"It's beautiful."
Beaming, she showed him the sections: the gardens, the art, the biographies, the travel, the fiction shelf she was still building. She showed him the back room with the ivory walls, the utility sink, and the chair where she sat at the end of the day. She didn't show him the shelf where his books were. He didn't ask.
Elias set up the picnic on a Tuesday evening.
She'd given him a key. She'd given him a key to the shop the week before, because he'd been coming in the mornings before opening to bring her coffee from the place on Dickens she liked. This had required her to come downstairs to let him in, and the coming-downstairs had become a thing she didn't want to do in her bathrobe. The hungry way his gaze raked over her made heat fill her, and she wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. The key had beeneasier than the bathrobe. She hadn't examined the giving of the key too closely.
She arrived at the shop after a Tuesday appointment on Clark Street and found the front door locked, the pendant lights on and, in the middle of the honey floor, a blanket.
He'd spread it between the garden section and the biographies. There were candles — real ones, in low glass holders, the kind that wouldn't set a bookshop on fire. There was food from the Italian place on Armitage she'd taken him to the week before, laid out on the blanket in the containers the restaurant used for takeaway. There was wine, two glasses. Beside the glasses, a single white peony in a jar.
Elias was sitting on the blanket with his back against the garden shelves.
He'd taken off his jacket. His sleeves were rolled. He looked, sitting on the floor of her bookshop in the candlelight, like a man she'd never met: a man who didn't run rooms or produce instruments or manage outcomes.
"Elias."
"Noelle."
"You broke into my bookshop."
"You gave me a key."
"I gave you a key for coffee."
"I've expanded the scope."
She didn't fight the thing that was happening in her chest, because fighting it would've been the old her. The old her was the woman who'd held everything and shown nothing, and she wasn't that woman anymore. She'd been that woman for a long time, but she'd built a bookshop and told a man on a sidewalk that he didn't get to touch her. All of it had been necessary, and the woman who'd done all of it was standing in the doorway now looking at a blanket on a floor and knowing that the season had changed.
She sat down on the blanket across from him.
They ate. They talked. They talked the way they'd been talking on the phone and at the lunches and at the matinees — about the shop, about a book she'd found at an estate sale in Lake Forest. The candles burned down in their glass holders, and at some point the talking stopped.
"Noelle."
"Yes?”
"I need to tell you something."
He looked at her. The candlelight was in his eyes — the hazel had gone to amber, the way it went in low light. She could see, in the amber, the thing he was about to say before he said it.
"I love you," he said. “I didn't know how to when we were married, and the not-knowing cost me the marriage, and I've spent every week since then trying to learn, and the learning has been — " He stopped. He started again. "I love you because you’reyou, Noelle. You protected me when you didn’t have to, because that’s the type of person you are. I've loved you since the beginning, and I was too afraid to hold it, and the fear was the thing that cost us everything."
The man sitting across from her had dismantled everything he'd been and found, in the wreckage, the version of himself that had been, all along, the one worth keeping.
She reached across the blanket and put her hand on his jaw. His eyes closed, his breath caught. She held him there and let herself look at his face the way she hadn't let herself look at it in months: the line of his mouth, the dark lashes against his cheek. He was so achingly handsome.
"Elias," she said.
"Yes."
"Open your eyes."
He did. She looked into them and she saw the full weight of what he'd just said to her. No one had ever, in her life, looked at her with that combination of terror and surrender.
He was giving her everything he had. She could see it.
Noelle leaned in and kissed him.
