2 Facing an Unexpected Encounter
2
Facing an Unexpected Encounter
For the next two hours, the bells kept ringing as regulars came in and out and strangers peeked in to see what was on sale. On a table by the door there was always a pile of cards with the name of the shop on them in gold ink. I set out more and tidied them up, along with the bookmarks the publishers often sent us for free.
Then I dusted off the heavy walnut shelves that reached up to the ceiling. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of books in there in all shapes, sizes, and colors: deluxe editions with beautiful illustrations and engraving on their covers, new releases, classics, and paperbacks. Oscar Wilde rubbed elbows with Paul Auster on the bottom shelf, while Charles Dickens sat next to Jane Austen and Charlotte Bront?. Gabrielle Roy, Marie-Claire Blais, Danielle Paige… My grandmother had always had a weird idea of what order things belonged in.
I rubbed my forehead. I still had a headache, and my mind was tired. But I needed to be present.
“You feel like a coffee?” I asked Frances.
She nodded and smiled as she helped an older woman choose a book about submarines for her nephew.
I grabbed my bag and went outside. As usual, the Montreal summer was noisy and full of movement. The scents took me back to special moments, reminded me of people who seemed to have been there forever: Beth, famous for her mint cakes and chocolate brownies, which disappeared from the shop window every day as soon as she lifted the blinds, or Percy, a street musician who’d played trumpet on the same corner as long as I could remember. I waved at them as I passed by and exchanged pleasantries with Meg, the florist.
Our bookstore was on Mont-Royal Avenue, on the Plateau, a neighborhood in downtown Montreal full of students, artists, and bohemians. When I lived there, I used to love walking its narrow, tree-lined streets with their pretty, colorful Victorian houses and their exposed spiral staircases. I was fascinated by the unique, multicultural mixture of stores and restaurants.
I walked slowly to Rue Saint-Denis. The sun shone through a thin layer of white clouds that were starting to darken the horizon. As I looked up, I prayed. The wedding was going to be held in my father’s gigantic gardens in Léry. The rain could ruin everything, and Hayley didn’t deserve that. She’d been planning the perfect wedding for months.
I turned right and walked on up the sidewalk to Café Myriade, my destination, which was on the next corner.
It was bustling. There wasn’t a free inch on the terrace, and inside, people were lined up in front of the counter. I almost turned around and went elsewhere, but I had gone that whole way dreaming of their muffins of cheddar cheese and cranberries, and I wasn’t going to leave without them and one of their wonderful lattes.
My caffeine addiction was one of the few things that gave meaning to my life.
I got in line and looked at the email on my phone. I had several messages from Ryan Radcliffe, the editor who was my direct superior. He wanted to know if I’d gone through the last manuscript he sent me. I ran my hand over my face, feeling guilty, and made a voice memo to remind myself I needed to download and print the document. I’d take care of it as soon as my sister’s wedding was over.
I started feeling uneasy and wondered whether my stress about my job might not be an unequivocal sign that I wanted my life to continue as it had been. And then the opposite occurred to me: if I hadn’t even looked at the manuscript, it might mean I didn’t care about it as much as I thought. Or maybe, since my grandmother had just died, I simply didn’t give a damn about the rest of the universe.
A voice broke through the fog, asking for my order.
I looked up and smiled at the barista apologetically.
“Two lattes and a cheddar and cranberry muffin, please.”
I looked, distracted, at the people at the tables, and at a little boy who was eating a pastry with his hands behind his back, pretending to be a bird picking at it. I smiled when I saw his mother’s desperation.
Scenes like that awakened my imagination. A wicked witch, a boy turned into a bird, and a moral… That was one more idea for the long list of books I’d probably never write.
“Harper?”
In that eternal second, as my name echoed in the air, the entire world slowed down and finally stopped. Well, that sounds nice, and it’s probably a metaphor for something, but it isn’t actually true.
In fact, in that eternal second, as my name echoed through the air, the entire world was engulfed by the worst natural disaster you could ever imagine.
Because that’s what Trey Holt was for me, an earthquake, a hurricane, a volcano spitting lava, the perfect storm I’d never been able to survive. I had sunken into him before like a fragile wooden raft in the middle of a choppy sea, and he’d shattered me into a million splinters and left me drifting…
“Harper?”
I thought I’d turned the page. But four years after hearing him speak for the last time, I’d only needed one word to recognize his voice again. That’s how deep a mark he left on me.
I turned, heart pounding in my chest, unsure how to keep my balance as I looked up and saw his beautiful eyes staring at me.
“It’s you! I wasn’t sure, but…my God, it’s you!”
I struggled to convince myself he was really there in front of me after all that time.
He stepped back to observe me from top to bottom, and he must have liked what he saw, because he smiled until I could see wrinkles in the corner of his eyes. Then he bent down and surprised me with a hug.
“I’m happy to see you, Pumpkin.”
I felt a tingle in my belly when I heard that pet name from my childhood. I was such a dummy that I closed my eyes when I smelled his scent, so unlike anyone else’s.
I took a step back when he let me go.
“Hey, Trey,” I said, my mouth dry.
He smiled. I wished I could do the same. I hated him for breaking my heart and sending my self-esteem whirling down the drain. I hated him. And at that moment I had to remind myself how bad he’d hurt me to escape the spiderweb of his mischievous, insolent smile, in which I was momentarily trapped like an insect.
He looked down, and his expression changed. When he glanced back up, his expression was graver as he tucked his hands into the back pockets of his jeans.
“Harper, I’m sorry about Sophia’s passing, and I feel bad that I couldn’t attend the funeral. When Hoyt gave me the news, I was outside the country, and there was no way to get back in time.”
Despite myself, I grinned scornfully. “Don’t worry, I didn’t even notice your absence. Besides, it was an intimate affair, family only.”
My cheeks burned as I replied. I’m not like that, curt, impertinent. But with him…with him, a very unpleasant side of me emerged.
I tried to feign indifference. Anxious lines appeared in Trey’s forehead. He’d always had a gift for pretending to be the good guy.
“Yeah, of course, the family.” The air around us turned dense, and I started to feel claustrophobic. After a pause, he added, “But the Westons are like my family, too, and I’d have liked to accompany you in that difficult moment.”
I exhaled. Seeing him had reopened a wound. What he’d done in the past had marked me and my future, and there he was acting all innocent, and it didn’t work.
“I’m sure Hoyt and Hayley would have appreciated your support.”
He scrutinized me and licked his lips. “Them… Yeah, right.”
His eyes were just as I remembered them: seductive, brownish-green, with thick, black lashes and dark brows. His jaw was square. His lips were attractive, the lower one fleshier than the top one. His hair was longer than the last time I’d seen him. That made him look more mature.
He was still the most handsome man I’d ever met.
He rubbed the back of his neck and smiled, as if pushing sorrow from his mind, and gestured toward me.
“You look amazing! You’ve grown… God, how long has it been since we’ve seen each other?”
Not long enough.
“Four years. I was eighteen then. I’d just gotten into college, and you were heading off to the United States.”
“You’re beautiful. You… You’ve let your hair grow out. It suits you.”
“Thanks. You haven’t changed a bit.”
He smiled timidly as he examined my face. “Tell me, then, do you usually come here, or did I happen to get lucky?”
“I come when I’m in town. My grandmother’s bookstore is close by.”
“That’s right, next to that store that sells comics and secondhand records. I haven’t been there in ages. I love it over there!”
I looked over my shoulder. Where the hell was my coffee? I needed to get out of there. The air in the room kept getting thinner and thinner. I was nervous, my heart was palpitating, and I could feel the blood pumping in my head.
“Hoyt told me you graduated and got a job at a publisher.”
“It’s just an internship for now,” I said impatiently.
“Well, it sounds brilliant, and I’m sure they’ll end up hiring you. Hoyt says you’ve got a knack for it.”
“I see Hoyt likes to talk.” The frustration in my voice was evident.
“I ask him now and again how you’re doing,” he muttered, chastened. “He also told me you were thinking of going to grad school. So probably you’ll head back to Toronto soon.”
“I’d say that’s the likeliest thing.” Finally I had to look away. But I couldn’t for long, not with that perfect smile I’d called up in my mind so many times. Did he really ask Hoyt how I was doing? Why would he? I never mattered to him. He ditched me the way you throw a cigarette butt on the ground and forget it.
“I admire you for that.”
“Thanks.”
“I finally graduated from MIT last year.”
“So you’re an architect. You always wanted that.”
“Yeah. But now comes the hard part: getting a job. For now I’m back in Montreal working on my own things.”
I lost it.
“Trey, what makes you think I care about your life at this point? I don’t even understand why you came over to talk to me.”
His expression was so disconcerted that I instantly regretted what I’d said. I tried to catch my breath, remembering that November morning and the last words that had come out of his mouth, those cold, hard, piercing words. The pain came back, and my body went numb. For four years, I’d been unable to face what had happened between us, what had happened after.
It was too humiliating.
I couldn’t stay there any longer.
“Sorry, I’ve got to go.”
I walked past him and outside without stopping. He said something else, but I don’t know what. My steps took me back to the bookstore, but my head was still in the café with Trey. Seeing him again had upset me more than I’d have thought.
A million times, I’d imagined running into him, the different ways it might happen, the different scenarios. In all of them, I acted like an adult, and I was marvelous and interesting and living a life anyone would have envied. I’d see him, and he’d be standing there with regret in his eyes, contemplating what he could have had if he hadn’t been so foolish. But I wasn’t that lucky. Trey looked better than ever, and I…
I…
I saw my reflection in the mirror and wanted to die. My hair was ratty and the little makeup I’d put on that morning was smeared from the tears I couldn’t control every time I thought of my grandmother.
Trey. Fucking Trey.
For a long time, he was my unrequited love. At first, in a childlike, innocent way, because I was too little to understand what love and desire meant. Later, with the passage of time, I did, and all my happiness hinged on him and on his smile and just one look from him could make my world stop turning.
I’d always felt something intense for him. Or at least that’s how it seems to me now.
I was twelve the first time I saw him. He was sixteen and had just moved to Montreal with his father. The first day of school, the first time they ever saw each other, he and Hoyt came to blows in gym class. They both wound up in the infirmary and had to write a paper together on violence and its consequences. That same day, Trey came to my house to get started on their punishment.
I was on the floor in my bedroom with the door cracked, doing homework, when I saw him walk down the hall. He had a black eye and a fat lip, but he was the best-looking boy I’d ever seen. He looked at me, and his brief, almost imperceptible smile gave me a tingle. I was captivated.
Hoyt and Trey soon became best friends, along with Scott, who was my sister Hayley’s boyfriend at the time. The four of them were inseparable. They spent all afternoon at home watching movies and talking. I would observe them with fascination, and I dreamed of being like them. Of belonging to their universe one day.
For the next two years, Trey was a constant in my life, a source of suffering and happiness. I suffered when I saw him go out with other girls, and I was happy when he noticed me, even if he only saw me as his best friend’s little sister.
The summer I turned fourteen, the four of them went to Vancouver to college.
I thought my feelings would fade with the distance, but they didn’t. I was still in love with him, in secret, for the next four years, and all the while I heard rumors about him going from girl to girl, from bed to bed, and I even saw him do it myself when he’d come back to visit or for the holidays. His charm was a weapon, and he used it without caring about whose heart he broke, whose life he destroyed. Even then, as I witnessed who he really was, I was incapable of hating him, of truly hating him.
Deep down, I wanted to be the girl he disappeared with every night instead of being the one who watched him disappear.
Then a day came when things changed. And I really did end up hating him.
“Where’s my coffee?” Frances asked.
“What?”
I was so caught up in my own thoughts that I didn’t realize I was back in the bookstore.
“I thought you were going to get me a coffee.”
“I was! But, like, there were so many people out, and it was hot. And it’s lunchtime. A coffee would have taken away our appetite, and I was thinking we could go to Schwartz’s for one of those delicious sandwiches. What do you say?”
“It’s only eleven,” she told me with suspicion.
I hung my bag on the coatrack by the window and smiled.
“We could push lunchtime back an hour. Let’s go crazy!” I exclaimed.
She laughed, and that sound made me feel better.
The bell chimed as the door opened, and when I turned around, there was Trey with a paper bag in his hand. The scent of coffee filled the room.
“You left this behind.”
I was so surprised he’d followed me that I didn’t know what to say. Trey looked at me, and I looked at him.
Frances cleared her throat and emerged from behind the counter with her brows knit. She smiled at Trey—not so much at me. Traitor , I thought, but I couldn’t reproach her because I’d never told her about us. Not her, not anyone else.
“Hello. I’ll take that. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” he replied.
“We’ve met before, haven’t we? I think I recognize you.”
“Yeah, I used to come here with Hoyt. But that was a long time ago. When we were kids.”
“Yeah, I remember you now. Your name’s Trey. You were Hoyt’s best friend.”
“I still am, I think,” he replied timidly.
Frances nodded, smiled, and glanced over at me. “Sophia liked you. She used to always say, See that boy? One day he’ll be proud of who he is and that scowl will disappear from his face. That handsome little face. ”
“Seriously? Why would she say that?”
“Son, have you looked in the mirror?”
Trey tried not to smile, at least not too openly, and I found that disarming. He was letting down his guard, and that helped me pull myself together.
“I meant the part about being proud of who I was.”
“Who knows? Sophia saw things in people most of us overlook. Do you feel proud of who you are?”
That was Frances: always direct, no filter. Trey blinked and shrugged. His expression changed subtly as he reflected on the question.
“Yeah.”
I believed him.
“What about before?”
“No.”
Again, I believed him, and I couldn’t help but see him differently because, for a moment, I had the feeling that the guy I knew was no longer there, that this was just someone who looked like him.
“There you have it, then. She saw something in you. Why? I don’t know. Maybe that was just another of her many gifts,” Frances whispered. She was clearly moved. “She saw something in me, too, and she wasn’t wrong about it.”
Trey must have realized then that she and my grandmother had a very special relationship, because he came close to her and squeezed her shoulder softly.
“I’m very sorry. She was always so kind to me.”
A lone tear fell down Frances’s cheek, and she nodded. Then she turned and left us alone, taking her coffee with her.
In the dead space afterward, I looked at the white canvas of his face, which showed no emotion, at least not at first. But then it changed as he reproached me, “What was that all about before? Do you have some kind of problem with me?”
Is that why he had followed me, to ask me that? I raised my chin, defiant, but inside I was feeling strange, meek, as though I had shrunken in front of him. His stare drilled into me as he waited warily for me to say something.
“Do I have a problem with you? You know the answer to that question.”
But judging from his face, he didn’t seem to.
“I do, do I? And what is it I supposedly know?”
I closed my eyes and my lips. Those words unsettled me even more than his presence. He knew as well as I did what the problem was, and him being there pretending to be innocent was a joke. I was hurting; he was digging up feelings I had buried as deep as I could.
I swallowed my frustration and walked toward the door. I opened it and held it, almost on my tiptoes, wanting to appear taller, more dignified, more…just more. Even that was absurd, pathetic, because Trey was a foot taller than me and a foot broader, and he looked like a grown man while I was still just a girl. I mean, I even still got carded when I went to bars!
He clenched his jaw at my invitation to go back where he’d come from. His expression was icy, livid. For a tenth of a second, he seemed to grin, and I saw the Trey I was used to: proud, sarcastic, selfish. The kind of guy I’d never get close to—the guy I’d fallen in love with before I knew who he really was.
He passed by me like a windstorm and disappeared.
For a few seconds, I stared at the ground, feeling something break again inside me. I pushed the door closed and leaned into it, covering my face with my hands.
I thought I’d gotten over him. I thought that when the time came, I could handle bumping into him again.
How naive I was!