mom promised, Finn's at the curb in the old pickup truck, driver's door open, one boot up on the running board, reading the pamphlet like it might change if he stares at it hard enough.
The late sun glances off his strong jaw and makes his golden-brown hair look like it's glowing from within.
He looks up, sees me, and goes absolutely still except for the pamphlet that vanishes into his jacket in one smooth motion. I pretend with my whole face that I didn't see it.
"Twice in two days," he starts, easy, the showman warming up as I approach him in the open space of the door. "People are going to say..."
I kiss him.
Mid-sentence, on Main Street. In front of the pharmacy window and God and whoever's walking out of the hardware store, I take two fistfuls of his jacket and pull his mouth down to mine.
He goes rigid for half a second. One perfect, stunned half-second in which Finn Bardot completely fails to process being kissed by me in broad daylight on a public sidewalk.
Then his hands find me, one sliding along my jaw, the other spreading warm and wide at the small of my back.
He pulls me in like he's been waiting through geological time.
His mouth opens over mine and takes charge of the kiss I started. He tilts my head back with the hand at my jaw, finding the angle he wants, and kisses me. Deep and unhurried, like there's no pharmacy window, no town. No clock running down on whatever our relationship is or wants to be.
When my lips part his tongue sweeps in, hot and sure, sliding against mine in a slow, thorough rhythm that calls to mind every delicious, wicked way he ran his mouth over me Sunday night.
I lean into the heat we're generating, licking my tongue into his mouth, rising up on my toes to get more of him, catching his lower lip between my teeth until I earn the tormented, then relieved, sound he makes against my mouth. It’s low and rough and completely mine.
I feel that sound everywhere. Heat pools low in my belly.
My fingers curl harder into his jacket, and I kiss him back with tongue and teeth and three days of wanting him, right up to the edge of what daylight allows.
God, I want him. All of him, all over again, starting immediately, and the only thing keeping this kiss street-legal is the small remaining part of me that remembers I have to live here even after he's gone.
When our lips part ways, we're both breathing like we ran here.
"Not that I'm objecting at all," he says. His voice has gravel in it now. His thumb is still moving along my jaw like it hasn't gotten the news that the kiss ended. "But what happened to the heavy work week?"
"It's still heavy." I smooth his jacket where I grabbed it, which accomplishes nothing, because my hands don't want to leave. "Tomorrow night. You and me. Dinner."
Something crosses his face that's too honest to be a grin, though a grin arrives right behind it. "Seven o’clock," he says. "I'll pick you up."
"I'll be ready." I step back before I do something that earns us a second headline.
"Let me drive you home now," he says, but I'm already smiling and shaking my head.
"I think we both know where that will end."
His mouth quirks into a crooked grin. "I'm not seeing the problem."
Neither am I, and that itself is the problem. "I left a stack of papers back at school that need to get graded tonight."
He groans. "You really know how to torture a man. Tomorrow, then."
"Tomorrow."
"Looking forward to it," he says, giving me an intense look that nearly melts my panties off my body right where I stand.
I start to walk away. I don't look back, mostly because if I look back I won't keep walking, and a woman should be allowed to keep a little dignity on the same public street where she just kissed a man senseless in front of the entire pharmacy.
I feel Finn's eyes on me until I finally round the corner and disappear from his view.