“But we’ ll miss our train,” he said, glancing at her.
“There’s another one leaving in an hour.”
He smiled like a kid who’ d been given permission to pick out a treat. As he stepped through the door, his hand brushed hers as he passed. She followed him in.
They split up immediately, Emeline wandering over to the music section, Hawthorne weaving towards the fiction section. Half an hour later, she found him in Poetry.
“Listen,” he said, reaching for her wrist distractedly, eyes on the page of the book as he pulled her closer.Holding the Dark,the title read. By a poet named Melanie Cameron. Emeline leaned back against the shelves, watching him.
“‘I didn’t know it would go like this,’” he recited. “‘I didn’t know I would find you in the dark …’”
Emeline stared at his mouth, captivated by the cadence of his voice. His expression was hungry as he read on, as if he’ d discovered some delicious secret and wanted to feed it to her. Like a ripe red strawberry dipped in chocolate.
“When I lie against you with my eyes closed,
I bring your body with me,
into the darkness,
I bring your whole body inside me.
And in that darkness I know you
so much better than hands and mouth can know,
I know you,
as though you were the darkness inside me.”
He glanced up from the page, fixing her in place with that same hungry gaze. Warmth pooled in her belly.
“It’s nice,” she murmured.
He raised an eyebrow. “Nice?” The corner of his mouth turned up as he lifted his hand, bracing it against the shelf beside her.
She wrinkled her nose at him. “Pretty, then.”
“How about tender. And …” His eyes dropped to her mouth. “Intimate.”
There was the oddest feeling in Emeline’s chest. Like a million tiny stars on the cusp of bursting. Sparks crackled in the air between them. Hawthorne seemed about to lean in, to close the gap, when the bookseller called from farther down the aisle, saying the shop was closing in five minutes.
Hawthorne straightened and stepped back.
The sparks fizzled out.
ONE LATE-OCTOBER DAY, EMELINEfound Sable and Rooke teasing Hawthorne on the grass beside Eshe and Abel’s pond. Hawthorne’s sketchbook lay open between them, and Rooke was shaking with laughter as he flopped onto his back.
Hawthorne rolled his eyes. “It’s not like that.”
“Oh?” Rooke sat up, wiping the tears from his cheeks. “What’s it like then?”
Emeline, who’ d left to fetch a jug of homemade sun tea and Maisie’s cinnamon buns, had clearly missed something good.
“Drawing a human model is no different than drawing a bowl of fruit. There’s no … It’s not like that,” he repeated.
“Right,” said Rooke, elbowing Sable in the ribs as he winked at Emeline. “Uh-huh.”
Sable leaned in towards Hawthorne, a smile quirking her mouth. “You’re saying there’s absolutely no difference between an apple and a naked woman?”
