Two Rows Past Tolstoy

Buy box of Earl Grey, Marissa scrawled on a Post-It, pressing the pastel pink square to the bottom edge of her desktop.She was down to her last two tea bags, and to run out of tea in the library was surely a cardinal sin. Not for the first time, she wished that they were allowed candles at their desks, even very little ones. She did not have Miss Irene's debilitating blend of anxiety and reverence that prohibited fire, open beverages, or so much as a granola bar within three hundred feet of the stacks. The supervisor often eyed even Marissa's lidded cups with concern, but she had taken the afternoon off today, citing a sudden ulcer condition in her parakeet. Marissa blew the steam off her Earl Grey, took a sip, and smiled. Perhaps the notes of lavender had waited to bloom until Miss Irene's worriedly clacking pumps had left the building. Overhead, above the third and fourth floors and the fogged glass dome that capped the city library, thunder chuckled a greeting. "Hello, there," Marissa murmured, belatedly checking her surroundings for eavesdroppers. But it was a Thursday evening, and even the potbellied man who camped out in the periodical section on her floor every weekday, reading the entirety of each daily newspaper, had gone home to beat the rain. 

No sooner had she leaned back in her chair, clasping both hands around her gently steaming cup, than the sound of raindrops wafted across the circulation lobby, and she looked up to see the front door close behind a young man. He blinked at her, trying for a small smile. "Hi, Rissa."

The wheels of the chair clattered as she thrust it backwards, landing on her feet behind the desk as if searching for balance on a ship's pitching deck. "Simon?"

"Lara said that you work here." He touseled the water from his hair - this damp, she couldn't tell if it was still blond - and stepped toward the circulation desk. "That you've worked here for two years now, that right?"

"Mm. After school. I got my MA in library sciences and came here."

"Why here?"

"It's pretty. The streetlights glow yellow at night." And far away. "What brought you here?"

"Oh, I..." He fished a piece of paper out of the pocket of his duster. "I'm doing some research, and I can't find this title anywhere." He slid it across the desk top. She picked it up, focusing on its pale shape between her burgundy nails. The letters were Cyrillic, marching across the paper with posture as straight as icicles. Қара Сөздер. Abai. Below it, he'd scribbled as an afterthought, Engl: The Book of Words. 

"Fiction?" she asked.

"Poetry. And philosophy."

"Russian?"

"Kazakh."

"Oh." This was as much polite inquiry as she could stand, and she ducked her head as if to study the keyboard. "Do you want the book in Kazakh?"

"Yes. That's why it's so hard to find. Not even Interlibrary Loan has been able to help me." He leaned against the desk as she typed The Book of Words Abai into the catalogue search engine, one key at a time. "How have you been?"

"Wonderful," she answered without looking up. "It's a good job."

"Dream job, for a bookworm." There was a smile in his voice. "You've even got the cardigan and everything."

Suddenly self-conscious, she pulled the cardigan tighter around her with one hand. Burgundy cashmere, like the softest armor. It didn't even smell like cigarettes anymore, not after the careful washings and sachets of herbs she'd lavished on it since its rescue from the local thrift store.

"No glasses, though." he added. 

"No," she said.

"It matches your nails," he said, as if it were the most pleasant surprise he'd ever encountered. "The cardigan."

"Yes." She clutched the cardigan tighter. 

"Do you live alone?"

She glanced up at him, her eyes going a little wide. "No! Why?"

Pushing off the desk so that he stood a little further back, he stared at her as his smile slipped. "I just wondered. It's hard to move into a new city, especially so far away. I hope you have friends here."

"Oh, I do. Have friends, I mean, not live alone. I live with five girls in a house. They're nice," she added, because he seemed to want to know more. 

"Boyfriend?" he asked. 

Her face reddened. The tea in her stomach seemed ready to boil from the heat of frustration that Simon had no problem meeting her eyes, even gazing at her quite steadily with his hands in his pockets.

"No. No boyfriend."

"Ah. Husband, then?"

That startled a laugh from her, and she thrust a hand in front of her mouth. How embarrassing for a librarian to shush herself. "No."

"Interesting."

She dared to quirk an eyebrow at him - I won't be asking what that means, thank you very much - and pushed back the keyboard with a sigh. "We only have an English translation, I'm afraid."

"Damn." 

"I could show it to you, if you'd like," The paper felt clammy between her fingers as she handed it back to him. "In case you might still be interested."

He studied her, and her stomach wrung itself so anxiously that she took a sip of tea for comfort. 

"I'd appreciate that," he said, "I might be."

"Well, then." She set down her tea and slipped out from behind the desk. "Follow me."

Walking through the library felt like taking a trip in seven-league boots, each step spanning a century, a continent, a dimension. As she led the way to the stairwell, rain still spattering the windows, she travelled across years with the boy close on her heels. Now she was a university student with her stockinged feet in the air, elbows on her pillow while she stared in turns at a page of Dickens and at a motionless text thread. Now she was striding down a cobblestone street, avoiding puddles and fingering the silk scarf knotted around her leather tote. It didn't make the bag any lighter, but she felt that it wished her luck nonetheless. Now she was sitting in the corner of Mr. Namotsky's classroom, half-hidden behind a gratuitous table jutting out beside the radiator and holding a giant globe. She let the boy beside her borrow a gel pen, watching him take the magenta one she offered without complaint.

"When did you speak to Lara?" she asked, her flats scuffing on the stairs. 

"Last week. She married Ross, you know. He and I still meet up sometimes for a pint."

"I know, the pictures were beautiful." She held a finger to her lips as they emerged from the stairwell into the stacks. "It's shelved past the Russian literature. This way."

It was habit to let her fingers trail along the spines. Leather, cloth, paper. They whispered against her hands as she greeted each in passing. 

Better to live your own destiny imperfectly- 

This fleeting world is not the world where we - 

Ever times would change and tides alter -

… are destined to abide eternally - 

The boy walked along behind her silently, his coat casting a few forlorn drops onto the carpet. Once, she glanced out of the corner of her eye and saw his hand brush against the spines of a set of Persian epics. She shivered and turned the corner into the next row.

She had been twelve years old when she read Pride and Prejudice for the first time and decided that was true romance. She had been fourteen when she read about Beren and Luthien, and decided that, instead, was true romance. She had been sixteen when she had shared her Shakespeare text with the boy who sat next to her in Mr. Namotsky's hot classroom and decided that true romance lay somewhere between Sonnet 98 and Sonnet 116. She was eighteen when she realized that many romances were not about love at all, and that true love was something else, unknown, altogether.

"Did you finish school?" she whispered over her shoulder. "In Scotland?"

"I did."

"Where did you go after? Did you come straight back?" Did you go back to the town with the swimming hole and the one-room bookstore and the ice cream parlor? They had sat in that parlor and shared a brownie sundae once. He had offered to pay, and she had replied that he had better, in return for all of her pens that he'd lost. Did you go to that ice cream parlor with Lara Henderson, before she became Lara Murphy?

"I spent a year abroad, on a grant. Almaty, then Bejing."

"You speak Chinese?"

"No." His words curved again, sliding deftly around his smile. "I took enough Russian to get by in Almaty."

"Did you like it there?" Were there ice cream parlors and libraries?

"It was beautiful." He followed her past the row dominated by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, past the library’s modest collection of Egyptian poetry, past a series of Arabic and Hebrew titles she couldn’t decipher. "But I still missed things."

"Oh?" Her stomach hitched, and a trail of butterflies flowed behind her. She began looking on the bases of the spines for their call numbers. 

"I'm sorry I stopped."

"You were busy." She dropped the malformed, burdensome word into her wake as well.

"Not really. I mean, I was, but -"

"Here it is," Her fingers scrabbled against a blue hardcover, pulling it from its tight cranny between two ragged volumes with illegible titles. It hadn't been retrieved in some time, and its binding clung to its neighbors, as if the dust had become a glue.

His hand came to the shelf beside her eye, the slate-colored sleeve sliding down his wrist an inch or so. Her cardigan didn't feel much like armor now, not when it had allowed him so near without her realizing it. She wished she had left her hair down this morning, that it might protect her face from his gaze as she slowly drew The Book of Words towards herself. 

"Rissa."

Her own name felt so warm against the back of her neck, and she closed her eyes. Her head filled with the perfume of the finely aged books before her and the cinnamon-smell of the boy behind her. The bracing taste of tea was long gone from her dry mouth.

"I'm sorry," he said again. 

It took very little movement to turn on the spot, the book clutched against her abdomen. As before, Simon met her gaze. This time, she held her breath for a few moments to examine them. They were still as blue as her favorite earrings, but now they rested steadily without that slithering unsurety of a boy who knows he can't be trusted to carry a heart overseas. The light from the chandelier suspended from the dome bent its way towards the pair of them and cast his face in even graver lines. One hand still anchored on the shelf beside her head, he left the other hanging by his side. She could slip away, if she wanted. But he stared down at her as if the secrets of the world were inscribed on her face in a language he only just had learned to read, an incantation that had bound him inextricably to her side.

"Did you go to Paris?" he asked. His voice was perfectly proper for a library, but she almost wished he wouldn't whisper.

"I did."

"Did you see everything you wanted to?"

She considered, leaning against the shelf behind her. "No, I don't think so."

"Would you go back?" 

"Would Paris be different for two?" she countered. She must be drunk on the smell of books and cinnamon, she thought, fighting the urge to take the challenge back. His grin was as wide as that of a knight who has been thrown his favorite gauntlet.

"I think it must be."

"Will you stay?" she whispered.

"I could stand here forever."

She pressed her lips together. A flush rose to her face once more, but she blamed the butterflies. "I mean in this city."

"Are you staying?"

"Mm. I think so."

His smile was so very close now. "Then I think so too."

She reached up, her fingers wavering, then dropped them to rest on The Book of Words. "Did you really think you'd find that book here?"

His blue eyes crinkled, and her seven-league-boots leapt fifty years ahead. He gazed at her, resplendent with a white beard and a network of lines etched from laughter and smiles. His eyes still glittered like gemstones, and his grey duster hung on his broad frame with all the dignity of a well-travelled coat. His face shone at her with the glow of a thousand shared memories, and she reached up again. As her fingers touched his smooth cheek, he whispered, "The Kazakh original isn't in any library on this continent."

Her hand stilled. "It isn't?"

Patiently, he pulled The Book of Words away from her and set it on the shelf beside their heads. "I'm afraid your search was for nothing."

When she kissed him, his smile tasted of cinnamon and vanilla ice cream and Earl Grey tea.