15. Calliope #3
We move through two more aisles before making our way downstairs. I add a used essay collection to the Marlowe edition, then put back a third book after carrying it halfway to the register. Dash sees me return it and keeps walking, his green hardcover in one hand and both coats over his arm.
At the counter, I pay for mine before he can reach for anything. Dash pays for his, and the cashier puts the books together in one paper bag when he sees us standing side by side.
The coffee counter is near the back window, half-hidden behind a shelf of staff picks and a display of notebooks from the stationery shop next door. Dash looks toward it while he gathers the bag.
“Do you have time for coffee?”
I glance at the front windows. The sky outside has gone dark while we were upstairs, and streetlights reflect in the wet pavement.
“I have time.”
We take a table near the window after ordering. Dash gets black coffee, and I get a vanilla latte with a slice of lemon cake because Mara will ask, and I’d rather have an honest answer ready when she does.
The books sit in the bag between my feet. Dash takes off his glasses to wipe them with a cloth from his pocket, and the faint mark they leave on the bridge of his nose makes him look more tired than he did in the classroom doorway.
“How many meetings did you have today?” I ask, cutting into the cake with the side of my fork.
“Three before noon.” He puts his glasses back on and reaches for his cup. “The last one involved two departments, one lecture hall, and a facilities manager who looked like he’d been taken hostage.”
“Who got the room?”
“Chemistry. They’d already moved equipment.”
“That sounds fair.”
“It was. Fairness didn’t stop anyone from discussing it for forty minutes.”
I take a bite of cake and listen while he tells me enough about the meeting to make the room assignment sound like a moral crisis nobody meant to create. He doesn’t make the story big. He only gives me the pieces, dry and precise, and lets me see the absurdity without pushing me toward it.
When he finishes, I tell him about the first class I ever taught on my own.
I had written twelve pages of notes and finished all of them in twenty-five minutes because I was terrified of silence and hadn’t yet learned that students sometimes need time to think before they can answer.
Dash listens with both hands around his coffee, his shoulders angled toward me while the shop moves around us.
“My first class ended early too,” he says after I tell him about fleeing to the faculty bathroom afterward to breathe. “I talked so fast one student asked if I was late for something.”
“You?”
“I was younger.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
His eyes warm behind his glasses. “No.”
I smile into my latte and look toward the window before I make too much of how easily the smile came.
Outside, people pass in coats and scarves, some carrying takeout bags from the restaurant next door. Inside, the barista wipes down the counter between customers, and someone turns a page at the table behind Dash with a slow rasp of paper.
He reaches down for the bookstore bag and pulls out the green hardcover. “This is the essay.”
He opens to the table of contents and turns the book so I can see where his finger rests beside the title. The name means nothing to me, though there is a faint pencil check beside it from whoever owned the book before him.
“What did your brother argue?”
“That I was trying to make duty sound more complicated than it needed to be.” Dash turns the book back toward himself. “He thought people knew what mattered and only built theories afterward to justify what they wanted.”
“And you disagreed?”
“I was nineteen and had just learned several words that made me unbearable.”
I laugh, and he looks down at the book with a small movement at the corner of his mouth.
“I probably disagreed badly,” he says. “He probably made more sense than I admitted.”
“You should tell him that.”
Dash keeps his thumb on the edge of the table of contents. “Maybe.”
He closes the book and sets it beside his coffee.
After a moment, he asks which class made me want to teach, and I tell him about a seminar in my second year of undergrad where the professor let us argue ourselves into a corner before she opened a book and read two sentences that made the whole room restart.
The story carries us through the rest of my latte.
I don’t check my phone until the cake is gone and the plate has only crumbs left. Mara has texted once to confirm Sunday, and two university emails sit beneath her name. I answer Mara, delete one weather alert, and put the phone away again.
Dash watches me set it beside the bag instead of in my lap.
He doesn’t mention it.
The shop starts quieting around us as the evening wears on.
One of the employees stacks clean cups behind the counter, and the last group near the front tables gathers their things.
Dash opens the green book again and reads the first page of the essay while I check the pencil marks in the Marlowe introduction.
We stay until the barista begins wiping the tables closest to the door.
On the sidewalk, the cold finds every place my coat doesn’t cover.
Dash carries the book bag and my satchel, and I walk beside him with my hands tucked into my pockets.
The restaurants along the block have filled since we went inside, sending warm light over the wet pavement and making the evening smell like garlic, rain, and exhaust.
Near the corner, a family comes toward us with two children weaving around their parents’ legs. Dash’s hand settles against my back while we make room, his palm spread steady between my shoulder blades until the children pass and the sidewalk opens again.
He removes his hand.
We keep walking close enough that my sleeve brushes his twice before we reach the parking garage.
“I want to read the essay,” I say as we climb the ramp toward his car.
“The one my brother liked?”
“Yes.”
Dash looks at me while he unlocks the car. The overhead light catches in his glasses, hiding his eyes for a second before he reaches into the paper bag and takes out the green book.
“You can borrow it.”
I accept it with both hands. “I’ll give it back.”
“I know.”