Page 133 of Bad Words

She grew still as I reached out and touched our names on the wall. Our truce.

I lowered my hand to move toward her, then stopped midstep, remembering how she’d slapped my hand away that morning in her apartment. Those minutes of rage and hurt seemed to roll in on us like a stinging fog, Selina snarling out that she should have expected nothing better, my accusation that she’d made this happen.

But she was here.

After that Saturday, I’d been sure that if we ever saw each other again, she would look at me with all the scorn and disgust she’d shown in the Cipriani library in October. Instead, she was regarding me with something bizarrely close to doubt, her lips pulling first to one side and then the other.

Hope laid a fingertip on my heart.

“Parker, what I wrote…” she began, and from the softness of her tone I realized that she intended to apologize, and disbelief reared up in me. No, I thought. That was the last thing I wanted from her.

“I read what you wrote,” I broke in. “Over Christmas. Last month … What you wrote to me.”

I saw her breath catch. She swallowed hard.

“Those messages,” she said, “meant more to me than anything I’ve written in my life.”

A gust of impossible hope swept through me, and suddenly my heart was beating hard, insistent, like an urgent knock at a door. I stepped closer. “Me too,” I said hoarsely, barely able to work the words free. “If I’ve ever said anything that mattered, I said it to you.”

I saw her sway by an inch, steady herself. The silence rang around us, and I couldn’t have looked away from her for anything.

“I waited for you,” I said. “The launch. I thought maybe you’d come.”

“I did.”

I looked at her, uncomprehending.

A blush faded in on the curves of her cheeks. “I couldn’t make myself go inside. I thought, I couldn’t ruin your night.”

“But that was all I wanted. For you to be there.” I finally closed the distance between us, close enough to take a shaky breath and smell the cream of her lotion and the sultry hint of her perfume, the sweetness of her shampoo. She lifted her chin, searching my expression with a kind of open need that I’d never seen her show.

“Did you mean it?” she asked. “What you wrote in my copies of your books.”

Haltingly, I lifted my hand to her reddened cheek. “Of course I meant it.” She closed her eyes and moved into my touch. I said, quietly, “I love you.”

She said, “I love you, too,” and my other hand found her waist, the softness of her T-shirt, and I just held on to her, unable to believe the feeling in my chest, like my heart was straining against its confines.

She leaned up toward me, and I tilted my head and kissed her, and my thoughts lit up like an electric grid, revolved brilliantly like a time lapse of the night sky. The truth swept around us like a cold, clean wind. When I looked back to autumn, all I saw was performance, but in winter, what we’d said in secret, that was the real thing.

This was the real thing.

Chapter Twenty-EightSelina

“Toni Morrison?” called Joyce, waving a small stack of Morrison novels around the library.

“Got them,” said about half the staff, rising above the mumbled assent of the other half.

“More for me, then!” Joyce placed them in her box as I did the same with a copy of Our Gods Our Heavens.

On my knees, I looked up at the City library, at the steadily emptying shelves. Scott stood near the door. He appeared to be studying a copy of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, but he’d been standing there long minutes, the crags and valleys of his face immobile.

“Think he’s doing okay?” Kellie said.

I looked over at her. She was sitting with her back against an emptied shelf, her elbow resting on a closed box of books.

“No,” I said, “I think he’s devastated.”

“Yep. He takes things hard.” She toyed with the zipper on her leather jacket. “How about you?”