He looked up from the cover. “Yeah.”
I hadn’t expected that. I’d assumed he’d read the first chapter to satisfy me and then quietly shelved it. “Really?”
“Really.” He said it simply.
I studied him for a second, trying to decide if he was telling the truth. He looked like he was. “What did you think?”
He didn’t answer right away. It wasn’t the pause of someone scrambling for a polite lie—it was the kind where someone was taking the question seriously enough to choose the right words. I waited, my thumb still resting against the spine of the book.
“I thought the guy waited too long,” he said finally. “To say anything.” He held my gaze, calm and direct. “He had eight years to write her a letter. Eight years. And he waited until the last possible second.”
The sentence landed somewhere between my ribs and my throat. “Wentworth,” I said, and my voice came out quieter than I’d meant it to.
“Yeah. Idiot.”
I set the book down on the counter between us—not in any of the sorted stacks, just there, in the space between us—and cleared my throat. “That book is partly why I named my cats what I did,” I said, because I needed to say something, and that was the first thing that came to mind that didn’t require me to look directly at what had just happened.
One of his eyebrows lifted. “Your cats.”
“I have three. All named after Austen heroes.” I picked up another book from the box and set it in the hardcover stack, giving my hands something to do. “Darcy, Knightley, and Wentworth.”
He made a sound that was almost a laugh—quiet, just an exhale—and shook his head slightly. “Which one’s your favorite?”
“I love them all equally,” I said, with great dignity.
He looked at me then—steady, patient, already not believing it—and held my gaze until I felt the composure start to go.
I held out for approximately four seconds before I sighed. “Okay. Wentworth is my baby. Darcy and Knightley have very serious inner lives. Very important places to be. Very little time for me unless food is involved.” I set down another book. “Wentworth still lets me hold him like when he was a kitten. Purrs the second I pick him up.” I smoothed the cover of the next book unnecessarily. “Not my favorite. Just my baby, he needs me the most. Those are different categories of love.”
“Sure,” he said, in a tone that suggested he didn’t believe me and was choosing to be charitable about it.
I pointed at him. “You’re doing that thing.”
“What thing?” His expression was perfectly neutral, which was somehow worse.
“You used to do it all the time. Where you agree with everything I say in a way that makes it clear you don’t believe a word of it.” I set the book down with more purpose than itrequired. His mouth curved into something warmer then, softer at the edges, and it landed on me before I’d had time to brace for it.
“I’d like to meet them,” he said. “I love cats.”
My stomach did something I chose not to examine. “Fair warning,” I said, keeping my voice even. “Darcy and Knightley will ignore you for the first twenty minutes and then act as if you’ve always lived there. Wentworth will decide within thirty seconds whether you’re allowed to exist.”
“I can handle judgment.”
“He’s very thorough about it.” I looked back down at the box. “So are the other two, eventually. They’re just more subtle about it.”
“So are you,” he said, quiet enough that I almost missed it.
I looked up. He was already reaching for the next stack of books, his expression easy, like he hadn’t said anything worth commenting on. I watched him go and turned back to the box and told myself very firmly to keep moving.
The copy ofPersuasionstayed on the counter between us.
We got through most of the second box without talking much after that, and it was a comfortable not-talking—the kind I wasn’t used to. With most people, silence was a gap I felt obligated to fill. With Jasper, it was just the space between one thing and the next, easy to exist inside.
I worked my way to the bottom of the box and frowned at what was left. The backlist hardcovers I’d ordered, the pretty ones, needed to go on the top shelf of the fiction wall, which meant clearing space up there first, which meant the step stool. I wiped my palms on my jeans and went to get it from the back room.
“What are you doing?” Jasper asked when I came back, dragging it.
“Making space on the top shelf.”
