Library Lovers

Marie McKinnon

A/N: Yes, I am aware that this is rather cliched. I don’t claim otherwise. This is a silly story about a boy, a girl, a library, and some mistletoe, so if you’re looking for deep philosophical writing, go elsewhere. If, on the other hand, you want to enjoy your holiday with a cute little romance, this is the place. Happy Holidays!

When he walked into the library its dim dullness was broken only by the occasional explosive sneeze from one of the many wizened old men reading yellowed newspapers in the corner. The carpet, wiry gray like steel wool, muffled his steps as he trudged aimlessly through the shelves. The gentle humming of the dehumidifier made the room sound like it was snoring, as though the books, dormant in their oaken bunkbeds, dreamed nostalgically of their first publishings. Perhaps someday they would shake their pages briskly, brush the dust from their worn covers, and return to intellectual vigor, but for now they enjoyed uninterrupted repose in the restrained silence.

Jack scanned the large gray signs for the biographies and hastened toward a section at the back. He had the eerie sensation that even the soft whoosh of his corduroy trousers rubbing together would shatter the fragile quiet that felt as though it had somehow been wrapped in cotton for protection. Upon arrival at the biographies section, he perused the titles, starting with Aaron, Hank, and moving on down the row to Browning, Elizabeth. He kept looking, on through Copland, until he realized he should have already passed the name he wanted.

“Stupid books,” he muttered under his breath in irritation. “How’re you supposed to find one?”

His glasses slid slightly down the bridge of his nose as he peered owlishly at the veritable wall of shelves that housed the biographies. It was a barrier of gilded titles and rounded spines with no elegant wrought-iron gate to indicate the entrance or even the direction he was facing. He ran a finger across the plastic book covers, letting his nails skid along the gaps between books, as though the right title would leap out of its spot and bite him when he touched it.

Maybe this is the wrong shelf, he thought, and bent in half to look at the bottom of the enormous bookcase. His hamstrings tightened like taut rope, whining at the inhabitual exertion, and his spectacles slipped a bit lower down the ski slope of his nose. He felt like an idiot, sticking his backside out into the middle of the row of shelves just so he could look lower, but it wasn’t as though he would meet anyone important in a library, of all places. No, that’s not it, he thought, this starts with Carson, Rachel and continues to Cousteau. A cart squeaked around the corner, a prolonged shriek of unwilling wheels being cajoled into forward movement, and his eyes sealed themselves in protest at the assault on his ears.

“It has to be here somewhere. I mean, come on, this is a library! Don’t they have a biography of Lewis Carroll?” His whispered commentary drifted gently down to the floor, where it lay gently draped over the books like the many layers of dust on their old leather covers, a thick winter coat. Tugging his jacket closer around his torso and shifting the weight of his school bag to the other shoulder, he stood and stretched his back. As he worked the stiffness from his neck he tipped his head back and looked at the mammoth shelves. They stretched to the ceiling in rigid rows, like soldiers in their regiments awaiting a command.

“Here.” A soft voice uncurled gently in the library’s muffled silence, a morning glory unfurling its petals. “I think you were looking for this.”

He turned, startled at the sudden interruption, and felt a flush creep into his cheeks as he realized that someone, a female someone, had overheard his soliloquy. The heat intensified in his cheeks and spread as though fanned by a furnace over his face like the rising tide of mercury in a thermometer. A very slender girl, short, with thick chestnut hair rippling across her shoulders like a calm river in the lazy summer sun, held out a red book in a pale hand.

He blinked twice behind his glasses, nonplussed. “What?”

“You were looking for a biography of Lewis Carroll, weren’t you?” The voice was shy, hesitant, and the hand holding the book wavered slightly.

“Yeah,” he admitted, running a hand through his dark hair to keep it from flopping in his eyes. “How’d you find it?”

She smiled gently. It was a modest, unassuming smile that didn’t show her teeth or flash in insolent coquetry. Instead it spread across her face, a ray of sunshine pouring through clouds. “I work here,” she murmured, gazing with bashful interest at the gray carpet. “His real name was Charles Dodgson, so it was under ‘D,’ not ‘C.’”

“Oh.” He plucked the book from her outstretched fingers and scanned the cover before looking back up at her. Now she stood slightly to one side, her face anxious, twining her thin fingers in and out of each other in an intricately woven pattern. Her eyes, large and coffee-dark, studied the variations of gray, white, and black in the industrial carpet beneath thick lashes. “Thanks. This was exactly what I was looking for.” He looked at her again, closer this time, squinting behind his rounded glasses. “Wait, don’t I know you? Aren’t you in my European History class?”

“Yeah,” she admitted, frightened doe eyes alternating between his face and the floor. He remembered her now, though he wasn’t certain how; she had never distinguished herself. She rarely spoke, though when she did her voice was soft velvet that cloaked him in its gentle warmth. It bubbled up melodically like water from a spring and he recalled, flushing, that he had often hoped to hear her sing.

“You’re Violet, right? You sit behind me this quarter - and didn’t you sit next to me last quarter?.” Her terse nod sent a wave of motion through her hair, a faint tremor rippling through the thick locks like a minor earthquake. Suddenly he had shifted his bag behind him and extended a hand, unsure why, and said “I’m Jack. Nice to meet you.”

Her small, white hand slid through the air to rest in his for a brief moment of warm, pure contact. She blushed. “Nice to meet you too,” she mumbled, looking at their joined hands as though wondering whether an invisible force had tugged her like a puppet into such an uncharacteristic action. “I have to get back to work. Enjoy--” she paused for a moment, a skip in the rhythm of her musical voice. “Enjoy the book.”

She whirled around and glided through the shelves with the ease of long practice, her strides fluid as a dancer’s and her hair spilling like water over her shoulders as she turned a corner and vanished into the flat, dead silence.

Jack’s hand remained suspended in the air momentarily. He stared after her for several frozen seconds before he jerked back to life and walked, zombie-like, to check out his book. At the check out counter he gazed blankly at the librarian who politely requested his card; it took three repetitions for him to return to reality and produce the much-worn piece of plastic. Only moments later he tripped down three stairs as he exited, nearly knocking over a formidable looking lady whose fur stole stared at him in glassy-eyed indignation as he tumbled down onto the landing.

Trudging pensively to the bus stop, he let Violet’s image slide once more into his mind’s eye. She was very small, delicate, pale, with slender limbs and graceful hands that fluttered like hummingbird wings at the corners of his eyes. Her face was a perfect oval with large dark eyes and a serious mouth, all framed by waist-length thick brown hair like sable. She seemed encased in a dense layer of clear ice, distant, pure, carved painstakingly by a sculptor and never brought to life. Light glimmered and sparked along her glassy exterior but did not melt her icy prison, only infusing her with an angelic aura of silver purity.

Cars roared past him on the road, but he didn’t hear them. He saw blurs rushing along into infinity, sometimes yellow, sometimes blue, sometimes green, occasionally with a red holiday bow flapping on a silver grate, but they all melted together into a whirling maelstrom that funneled down to only one idea: Violet. Words to describe her hovered temptingly out of reach, exotic butterflies that flitted away on paper-thin wings when he tried to catch them. They passed through the ropes of his mental net and vanished into the crisp December air.

The bus arrived, bearing with it a choking cloud of dust and grime. Jack felt beyond the dirty, mundane world of public transit, and it only took a few moments in the squashy plush bus seat for him to recognize that one encounter in a quiet library had turned him inside out. The girl was a sprite, a sylph, a book nymph; she moved with ease and liquid grace through the shelves as though they were her natural habitat, like she lived in the world of words and had only descended for a moment to come to his aid. There had been something, a deeply-buried gleam, in her dark eyes, like a ripple of movement beneath the surface of a placid lake. He felt the thought of her warm his cheeks as he realized how truly lovely she was, pale as alabaster with rich dark hair and sweet, gentle eyes.

He realized at the same moment that she lived in a different world. Her world was peopled with fantastical literary creatures, beings of myth and fantasy, nothing like the mundane athletes and cheerleaders that inhabited his reality. She would not easily follow him into the real world when it was flat and colorless compared to the vividity of fiction. And he certainly wanted her to follow him. He wanted her company, her soft-voiced gentleness, the brush of her glance. It had taken two minutes and perhaps three complete sentences for a bashful young girl to completely ensnare him, and now he wanted to ensnare her.

How, though? He pondered, gazing blankly at the houses and trees rushing past him at alarming speed. Something told him than a straight-on attack would shatter her, leaving him with nothing but a pile of cold shards. He would have to woo her subtly, discreetly; he would have to resort to subterfuge. Not that he would lie. He would not deceive, would not give a false impression of himself, but now that he had penetrated her sanctuary he felt confident that the right sort of message, left tantalizingly on top of her work, would pique her interest and gain her trust.

His plan unrolled in his mind as though it had always been there, waiting for the right moment. It progressed as neatly as a geometric series: she worked in a library, so she liked books. If she liked books, she had probably read a lot of them. If she had read a lot of books, she had probably read a good deal of poetry. Poetry, then, and classic poetry, not his own half-baked attempts that deserved to go straight into the garbage, would be his milieu. He smiled, tugged sharply on the cord, and practically skipped back to his house and his parents’ volumes of Byron.

Violet, face burning, had turned the corner and returned to her cart, where she sorted books with robotic rapidity. The pads of her fingers glided along the slick plastic-coated spines as she slid them into their slots, a gentle smile of pleasure curving across her face. Her mind was utterly beyond her work; in fact, it had not moved from the spot where Jack had looked at her and blinked as though he saw an angelic vision. She felt detached, as though someone had cut the cords that bound her mind to the details of her task and let it float above her body in a soft, contented cloud.

Why? She asked herself in frustration. Why had she spoken to him, initiated a conversation, drawn his attention? He would have gone to the information desk, they would have found the book for him, and she would never have had to endure the excruciating ecstasy of his eyes on her. She sighed internally. His voice, deep for a boy, had resounded in the dead, flat quiet of the library. It had bounced off of the books in gentle vibrations that she could almost see as they arced in shallow parabolas between the shelves before they faded into the dim corridor. Listening to him had been a pleasure, but seeing him… She sighed again. He was handsome, tall and solid, with thick dark hair that he was constantly brushing back from his forehead with long, strong fingers. She knew that, of course, because she had been watching him for a long while. She watched quietly, discreetly, but she watched just the same.

She supposed she could blame the European History teacher for seating her next to him for the first quarter. She had been easy prey for his gentle charm and handsome profile, which she had covertly observed for weeks while he wrote earnestly, nose practically touching the notebook and leaving him with an endearing smear of graphite on the end of his nose. Then had come the realization. It had been slow, honey oozing in a thick, glutinous tide, but when it had come she had seen it glowing in the sun in all its golden-amber glory and had blushed fiercely. In October, as the quarter was drawing to a close, she had felt the first saccharine honey crystal drip onto her tongue.

It had been warm, too warm, but perhaps that was a product of the school’s absurd heating system. At any rate, the classroom had been stifling, and the teacher, too weary to give another lesson, had passed out a worksheet for ‘educational pleasure’ and retired to her desk. Violet extracted a sharp green pencil from her case and set to work, looking at Jack through the corner of her eye. The heat seemed to be getting to him, too, because he rolled up his sleeves or brushed back his hair between every sentence he wrote. Finally he gave up, sitting back in his chair, and began to unbutton his shirt.

Violet stared at her paper, a flush growing on her cheeks. Diet of Worms, she told herself, consider the ramifications of the Diet of Worms and the Council of Trent. Surely he’s wearing something under that, she thought next, proof that she could not force herself to concentrate on the Diet of Worms. She felt flames of embarrassment licking at her cheeks and was sure that in a moment nothing would remain of her except a pile of humiliated ashes lying heaped in her chair. Soon, thankfully, she was delivered from her torment. Jack discarded his button-down shirt, draping it elegantly across the back of his chair, and settled down to work in a plain blue cotton t-shirt. She sighed imperceptibly and, her fierce blush beginning to abate, kept writing. For the rest of the class she stole covert glances at his strong upper arms and firm chest.

That long-ago afternoon, analyzing the possible causes of her extreme embarrassment, it had occurred to her that she was in some way attached to Jack, that what she saw as his awkward moments affected her similarly. Comprehension of her illogical affection had only been a step away from that odd sympathy, and soon she was caught in a deluge of hopeless admiration and emotion for her classmate.

Heaving another great sigh, Violet continued to shelve biographies. She told herself that he had recognized her, at least, and hadn’t brushed by with a contemptuous sneer. She would have to be content with that.

The next day Violet shouldered her way through the heavy front doors of the library, snaked through the clusters of young children, and slipped quietly behind the front desk. She deposited her backpack on the floor, relishing the emphatic thud it produced on the gray tile of the workroom, and laboriously rolled a full cart of non-fiction out into the empty library.

Jack watched her from behind an extra-large copy of Scientific American. Her back to him, she deftly sorted through the books, putting them in numerical order, and departed for the labyrinth of shelves with a precariously piled stack. Sensing his chance, Jack leapt from his chair, crept quietly to her cart, and dropped a cream-colored envelope beside the next book. A smile spread across his face as he though of her surprise when she saw it. He then retreated to his hidden table, discarded the Scientific American, and began to do his math homework. Never before had integrals filled him with jollity, but today every symbol made him smile with unadulterated glee.

Violet, intent on her work, almost did not notice the envelope that lay in benign mystery next to a dog-eared copy of the Guinness Book of World Records. It fell to the floor, a dry leaf fluttering in a chill wind, and landed on her toe when she scooped up another armfull of texts. She paused, replaced the books, and bent down to examine the envelope. Turning it over in her fingers, she searched it for a name, an address, an indication of the destination, but there was none. A furtive glance around the perimeter of the room assured her that no one would descend on her in righteous anger for invasion of privacy if she opened it, so she broke the seal and tugged the folded paper free of its container. It crackled a bit as she opened it and she looked around again, fearful of being interrupted in the middle of a petty crime. Still she saw no one. With trembling fingers she flattened the crease and read the carefully penned lines:

I feel almost at times as I have felt
In happy childhood; trees, and flowers, and brooks,
Which do remember me of where I dwelt
Ere my young mind was sacrific'd to books,
Come as of yore upon me, and can melt
My heart with recognition of their looks;
And even at moments I could think I see
Some living thing to love--but none like thee.

She read it through three times, then set it down, as though distancing herself from the contents of the letter. Her mind whirled in confusion. One thing was clear and certain in the dizzying eddies of conjecture, however: the letter could not have been meant for her. Perhaps someone had left a love letter in a book, it had fallen out, and she had chanced to pick it up. That was all there was to it. But oh, and her soul soared as she thought it, how wonderful it would have been if it were for me! A loving smile crossed her face as she traced the fine strokes of black ink, the gentle words, the sweet rhymes. With a guilty look around, she pocketed the poem and returned to her work. She was still smiling giddily when she trundled the squeaky cart back to the main desk and signed out.

“What’s gotten into you?” Ralph, her supervisor, asked as he initialed her time sheet. “I’ve never seen you this happy.”

“It must be the holiday season,” she fibbed. “I just love Christmas. See you tomorrow!” She practically skipped out of the library, holding the letter in her pocket the whole way home.

The next day another cream-colored envelope lay innocently on top of her cart. This time the poem read:

And stern to the haughty, but humble to thee,

My soul in its bitterest blackness shall be;

And our days seem as swift -- and our moments more sweet,

With thee by my side -- than the world at our feet.

Violet was acute enough to recognize a coincidence when one presented itself; it was as evident, and as unexpected, as an elephant doing the foxtrot in the middle of her living room. The envelope had not been there when she’d put the cart in order, but as soon as she had returned it had rested gently on the curved backs of her beloved books. She read the poem several times in patent disbelief that any sane human being could write such things to her. She certainly did not merit such adulation. She was neither beautiful nor particularly kind, certainly not the sort of girl whose arrival would turn the head of any young man. She was short and scrawny, had no figure to speak of except perhaps a tiny waist, her hair and eyes were boring brown, and she was as pasty pale as uncooked dough. Still - her eyes flickered back to the quatrain that reposed gently on its bed of books - there was someone somewhere who thought differently. Her mind sifted quickly through the possibilities, but there were none. She had no male friends, nor female friends, for that matter. She lived among her books and her schoolwork, a fragile fortress of words and formulas and facts, with no companions but Sir Ivanhoe and Little Dorrit and Jane Eyre and anyone else who sprung fully-formed from a novel to stay with her a while.

Jack flashed into her mind, his handsome face winking conspiratorially behind his glasses, but she shook her head hard to clear the thought from her brain. It was impossible. He was kind, popular, handsome, clever, funny, and, in short, too good to even consider her, much less leave love poems for her to find. With a sigh at the last hopeless flicker of vain hope’s flame, she pocketed the poem and returned to work.

A week passed in this manner. Violet had assembled a small collection of Byron poems that she perused at her leisure, a soft smile illuminating her face as she traced the words. The poems, though, contributed less to her mounting contentment than Jack’s sudden realization that she existed.

On Monday, for the first time in weeks, he had turned around to ask her a question. He was hunched over a grimy bit of newspaper, cheek pillowed in his palm and deep lines of frustration furrowing his brow, when suddenly, as though tugged by a puppet master’s strings, he whirled around to face her as she read The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

“Do you know a diarist Anais? Last name with three letters?”

“Nin,” she responded promptly in a soft voice, lowering her book. “Anais Nin.”

“Is that N-I-N?” She nodded, wondering what on earth could have persuaded him to ask such a strange question. “Thanks.” He turned around again, bent over his bit of newspaper, and Violet heard the scratching of a pencil. Her book lay abandoned on her desk. She felt a change coming over her, a surge of courage inspired by the thought that someone, somewhere, thought something of her.

She spoke up, her voice still velvet-soft, and asked quietly “Why do you want to know about Anais Nin?”

“Crossword puzzle,” he replied, turning again to face her. “I’m not very good with authors or literary characters. Say, do you know who wrote The Fountainhead?”

“Ayn Rand,” she replied. “A-Y-N.”

“Oh, thanks.” And he turned again to his scribbling.

Violet peered cautiously over his shoulder at the maze of gray boxes. “Anything else?” She asked, hoping fiercely that there would be another literary clue, another reason to continue the conversation and prolong her vain reverie of something between them.

“Don’t know yet,” he admitted. “If there’s something, I’ll ask.”

She saw a clue in the corner and recognized the name with a start. “71 across is Byron,” she said. “Poet Gordon, it’s Byron.”

“That one I knew, actually,” he said with a hint of a smile. “My parents are Byron nuts. Thanks, though.”

And so it had continued every morning. She liked to think he relied on her for literary information, that she was somehow necessary to his morning ritual. Soon their exchange of words was prefaced by a polite ‘Good morning, how are you?’ ‘Fine thanks,’ before they got down to business. Eventually, though, they chatted quietly over the crossword puzzle for the few precious minutes leading up to the bell. Violet waltzed a few inches above the ground after their quiet conversations, then later soared up to the clouds with the advent of another snippet from the mystery poet. Well, perhaps poet was the wrong word; she recognized the poems from her reading and did not labor under the delusion that the writer was an undiscovered literary genius. Still, he had a romantic mind, and that qualified him as a poet in her view.

Finally it was December 23, the last day of school, and her last day of work. She entered the European History class with a smile, an increasingly frequent occurrence, and seated herself behind Jack.

“Morning,” he said, voice muted by its proximity to the crossword puzzle.

“Good morning,” she replied. “How are you?”

“Fine, but I’m stuck on this clue. They have this holiday theme and I can’t figure out what Norse mythology has to do with Christmas.”

“Mistletoe,” she answered. He looked at her in disbelief for a moment, his head cocked to one side in contemplation, and counted the boxes with the tip of his pencil. His disbelief gave way to amazement as he filled in the blanks.

“How on earth did you know that?”

“In Norse mythology Balder, one of the gods, had dreams that he was about to die. His mum, Frigg, got worried and so she got everything, plant, animal, human, and god, to swear not to hurt him. She forgot the mistletoe tree, though, and Loki, who was jealous of Balder, got Balder’s brother to throw a mistletoe dart at him. It killed Balder, but Frigg declared that after the sorrow it caused it would be a symbol of love. That’s why people kiss under mistletoe -- in memory of Balder’s death.” She stopped, a bit out of breath and a bit amazed at her own daring. Jack still stared at her in wonder, shaking his head.

“You are something else, you know that, right?” He said.

Violet flushed crimson as their eyes met and quickly looked down at her book in hopes that he would return to his crossword and leave it at that. He looked at her for a long moment, eyes resting on the smooth curve of her forehead and her graceful neck, before turning back around. They worked in awkward silence for a few minutes, the only sounds in the room the scratch of his pencil and the disconsolate sigh of the pages of her book.

“Are you doing anything over break?” Jack asked suddenly.

She raised her eyes from the book and blinked, her thick dark lashes brushing against her cheeks. “No,” she said uncertainly, as though the question had somehow confused her. “We’re staying here. I’ll probably just read,” she elaborated, holding up the book as evidence.

“Reading? Really? I never would have expected that from you,” he joked. “So if I’m stuck on a clue I can call, right?”

“Or you could go to the library,” she replied, trying to mask her excitement at his suggestion. “You can find just about anything in the library.” Including me, she thought.

He smiled at her comment, aware by now that he really could find anything, even a pretty girl, at the library, and kept working. The handwriting in the boxes of his puzzle was messier than ever, due, perhaps, to his anxious trembling. He had a plan for that afternoon, a plan that involved one last poem and a sprig of Balder’s bane. It was a cliché, of course, and he knew it, but he had seen the smile spill over her face like golden sunlight when she read the first poem and he knew, in a deep, instinctive sort of not-knowing, that mistletoe was the answer to his unasked, unprayed for question.

He listened to the rustle of pages as she read, her slow, even breathing, and felt her shift the position of her feet on the bottom of his chair. He smiled. It was odd, he thought as he struck a decisive line through a clue he had answered, how happy she made him. Just the delicate weight of her behind him in class, the brush of her hair against his back as she bent over a paper, her soft inhalations filled him with a heady contentment that threatened to overpower his good sense. Already he had stopped himself twice from explaining to her about the notes, the poems, and his silly romantic notions. He hardly knew what it was that compelled him to act like a besotted fool, but it drifted away from him like an evanescent soap bubble, to fragile and too beautiful to pin down. He had said it correctly before: she was something. What that something was was beyond him to explain, but she was certainly something, and something he wanted to keep.

It was a long day, and by the time Violet shoved the groaning cart full of biographies into the back of the library she was simmering with a bubbling nervous excitement. She was on the brink of vacation, two hours away from freedom, and she was determined now to catch her mystery man. The calm expression she had worn all day masked her anxiety, her roiling anticipation, that today everything would become clear.

Violet had long rebuked herself for her fickleness, or what she imagined to be fickleness, as she sat rereading the poems that had been left for her. Is it treason, she wondered, to abandon the affections of the real, the solid, and the true for the imagined perfection of the invisible? She felt guilty and ashamed of her interest in the boy - she was sure it was a boy - who had so thoughtfully chosen and copied poems to catch her attention. She almost loved him, this romantic soul cloaked in mystery, and it twisted a dagger in her heart to know that for the (perhaps deceitful) affection of a boy wrapped in shadow she would abandon the one who had first caught her eye and even now treated her with kind warmth.

Jack, hidden nearby at the beginning of the biographies, wedged the mistletoe between two books with a shaking hand and settled himself down to wait. He leaned nonchalantly against a shelf, hoping to convey a calmness he did not feel, and listened to the clunk and clatter of books on the metal cart with mounting discomfort. Worms squirmed in his stomach, slimy and serpentine, in the throes of horrible agony. Their tormented writhing halted when Violet appeared from around the corner bearing an armful of heavy biographies.

She set them gently down on the floor, her dark green skirt brushing the floor like the kiss of the wind on a cool day, and stood up before she noticed him. She jumped. Her hand flew to her chest in surprise as she stared, open-mouthed, at the boy she fancied.

He didn’t speak for a long moment. His eyes were caught by the smooth curve of her calf beneath her skirt, an enticing vision that he found it difficult to abandon. With an extreme effort of will he tore his eyes away from her legs to look at her face, now gaping in astonishment.

“Hello,” he said. His voice was hoarse and husky, like he hadn’t spoken to anyone in eons, and he combed his hair away from his face in an effort to regain composure.

Violet watched him brush his hair back, wishing to touch it, and managed a faint “Hello.” She looked at the pile of books on the floor, waiting to be shelved, and then looked back at him. “Were you, um, looking for something?”

“Yes,” he replied. His voice was steady now. He hardly knew what he was doing, what he was saying, but it spilled out of him like honey. “I was looking for you.”

“You - you were?” There was a look in her eyes like that of a frightened rabbit, a wild fear and a hope that if she didn’t move the predator would ignore her and move on. She seemed trapped and alone, as though she had tried to shrink deeper into herself but had not succeeded.

“Yes. I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

“Oh?”

He moved closer to her until their noses were almost touching. He saw how much taller he was than she; her head was even with his broad shoulders. His physical stature only deepened his craving to fold his arms around her and quell the tremors that gently shook her small frame. “I’ve been meaning to ask,” he continued, “if you’d like to go out with me sometime.”

For a fleeting moment he saw the sun come up in her eyes, radiant and splendid, but clouds soon covered it as she looked at the floor.

“Don’t tease me like that,” she whispered, her voice broken. “It’s cruel.” Her heart beat in a rapid rhythm like the cadence of a horse’s hooves beating the dust of a race track. She didn’t believe it, she couldn’t believe it; he was joking, he was toying with her, he had been sending the notes and it was all to make a fool of her, an absolute fool. Tears sprang into her eyes and she felt each one like a knife’s point piercing her skin.

She tried to turn away, to flee, but his warm, strong hands had descended on her shoulders and held her in place. He looked earnestly into her face, his eyes serious behind his glasses, and spoke deliberately. “I’m not teasing. I’m the one who’s been leaving you the poems.”

“No.” The word broke from her roughly and she shook her head, a convulsion that fanned her rich hair out into the air and across his fingers. Tears seeped in a solid stream from her eyelids, condensing on her thick lashes like glistening pearls.

He squeezed her shoulders so that she looked up at him, luminescent drops clustered on her dark lashes. “Yes,” he said insistently. “I did.” He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and marveled at its fine, soft texture as he began to recite the final poem in a deep, steady voice.

“She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes:

Thus mellow’d to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,

Had half impair’d the nameless grace

Which waves in every raven tress,

Or softly lightens o’er her face;

Where thoughts serenely sweet express

How pure, how dear their dwelling place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,

So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,

The smiles that win, the tints that glow,

But tell of days in goodness spent,

A mind at peace with all below,

A heart whose love is innocent!”

Her eyes closed as the rich timbre of his voice washed over her in a soothing stream of silken syllables. A smile played around the edges of her mouth, a glimmer like the glint of light on moving water. He held her shoulders in his strong hands, steady and immobile, while the last words died away in the air.

“Byron,” she said quietly, opening her eyes. “I should have known.” She was serenely calm now, all tremors having died away with the joyful epiphany that her fickle treason had been none, that the beloved was also the lover, that the handsome boy standing in front of her really, truly did care for her.

“I told you I knew Byron,” he chuckled, euphoria brimming over him in silver drops. He brushed the pad of his thumb across her cheek to clear away the transparent tracks of tears and she tipped her face forward fractionally into his touch. “And now that I know a bit more about Norse mythology, well…” He pointed up above her head at the herb stuck between the books.

She blushed fiercely. “I -- I --” she murmured, looking at the floor. Everything had descended on her in a headlong rush, a wild whirl of unexpected jubilation. It had been so sudden, the realization of her wispy dreams into a solid form, that she wasn’t certain what to do.

“Frigg would be disappointed in you,” he cajoled, drawing a watery laugh from her.

Turning her face up to meet him, she smiled, and summoning all of her courage, said “We can’t have that.”

Jack smiled, all the tension melting out of his face and giving way to pure, unadulterated joy. He cupped her face with one long hand and relished the warmth of her soft, pale skin as he prolonged the touch. Her eyes drifted closed, the lashes painting fine dark lines across her cheek, and their lips met. His arms snaked around her dainty waist and pulled her flush against him, her warm soft flesh pressed into his chest. She wrapped her arms around his neck and reveled in the sweet fire of his touch, the comforting solidity of his embrace, and the electricity sparking through her veins in a powerful current.

The kiss was brief. Jack rested his cheek against hers, feeling her eyelashes flutter like a dragonfly’s gossamer wings against his jaw. He held her tightly, blanketed in his solid warmth and security. Her soft breath brushed across his neck, a fragrant breeze, and he smiled as she nuzzled into his shoulder.

“Is that a yes, then?” He asked, the deep chuckle reverberating in his voice.

“No,” she whispered, “that’s an absolutely.”