Chapter Thirty-Five #2
Even though it’s bitingly cold outside, the courtyard has always felt warmer, insulated from the buffeting wind.
Or perhaps it’s the river, protecting its foolish owners from freezing to death.
In the centre grows a sycamore tree that, despite the laws of nature, never seems to be entirely bare.
Underneath, a previous owner thoughtfully left a bench, though from a certain angle it looks like a repurposed table, with old joints in odd places.
Cassandra’s spent more than a few summers out here, tracing her fingers across the graffiti left behind.
She brushes a few leaves off the bench and they both sit. Lowell sets his mug to one side, steam curling in the air.
“Tell me,” she says.
Lowell’s gaze rests on their hands, still interlinked.
“His name was Arthur,” he says, then he exhales.
“Arthur was the first. Then Edmund. Then me. All firstborn prices. When Jimena died, the shop went to Arthur.” Lowell flexes his hand against Cassandra’s.
“I don’t think she ever considered that he wouldn’t want to be an owner.
It’s inconceivable to them, you know? How could you not love it? ”
“‘To even step foot in this bookshop is a privilege,’” Cassandra says, quoting Chiron.
Lowell nods, then pauses. “Well, Arthur might have loved it. He liked it enough. But I don’t think he was ready.
He got in over his head, fell in with a bad group of people.
He was just… he had this way about him, you know?
Like he could be friends with anyone, or make anyone feel welcome, just by being there.
But he had an awfully hard time saying no, and I guess by the time he thought about it, maybe it was too late.
These weren’t the kind of people you could say no to. ”
Cassandra doesn’t ask how Lowell knows this, or how deeply he’s ventured into those murky waters. But she recognises the world, the people, the impossibility of refusing duty.
“They started asking him to do readings. Risky, then riskier.” Lowell hesitates. “He’d never really got the hang of readings, but I’m not sure it mattered to them. And then… a reading went bad. Worse than bad. And that was it.”
He exhales again, his breath a puff of condensation in the night air. Cassandra’s not sure she’s ever heard him talk so much before.
“He sounds like a good man,” she says.
“Oh, he was. Better than both of us.” Lowell picks up a stray leaf and twirls it between his fingers. “I like this world too much to ever leave. But I’ve always wondered what he might have done, if he hadn’t been an owner.”
They sit quietly, listening to the sycamore rustle above them.
Cassandra tries to imagine what that world might look like.
What she and Lowell might have been allowed to be, if they’d never stepped foot into a tributary bookshop.
But her imagination keeps failing; she’s already seen the expression on Lowell’s face when he walks through the bookshop that should be his.
And she’s already seen what Fate had in store for her when she’d left.
She would have always found her way back, she decides.
“Edmund will give the bookshop to me eventually,” he says. “When he gets bored, or it stops being worth it to him.”
Though Cassandra has more than enough reasons to dislike Edmund, she feels another sharp stab of hatred.
“If he hates it, he should give it to you now,” she says.
He glances at the tree above him, an odd expression on his face. “Lowell Sharpe, owner. It has a certain ring to it, I suppose.”
“That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
She can hardly bear to look at him, for what she might find. But she forces herself to meet his gaze. Shivers like lightning race down her spine, and this time, they have nothing to do with the cold.
Lowell, with his own bookshop. Lowell, no longer interested in this one. Without an excuse to drop in, to cross swords over this or that book. To tease Cassandra, to send her notes. To give her that crooked, wry smile she’s grown so very fond of.
“And what,” he murmurs, “if I’m afraid to get what I want?”
He reaches over to tuck a stray thread of hair behind her ear, but his hands don’t leave her face. She lets herself look at him properly: at all the soft lines clustered across his forehead; the rich brown, almost black of his eyes, shadowed under his glasses; the slight bow to his lips.
“Aren’t we all?” she whispers.
He kisses her.
He tastes of ink and salt, mouth soft and pliable. One hand brushes through her hair, while the other cups her jaw. She leans into him, and how wonderfully solid he is, how incredible to feel the weight of his chest against hers.
It occurs to her then just how much she’s wanted to kiss him. That she hasn’t really stopped thinking about his hands since that moment in the wardrobe. That she could have stayed there for another ten, fifteen, twenty minutes if it meant feeling the plane of his body against hers.
His lips part and his hands glide across the curve of her waist. She pulls him close, his skin warm underneath his shirt. The edge of his glasses bump against her face, delightfully unfamiliar.
“Do you ever consider that you were wrong about me, Lowell Sharpe?” she murmurs against his lips.
His hand skates her jawline, electricity in a fingertip. “Never.”
She presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth, then another. “You’re a good liar, Lowell, but I’m better.”
When he finally breaks off, a little breathless, his smile is a wild, rare thing, lightning racing across the landscape of his face. How much she enjoys that smile. What she would give to keep seeing it, just for a little longer.
His hands sweep down the line of her body, coming to rest on the top of her hips in a carefully controlled halt. Like they could keep going, if she let him. She sucks in an uneven breath.
Lowell exhales, the tops of his cheeks flushed. “I have wanted to do that… for quite a long time.”
“I told you the strip-tease was inadvisable,” she says.
The look he gives her is molten. “Oh, it’s been far longer than that.”
Something hot buries itself within her. She leans against him to hide it, letting her head rest in the crook of his shoulder. Lowell’s quiet laughter rumbles through her, as though he already knows what she’s thinking. Then he shifts, and she catches the change in his attention.
“Look,” he murmurs, and lets his hand fall outside the shelter of the sycamore.
A snowflake lands, then another one, crisp and perfect. The first snowfall. There for a second and then gone.