“I’ll bring the soup,” I said.
A small laugh escaped her. She shook her head slowly, hair falling forward, and I reached across and tucked it back behind her ear without thinking about it, and she went very still at the touch, and neither of us said anything for a second.
“Jasper Dean,” she said finally. “Please stop making me fall apart in the corner booth.”
“I’m just telling you true things.”
“That,” she said, “is exactly the problem.”
I squeezed her hand gently. “Your food is getting cold.”
She looked down at her plate like she’d forgotten it existed, which I was fairly certain she had, and picked up her fork, and I watched her collect herself and felt something I wasn’t ready to name pressing outward from behind my ribs, warm and insistent, and kept it where it was.
She took a bite, chewed, and looked at me with the expression of someone who had decided to be okay and mostlywas. “Your turn,” she said. “The book that wrecked you. I told you mine.”
“East of Eden.”
Her eyes lit up. She remembered. “So you did read it.”
“You didn’t exactly give me a choice,” I said.
She sat up slightly. “I gave you a choice.”
“Cara. You put it on the table in front of me and said if I didn’t read it, you were going to have serious concerns about my character.”
“That’s a choice,” she said. “That’s clearly a choice.”
“That’s an ultimatum delivered by a fifteen-year-old.”
“An effective one,” she said, completely without remorse, and pointed her fork at me. “You’re welcome.”
I laughed—a real one, the kind that caught me off guard—and she grinned at me across the table with the unrepentant satisfaction of someone who had been right about something and was only now getting to enjoy it properly.
“And?”
“And I read it in four days and didn’t sleep much.” I took a bite of my steak, chewed, and swallowed as I watched her try not to gloat. “So, the fifth time I read it, I was on deployment. Small paperback I kept in my pack until the spine gave out completely. Cover went soft as cloth.” I looked at her. “I’ve read it five times. I’ll read it five more times before I’m done with it.”
She had stopped eating again. Her fork was resting against the edge of her plate, and she was looking at me with that expression—the one that made the rest of the room recede.
“What’s the part that stays with you?” she asked.
I thought about how to say it right. “There’s a line near the end. About how trying to be perfect is what keeps you from being good. That once you let go of perfect, there’s room to actually be good.” I looked up at her. “I’ve needed that line at differentpoints in my life for different reasons. It keeps being true in new ways.”
She went very still across the table. Not the stillness of politeness or patience—the stillness of someone who has just heard their own private thing said out loud by someone else, unexpectedly, in the middle of a restaurant, and needed a second to absorb it.
“I have three different colors of ink underlining that passage in my copy,” she said.
I looked at her. “Three colors?”
“One for each time I needed it to mean something different.”
I thought about myself sitting in a school library while she told me, with complete conviction, that this book was going to matter to me. I thought about the deployment paperback with the ruined spine. I thought about all the years between that library table and this corner booth and the strange way certain things kept finding you when you thought they were lost.
“We’re going to have to compare copies,” I said.
Her mouth slid into a radiant smile. “Come over, and I’ll show you all three colors.”
I shook my head slowly. “You keep inviting me to your apartment. Or asking to come to mine,” I teased.
