Chapter 5
Quill
Ink Ghosts
As if turned to stone, I stared at the man in the black three-piece suit who slammed the door shut just as hastily as I had done a few minutes earlier, braced himself against the wood with both hands, and laid his forehead against the door with his eyes closed.
His chest rose and fell heavily, as if he had run here.
Finally, he tilted his head back, and all I could focus on was his hair tumbling over his forehead... until his prominent Adam's apple moved up and down.
I swallowed, blinked, but no matter how many times I closed and opened my eyes, the stranger from last night did not disappear from the library of the Richters' mansion.
He was here. He was really here.
Something inside me tensed, but in a pleasant way. Added to that were the moths in my stomach, as if he had brought light for them.
He opened his eyes and I longed for the moment when, as if in a feverish dream, he turned toward me until our eyes met.
Fever dreams seemed to be capable of becoming reality. But nothing had prepared me to once again witness the reflection of lights in his eyes. Eyes that seemed to see a ghost. But I was real too. And he seemed just as surprised to see me here as I was to see him.
Countless questions popped into my head as he slowly took his hands off the door and turned completely toward me.
The fact that I had snuggled up to his jacket last night made my cheeks flush.
Part of me wanted to be excited, and the corners of my mouth turned into a timid smile. One that he immediately returned.
Finding It There
Goldmund
“How did you end up in this house?”
He sounded as confused as I felt.
Shouldn’t I be asking him that question? My father didn’t have any author friends, unless he was accompanying a lawyer or a Maplecrest professor, which I highly doubted.
I tried not to let my overwhelm and bubbling euphoria show and instead held the book up in my hands.
“Is a woman not allowed to read?”
He ran a hand through his hair and stepped forward cautiously, as if searching for words. Eventually, he pointed to the floor next to me.
“Mind if I join you?”
He wanted to sit down. Next to me. Like yesterday.
My smile returned and I shook my head, whereupon he sat down next to me, leaning against the shelf and pulling one knee up.
I let my knees sink down, placing the book into my lap, and carefully inhaled the scent of cedar wood. No coffee, but I didn't care, because my smell receptors immediately reacted to his masculine scent, as did the moths in my stomach.
“I think I owe you an explanation for why I was at that miserable sexist reading.” He hesitated, staring at his hands, the sight of which made me miss his warmth as if I needed it to survive.
“I'm an old broken part of this town. Inside me is the hope that someday, amid all the superficiality here, I'll find something I don't even really know what it is or if it even exists.”
He had barely been here a minute, and already my vision was blurring. Still, I smiled and suppressed the tears of connection I felt for this stranger.
“We're writers.” He looked up, straight into my eyes. “We tend to get lost quickly.”
He held my gaze, letting my... his words sink in, and I felt our invisible blue threads moving toward each other.
Something inside me knew that he needed someone to talk to about the things that were trapped inside him just as badly as I did. Things that someone had to pull out of us because our written words were not capable of calming these storms.
If not two word weavers who could unravel each other's souls and decipher raw answers between all the threads of our existence. Then who?
Damn it, why did I feel so vulnerable next to him? In an indescribably beautiful, overwhelming way... And yet I only knew him since yesterday, knew nothing about him.
“What are you doing in this town?” His voice was hoarse. “In this house?”
I would have preferred to tell him the truth, but the truth was destructive. In the end, he knew my father personally, which I hoped was not the case.
“I’m no one special who just happened to stray into a library.”
It wasn't even a lie, and he seemed to be thinking about my words.
“Okay, no one special.” I couldn't help but smirk. “I firmly believe that we don't get lost for no reason.”
“So, you believe in something like fate?”
His gaze fixed on my hands, which were stained with black ink from earlier that afternoon.
“More like an intuition that makes us act according to certain patterns.” He laughed softly. “But right now...” He hesitated again. “...I'm trying to explain to myself why our paths crossed. I don't even know your name.”
I held out my hand to him, keeping to myself that I longed for his gentle touch, and smiled.
“Quill.”
Again, that stare.
Then I felt his rough warmth on the palm of my hand.
“Quill.”
The way he let my name melt on his tongue brought me to the edge of clear thinking. Never before had I so desperately wanted to be able to look into the mind of the person opposite me. To be a word on his tongue...
“Like a quill pen…”
Heat flooded my cheeks, which were tense from smiling.
“Like a quill pen.”
He didn’t need to know that I had given myself that name five years ago because I had grown sick of the names my parents had chosen for me.
“Davian.”
As soon as he said his name, I tried to burn it into my memory. I never wanted to forget Davian. Another wandering soul who spoke the language of the written word, searching for the same salvation as me.
Unable to let go of his hand, I looked down at the veins that stretched like a work of art under the skin of the back of his hand. I imagined our blue threads wrapping around our hands, moving toward each other.
The moment he gently moved his thumb over my knuckles as if I were fragile, I sucked in air almost inaudibly, overwhelmed by the storm of moths in my stomach.
“Thank you.”
I forced myself to look up.
“For what?”
His hesitation would be the death of me. Because every time, it made me find something about him that I couldn’t take my eyes off.
“That you are still alive.” My breath caught, but he wasn’t done yet. “I know it should be the other way around, and maybe it sounds selfish…” He smiled sadly, looking down at our hands. “But you gave me hope.”
His jaw worked.
Hope. Me? Him?
“Do you want to talk about it?”
I wished I could give him more than an open ear, wanted to thank him for following me, wanted to give him back his suit jacket, but then he would have questions I couldn't answer.
“The book I gave you yesterday.” He leaned further against the shelf and I tried again to guess his age. Thirty-nine? “I've never heard anyone talk about it like that before.”
My smile returned and I let my gaze wander around the library.
He hadn't heard me rave about this book for hours, like Lara or Thomas had.
“You should check out the internet forums about it. There’s a whole fan base desperately waiting for a possible sequel.”
“And yet you’re the first person who’s managed to make me question my firmly held opinion.”
I felt honored to be someone who could inspire people to give a book a second chance. Atrianima deserved every enthusiastic reader. Besides, there was a part of me that craved to feel understood, that longed for someone to find the same beauty in my favorite books that I found in them.
“Why exactly do you think the book lacks eloquence?”
I searched for the answer in his hesitant expression. His gaze wandered around the room as well.
When was the last time I'd had a conversation with a significantly older man on a truly level plane of understanding? About books?
“Certain scenes feel mechanical... As if the author wrote a manual rather than an experience.”
That was... an interesting observation. And the fact that I knew immediately which scenes he was talking about made me pause.
What if he was right?
Something inside me wanted to run up to my room, grab the book, reread all those scenes, and convince him otherwise, but I couldn't.
“I think the author is writing from his imagination rather than from experience, and that makes me doubt how multidimensional these scenes really are.”
Why did it sound as if authors had to experience everything they wanted to write about in real life to earn the right to write about it? Wasn't it that we sometimes wrote because we were missing something specific in our lives that we couldn't find anywhere else but in stories?
You and I – Stripped
PVRIS
“Isn't that the beauty of books? That the content often reflects an individual's perceptions?
That we get to experience the recorded frequency of a perception?
Doesn't that show just how unique our brains are? And does it really matter whether an author has been in that situation, as long as the scene evokes what the author wants it to evoke in the reader?”
He stared into space, letting my words sink in.
Then he turned to me, his gaze searching, observing, as if my answer to the next question was important to him.
“What did those scenes evoke in you?”
The scenes he was talking about were scenes that you wouldn’t normally talk about in everyday conversation. But he was an author. The first one I had ever met. If I couldn't talk freely and without inhibition about such books with him, then with whom?
I swallowed and his gaze wandered down to my throat.
“Desire.”
My fingertips tingled, as did my stomach, and the mere thought of continuing to talk to him about this stimulating book robbed me of my ability to think clearly.
His eyes found mine.
“Desire for what?”
He didn't smile, just stared. Waited...
All my last inhibitions fell away, layer by layer, flaking to the floor.
“To be touched the way Atrinus touches Velina.”
My lips trembled, and that was exactly where his eyes wandered. He didn't look away, as if his inhibitions were fading too.
My heart pounded, overwhelmed, impatient for what might happen if I continued staring.
I felt his fingers begin to brush against mine. Slowly. As slowly as Atrinus would touch Velina every time.
A shiver trickled down my entire body.