We chewed and smiled at each other. I’d never met anyone else that actually liked this flavor before. I’d always felt alone in my strange taste in crisps and my need to slather my sushi with the green stuff.
“It’s an acquired taste,” he said, swallowing and putting some more into his mouth.
“Our taste buds are clearly just more sophisticated than other people’s,” I teased.
He nodded at me, and then something in the drawer caught my attention. I pointed over at it and then his cheeks went slightly pink.
“You really did read my book,” I said. The copy in his drawer looked old and worn, like he’d read it more than once.
“It was a good book.” He said it so matter-of-factly that it felt like one of the best compliments I’d received in a while, maybe even ever. I looked down at the desk and something else caught my attention. I pulled the piece of paper towards me.
“What’s this?” I asked. I could see my name at the top of it: Pebecca Thorne, without the sloping line.
“Incident report. I’ve been sitting here, deciding whether I should fill it in or not.” He tapped his fingers on the desk.
“So, are you? Going to fill it in?” I asked.
He pulled some more crisps from the bag and popped them in his mouth. He chomped them while looking at me thoughtfully. He swallowed and then wiped the side of his mouth.
“I don’t want to, Becca.” He said my name in a whispery tone and I felt myself crumple into the seat as I stared into those green eyes of his.
“Then don’t,” I whispered back, feeling like I was slipping and sliding across the desk towards him.
“I’ve been seriously thinking about that. I’ve been thinking of letting you go and telling all those people that you have some kind of an emotional problem and that you weren’t really in charge of your faculties when you broke in and decimated the nesting place of the—what was it? Black budgie thing?”
“Pigeon,” I said quickly. I smiled at him. “You know they totally made that bird up, right?”
“Made up or not, the fact is that you were there and you broke in and you caused a scene.”
“I know.” I leaned over and stuck my hand into the bag of crisps again. “God, I could eat these all day.”
He sighed and put his head in his hands. “The perfect woman in so many ways, other than the fact she’s a criminal.” He chuckled under his breath and I didn’t really know what to say to this, to be honest. One minute he was telling me that he liked me and I was the perfect woman, and now he was telling me I was a criminal. He stopped chuckling and looked up at me.
“You know, I read your book four times. At least.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “It wasthatgood.”
“Thanks,” I replied.
“And you know what I thought when I read it?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No.”
“Maybe this is going to sound stupid, but I really felt like I knew you. Not the character in the book, but you. And I kept wondering if you’d had your heart broken like the character, because it was so real and I could relate so much.”
“I guess I did,” I said softly.
“And you poured your broken heart into the book?”
“Something like that.” I looked down at the desk and started picking at a small wooden splinter sticking out of it. “I guess writing the book was cheaper than going to therapy.” I looked up at him and forced a small smile.
“Reading your book was cheaper than going to therapy for me, too.” He smiled back at me, but it seemed slightly forced. The kind of smile you give people when you’re trying to put on a brave face. “Your book made me feel less alone,” he said. “I knew that, somewhere out there, a writer called Becca Thorne was going through what I was.”
“With April the girl, not the month?” I smiled at him.
“I blame her Swiss father,” he said, in jest.
