18. 1960
In his short lifetime, Jasper had read no fewer than three different books on etiquette.
The first had been more of a pamphlet than a book, given to him by his mother after he’d been invited to a children’s birthday party where he’d known zero of the guests and even less about the many different forks he was likely to encounter there. The second had been Emily Post’s Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home, and he’d only picked it up because someone had left it on the train when he’d moved to Colville. The third had doubled as a cookbook, and the only thing he’d gleaned from it was that any and all modern dinner parties required a generous investment of aspic, but he still counted it on his list.
Nothing, however, could have prepared him for the delicate situation of telling a young woman that he was being threatened into helping an up-and-coming lieutenant under her father’s command to win her love.
“Out with it,” Catherine hissed as they sat in the back of the darkened movie theater, carefully separated by a row in case anyone walked in and discovered them. “What’s so important that it couldn’t wait for a note inside our next book?”
He glanced over his shoulder to find the flickering lights of the movie casting a brief illumination across her face. The film was one they’d both already seen—Some Like It Hot—and they’d carefully chosen a time when they knew the theater would be empty, but Jasper still wished they could watch it like two people on a real date. Sitting side by side, sharing a bucket of popcorn, her thigh pressed warmly against his… Jasper knew her parents would never allow these things, but he still wanted them.
He still yearned.
“We need to pick a new book anyway,” he said as he settled back in his seat, buying himself time. “I’ve run out of interesting things to say about The Haunting of Hill House.”
Her soft sigh reached him. So did one of the Sugar Babies, courtesy of her surprisingly good aim. It thwacked the back of his head before falling to the sticky floor with a plop. “You’re such a liar,” she teased. “You loved that book.”
He grunted. He’d actually disliked it quite a bit, finding the lack of romance and meandering sentences not to his taste, but he wasn’t about to say so. Not when the book was so clearly her favorite.
“Don’t worry,” she said, still in the teasing tone he didn’t trust. He liked it, obviously, and was in serious danger of falling irrevocably under its spell, but he trusted it as much as he did a coiled snake. “I have a new one for us to read. I think you’re going to enjoy it.”
“What is it?” he asked.
“I can’t divulge the title. It’ll shock your maidenly senses.”
He felt himself stiffening into an upright seated position. “My senses aren’t maidenly,” he said. “They’re…sensitive.”
“You almost passed out when I took off my top the other day.”
“Catherine!” He whirled around, unable to continue the pretense of holding this conversation while speaking to the space in front of him. Sure enough, her face was lit with laughter, her lips parted to show a flash of her teeth. “You can’t say things like that in public.”
“Why not?” she asked. “I’m only telling it like it is. If I hadn’t had the foresight to push you up against the wall of your cabin, you’d have fallen flat on your face.”
He groaned and sank down in his seat, feeling his cheeks flame. While it was true that she’d pushed him up against a wall—and that she’d done it while his hand was cupping the most glorious bit of flesh ever to be crafted by God or humankind—he hadn’t been shocked.
He’d been excited, obviously. Delighted, yes.
But he’d also been aware of a truth more terrible than anything contained in her stupid horror books: there was no way he was getting out of this thing alive. He was in too deep, too fast, so lost in her that he was in danger of drowning forever.
“If it’s D. H. Lawrence, you’re too late,” he said, feeling petulant. “I already read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and my maidenly senses didn’t flutter once.”
A gurgle of laugher escaped her. “It’s not that, but tell me more. When did you read this masterpiece of titillation?”
He ignored this and stared at the screen, where Marilyn Monroe sashayed to and fro.
“I’ve read all of Walt Whitman, too, so don’t even try,” he added. “And the Marquis de Sade, though the translation was bad, so I didn’t understand most of it.”
Much to Jasper’s surprise, Catherine climbed over the back of the seat next to him. She slid into the empty spot, her eyes sparkling. “Why, Jasper Holmes. You’re a bit of a dirty bird, aren’t you?”
He could only be grateful that the dark lights of the movie theater made it impossible for her to see his blush.
“I just wanted to know what the fuss was about, that’s all,” he explained.
Instead of teasing him further, Catherine sighed and settled into her seat, allowing no more touch than the light brush of her forearm against his. She was good at that—at knowing when to push and how hard, at pulling back before he got too overwhelmed by the scent and feel of her. He sometimes thought it was her restraint rather than her forwardness that intrigued him the most.
It was as if she knew, on an instinctive level, that the empty spaces were where people like him thrived. The lull in a conversation that neither one of them felt compelled to fill, the electric space where their thighs didn’t touch, the lines of a page where she sometimes scrawled a single word—those things meant more to him than all the rest. It was quiet there, and he could be alone in his thoughts without feeling lonely.
“And what, in your estimation, is ‘the fuss’?” she asked.
Jasper didn’t have to answer her. The question had been uttered in rhetorical spirit, and she wouldn’t think it strange if he sat back and watched the movie for a few minutes while he regained his bearings.
But he wanted to tell her. He wanted her to know.
“I know I’m supposed to read those books for the scandal of it,” he said as he settled more comfortably in his seat. The side of his oversized work boot brushed the curve of her red patent leather pump. “I hear some of the other guys snickering over stuff like that sometimes, like a few words strung together on a page is supposed to be the same as feeling a woman come undone in your arms.”
She sucked in sharp breath, her foot still pressing up against his. “It’s not the same to you?” she asked.
He almost laughed out loud. There was no combination of letters in any language that could match the way it felt to have Catherine’s body next to him—her heart beating against his, her mouth open to let him in, her very spirit escaping and wrapping around his insides until he could no longer tell where one of them ended and the other began. He could read every book in existence and never come even close to that.
“No,” he said.
She held her breath in anticipation of more, but Jasper didn’t attempt an explanation. There was no point. He wasn’t a writer or a poet, and he had nothing to say that hadn’t already been said in a thousand different, better ways.
He was just a shy, awkward, overly sensitive man who could never seem to make the world inside his heart and the world he was forced to live in fit together. That Catherine was some sort of bridge, he knew. He’d known it from almost the first moment he’d laid eyes on her, yelling at him from underneath her broken bike, so full of fire that simply being in the same room with her brought him to life.
Her fingers slipped into his. “Okay,” she said.
As she rested her head comfortably on his shoulder, her attention fixed on the movie screen, he found himself once again crossing that bridge—however temporarily.
“What if someone comes in and sees us?” he asked.
“Then I get grounded for life,” she said as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “Or sent back east to live with my grandparents. Or married off to the first handsome officer to cross the threshold.”
That last one caused Jasper to slide his hand out of hers—or at least, to try. Catherine’s hold on him was too firm for him to slip easily away.
“Don’t,” she said. “It was a joke.”
He was well aware of that, but there was no part of him that felt compelled to laugh. “He likes you,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “William McBride.”
“I know. His kind always does.”
“He approached me in front of the library the other day.”
“He did?” That got her to pull her hand away. She cast an anxious glance at him, her brow furrowed and her nose wrinkled. “What did he want? What did he say to you?”
Jasper tried not to let her tone get to him, but her worry cut through him like the slice of a freshly sharpened sword. It had been on the tip of his tongue to divulge everything—the threats and the mockery, the fear that they weren’t being as discreet as they should—but he didn’t want to add to her troubles.
“He wanted me to give him a reading list,” Jasper said, since it was no more than the truth.
Her peal of laughter came at an opportune time, matching that of the silver-screen goddess. “That’s cute. Did you do it?”
“I had to. He wanted to know what you liked to read. So he could…woo you. Over literature.”
“You didn’t tell him about our books, did you? Because if he finds them—”
“No, of course not,” he said roughly. “Those are for us.”
“And for anyone else who checks them out and finds the notes,” Catherine pointed out.
Jasper grunted his agreement. They both knew it was only a matter of time before someone found one of their books and discovered the communication inside them, but that was the whole point. Jasper would never be one of the literary greats. His education had been cut too short, his time too taken up in physical toil. He’d never be able to say even a fraction of the things he felt in his heart.
But for a few lines, for a little while, he got to pretend. In his own meager way, he got to write his love story down.
“Just don’t be surprised if he starts quoting Edgar Allen Poe at you,” Jasper said by way of warning. “And don’t—”
She glanced up at him, her head tilted in an innocent query. “Don’t what?” she asked.
It had been on the tip of his tongue to tell her not to fall for it—not to fall for William—but he knew better than to make the attempt. He’d read enough of the books to know how the real stories ended.
Not with happily ever after. Not for a man like him.
“Don’t encourage him to pick up D. H. Lawrence,” he said with a huff. “He’s the exact sort to think the scandal is the point.”