She looks at Professor Hammerwell and gives him a pair of nitrile gloves.
“Fine. How’s progress?” She peers down her nose at me.
“Perfectly regular.”
This pleases her immensely, and once she’s recovered from the delight she says, “I’m wondering if you can help a professor get something from the stacks.”
I’m flabbergasted. I freeze with a pamphlet semi-clutched between a thumb and forefinger, which Professor Hammerwell unwedges carefully from my grip. The thing is, I’m like stage management at the Beinecke. Neither seen nor heard and always behind the curtain. So this? This is highly irregular. “Sure, if you’d like me to.”
She looks equally flabbergasted as I feel, in fact. “He did request you specifically,” she says, as we leave Professor Hammerwell to delight over his pamphlets. We march through the floor-to-ceiling cabinets. She lets me out a fireproof door and shuts it behind us.
I’m thinking that the professor in question has to be Professor Sarka. I get all kinds of images of rare manuscripts of sea creatures in my head. Krakens eating boats, that kind of thing.
But it’s not Professor Sarka at the bottom of the steps. It’s Ben.
I yank the paper cap off my head and stuff it into my pocket.
Lillian, always very nice and demure and quiet, whispers, “Here she is, Professor Beck.”
“Thanks, Lillian,” he says. He isn’t looking at me. I, meanwhile, am gazing up at him the way people look at statues of ancient Roman generals.
Lillian walks away, and that’s when I whisper, “What are you doing here!”
My voice, though just an airy gasp, echoes all over the lobby, bouncing from marble surface to marble surface forever.
He’s got his serious professor face on. “I need help in the stacks, Miss Costa. I told them you’re a student of mine, majoring in Philosophy. I said it would be very educational.”
Completely against protocol! How he does things, I just don’t know. It could be those eyes. Those eyes could rob a bank. “And they just let you?”
“Lillian said it was highly irregular.”
I snort.
And he gives me this look like, Good morning, sexy.
I make like my heart is not parting my ribs and walk up the steps next to him. We pass the Gutenberg Bible. I don’t give it a glance since I’ve seen the thing more times than I’ve seen a regular Bible, but Ben stops dead in his tracks. “Holy shit.”
Seeing it through his eyes, I realize it is amazing. And it’s amazingly easy, I also realize, to take magic for granted. “One time they let me turn the page. I had to use a special little page turning thing and had to hold my breath.”
“This place.” He shakes his head.
“They’ve got the Declaration of Independence somewhere,” I whisper. “But never mind that, Professor.”
He’s towering over me now. Everything in me says unzip his jacket! But I just jam my hands further in my hoodie. “What are we after?”
“I don’t fucking know,” he says. His voice is lower, and the carpet here on the second floor dampens it.
“You just wanted to see me?”
He nods.
“At work?”
Nod again.
“We have to do something.” I gaze up at him, unblinking and warm all over for about three whole seconds. “What about Aristotle?”
“Perfect.”
So I lead him into the viewing room, which looks just like a police interrogation room. Before we go in, I turn to him and say, “I have to search you.”
A low growl sneaks out. His eyebrow answers, Search away.
“For writing implements, sticky notes, gum, lotions, chapstick.”
His face softens in a kind of amused wave. He hands over a pen and a mechanical pencil that he had in his jacket. Burt’s Bees. A small tube of sunscreen. “Habit,” he explains. And his phone. I place everything in a small Tupperware bin in the hallway, then place it in a small locker, like they have at gyms, and hand him the key.
“You’re very efficient.”
I let my fingers linger in his palm before I drop the key. “I do try.”
The viewing room has white walls and a white table, with blue industrial carpet. There’s a computer station in the corner, but other than that the place is just a big table and two chairs.
When the door clicks shut, I turn around and he’s right in front of me.
“Hello, beautiful.”
The flush is immediate and wonderful. “I love that you made this happen.”
“How are your knees?”
The answer is battered. But I just shrug. “They’re…okay?”
He winces. “Mine look like I just learned to rollerblade,” he smiles, and his eyes shift side to side, on the lookout for lookouts, and he reaches out to take me in his arms.
The blood whooshes in my ears. I know I’m not supposed to be doing this. I know it’s dangerous, but I cannot help it. I actually cannot help it. His arms open, and I step into them, unzipping his jacket to get close to his body. Gore-Tex is not for lovers.
For a moment, I just keep my cheek to his chest and then slip my arms around him, beneath his jacket, feeling the warmth of his skin and the dampness of a freshly taken shower.
“What are we going to do?” I ask. Same as I asked last night.
He brings his hand up to my cheek, and his lips press gently on the top of my head. “We’ll figure it out.”
Groaning, I drop a little of my weight on his chest. “This is impossible.”
“A lot of things seem impossible,” he says, pulling me away a bit so he can put his eyes on mine. “But that doesn’t mean they are.”
“What happened to my nihilist? What happened to the guy who doesn’t believe in anything, not even love?”
His blinks become a little faster, and I’m just floored. I know that feeling so exactly, when something gets you so far to the quick that the world gets blurry.
“You happened, you philosophy wrecker.”
He kisses me then, deeply, tenderly, the kind of kiss I’d like to wake up to forever.
And that’s when the door squeaks open. We part immediately, suddenly acting like strangers, muttering weirdly to ourselves like we’ve been so busy thinking we haven’t had time to talk. It’s Lillian.
“Just wanted to see what you needed access to,” she says. But I can see from her eyes obviously going back and forth that she’s putting it together. She’s no idiot. And you’d have to be an idiot not to feel the energy in this room.
Ben blurts, “Socrates.”
I say, “Aristotle!”
She eyes me particularly. “Let me know when you have a box number you’d like me to retrieve.
“Definitely,” says Ben, raking his hands through his hair. “We’ll let you know.”
And then the door closes, I put my hands to my face and laugh softly and painfully into my palms.
29
One thing I know for sure: Librarians miss nothing. Ever. They’re like all-seeing spirit owls of the damned universe.
As the door shuts, I grab Naomi and kiss her as hard as I can. I don’t care what the stupid librarian saw. I’m so hard, so pent up, I feel like I haven’t been inside her in years. In fact, it’s been less than twelve goddamned hours. So with my next kiss, I say, I hate you, I love you, I need you, and I’ll rock your world. But she pulls away like she’s been punched.
“Ben!” She wipes her mouth, still smiling but also watching the door. “God,” she whispers. She’s not kidding around. “You’ll get me fired!”
She’s right. It’s like this lemon haze overcomes me.
“Do you have any idea what these hoodies of yours do to me? The thumbholes?” I make a noise that sounds more herd-animal than person
She makes this I can’t help it face, and I want to rip those leggings down and take her right here over this ridiculously huge library table. She’s also wearing my boots, the boots I bought her. The boots that make
me feel like I own a little piece of the perfection that is Naomi.
I kiss her again. This time fast, just a press of my lips to hers.
I’m a wildman. My inner Hyde has been unleashed.
She starts smiling now. Her frustration has faded a bit. “You’re unquenchable.”
“Not my fault,” I say. I’m possessed by this seam on her leggings again. These leggings are old ones, and soft. A little grayed from so much wash and wear. I feel all my resolve disappearing and take a step closer.
“Stop, stop, stop,” she says, through whispers and giggles, and pushes me away.
“I need you to clear your schedule. Pretend you’re sick. I’ll write you a note,” I say. “Masters, they can do that right?”
Her eyes flash in the most mischievous way. “I have to write papers. One of them is for you!”
“Screw the goddamned paper. I’ll inflate your grade until it soars above the sky like a weather balloon. I gotta go,” I say, moving away from her out of sheer necessity to keep myself from grabbing her again. “Keep your phone on you.”
I leave her there, with her hands in the air. Outside the room, I smooth my rain jacket and squelch along in my boots. Escaping silently is impossible. Lillian is at the end of the hallway.
“Everything alright, Professor Beck?” “Definitely,” I say, “I just realized I’ve got office hours.”
“On a Saturday?” “Work never stops!” I say, and jog down the steps.
I’m noticing a pattern here. Let that shit go has, because of Naomi Costa, been replaced by Keep your shit together.
As I’m jogging past the Gutenberg Bible, I hear her whisper fill the huge marble cube of the Beinecke. “Professor Beck!”
I turn around in a circle. This is what people say when they hear the voice of God, I think. Completely disorienting, completely overwhelming, fucking transcendental.
“Up here!”
Now I see her. And she’s holding all my stuff in the little Tupperware bin.
So I walk-jog up the stairs. What I’d really like to do is sweep her off her feet, press her up against the wall of the Rare Medieval Alchemy Manuscript section and kiss the shit out of her again, but I do not. I put my chapstick and everything else in my pocket, and say, “You make a mess out of me.”
“Tell me about it.”
I’m off again. I push out of the revolving doors, nearly maiming an old lady with a walker. Jesus. I can’t decide if I like this new feeling. It’s a sea change. Like when Beck (not me, the other one) recorded that album Seachange and everybody said, “What the hell happened to him!” Exactly like that. It’s like a different planet that I have no desire to leave at all.
Standing out in the courtyard in the gloomy New England rain, I feel this wave of hope, this wave of the future. The light looks different, the world looks different. That girl.
She’s given me something to believe in. She’s taken me out of my own head.
So I head towards the Commons, thinking. Plotting. Scheming.
The work of every philosopher since the beginning of time.
30
I’m working on the paper for Ben’s class. Had it been any other professor and any other time, of course, I like to think I could have pounded it out with all the efficiency of a philosophy-analyzing machine—thank you, color-coded highlighters and Post-it flags! But now? Between Ben and C.S. Lewis and my lovebrain, I’ve got nothing. It’s a confusing morass of utter B.S. that will probably read like word salad.
Skimming my eyes over the words, it’s confirmed: Jello word salad. I’ve got dangling modifiers and sentences that end with, “???”
I cannot take my mind off that kiss in the viewing room. That kiss was different than any of them before. Kissing isn’t fucking. Kissing is speaking without words. And today, in the viewing room, he was saying everything that he hasn’t yet said out loud.
I stare at my screen. Wait. I’m making him lose control.
Me!
I try to focus. I have exactly zero idea what I’m writing, but I have four hours to write it. What I’m not going to do is skip this paper because God forbid anybody ever accuses him of giving me preferential treatment.
Midway through the second body paragraph, my phone buzzes under my leg. I freeze.
I have been able to focus through hurricanes. I have been able to study through drunken fishermen screaming insults at one another. I have been able to keep my focus with moderate sustained difficulty through two years at Yale. And yet now my phone buzzes and someone might as well have detonated a bomb in the quad.
There’s no point in resisting. And I give in, opening up Signal. It’s a hyperlink. My heart begins thumping wildly in my chest again. The first part of the URL says:
http://www.Airbnb...
Even though I live alone, I live in the constant threat of Lucy wandering in babbling while eating almonds, so I stand up and lock my door. Then I take a deep breath and open it up.
Romantic Private Seaside Cottage.
Mystic, Connecticut.
“This cottage, all by itself on rugged Mystic shoreline, has been completely renovated…”
The little thumbnail is beautiful. Sun-bleached shingle siding, pitched roof, balcony, beautiful garden…so beautiful and mystical, in fact, that it takes me a few seconds to figure out what’s happening. I scroll down. He’s booked the place for tonight. For the two of us.
Yeah?
yes yes yes
I love when you talk dirty.
you haven’t heard anything yet.
Jesus.
I try to think of something double-dirty to say, but again I’ve got nothing. Not right now. I’ve got to get my hands on him to know just what to say.
Problem: Us leaving together is so suspicious.
Osgood will figure us out.
My wheels start spinning. Think, Naomi. Think. I have no car. And Mystic, an hour and a half away, isn’t exactly somewhere that public transportation will take me. I click my tongue at my phone thinking, thinking…
Can you get there? I’ll pay.
I feel my face flush hot and a little mad. Just him buying the boots and burgers made me ache, never mind the surely astronomical nightly rate of this beautiful cottage. I’m still independent, even if I’m dead broke.
i've got it covered.
when?
Naomi. Seriously.
ben. seriously!
Fine.
Be there at 6.
i cannot wait.
thank you.
so much.
Beautiful. It’s nothing.
I can’t wait either.
Staring at the thread, I let my mind start whirring even faster. Uber isn’t happening. Zipcar maybe?
I've never rented one. I look it up, and no, no, no. It’ll break me. Spring tuition is due soon. Meal plan. The panic of all the untold things, books and bills and the ordinary everyday stuff of just living starts to swell up around me. I shove it back down. Now is not the time to worry about all that. Now is the time to enjoy this amazing thing that is about to happen to me.
So I stand up and swallow my pride. I go next door and knock on Lucy’s door.
“Open!” she says. She looks a little like an 80s pop star with a slowly advancing coke problem; three days of double-dosed Adderall will do that to a person. Not to mention she’s got her hair on her head in an actual scrunchie and is wearing tiny pink shorts with tube socks.
“It might happen this term, Naim. They might give me the ax,” Lucy says. “Have you ever paid anybody to write a paper for you? There’s a company in Singapore…”
I bear my teeth. “Don’t you dare. Do the work. You know you can. Don’t make me call you a wuss.”
“I’m not a wuss! I may have a small problem with historical chronology. Why they insist on me taking history classes, I just don’t even…”
“Wuss!”
Ooooh, she doesn’t like that. Her eyes are flaring and her nostrils flashing, all the mixed e
motions. “You got it? Do the paper yourself. You’re not getting kicked out of here for something so stupid. Right?”
We have this same conversation twice a year. Singapore-wuss-art major-historical dates-wuss!-fine-fine! Like clockwork.
“Fine!”
The biannual academic ethics confrontation abating (oh my God, the irony), I flop down on her bed. She’s got matching Marimekko sheets that are so pretty I used to be afraid to sit on them. Until I found out she has three sets.
“Here’s the thing. I need some money.”
She snaps her face towards me and then cups one hand to her ear. “That’s it. That is the sound of hell freezing over…”
I lower my eyes and fuss with the buttoned edge of her duvet. She’s offered to help me with everything all the damned time since I’ve known her. At every turn, I have resoundingly rejected every penny.
But this is different. This is for love. For hope, for Ben. For us. Us! “It’s an emergency. And I’ll pay you back with compounded interest.”
“Don’t tell me your dad fell overboard.”
She’s got this handle on the macabre that’s almost superhuman. “No, but nice try. It’s something else. I need to leave town.”
Her nose starts shifting. “I’ll give you whatever you need if you tell me his name.”
“I always knew you’d end up a blackmailer. Remember when we saw that movie on Lifetime and I said you could totally play that part?”
She eats an almond. “You learn a thing or two in Greenwich. So… What’s his name? Spill it.”
The thing is, for the first time in my life I’ve got a secret from her, and I just cannot tell her. Even Lillian spotting Ben and me at opposite ends of the room was terrifying, never mind Osgood leering around corners everywhere. “I just can’t tell you his name, Luce. I can’t. I don’t want to get you involved in it.”
She looks surprisingly wounded by this. Not faking it. Just a big, sad frown. “I want to know. I’ve never seen you like this. I want to know who’s got all the dynamite.”
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