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That felt too meddlesome.
Instead, he’d just flipped through some of the scrapbooks. The Sisterhood maintained those, so there were pictures of groups, life cycle events, holiday parties, Purim shpiels, all kinds of things going back to the forties at least. He started with the year the library was dedicated and worked his way back. This had the added benefit of giving him a pretty detailed account of everything that happened at Beth Elohim, and that meant he was just doing his job.
At least that’s what he told himself.
Usually this was when Moshe popped up with a bit of snark about how David was being an ass.
This time, though, Moshe was silent.
Maybe it was because every part of David wanted to know as much about Shoshana as possible. Or maybe it was that he was naturally nosy. It was a good personality trait to have as a rabbi doing pastoral work, provided he didn’t tell anybody about what he learned. And he was good at keeping things quiet too. He wanted to ask Shoshana about her dad. Ari Goldman had been a presence, that much was obvious from the first photo David saw. He was a round-faced man with a shock of steel grey hair and eyes that burned like Shoshana’s.
The further back David went, the more he saw pictures of her dad. Ari was incredibly active in the shul. Weirdly, there were hardly any pictures of Shoshana though. Not that he’d specifically gone looking for that, he reminded himself. The few times she’d appeared in frame, she’d looked uncomfortable. Sad.
There was a picture from a Purim carnival. She was dressed as Esther, perhaps seven years old. The way her eyes stared up from the page was so similar to the way she’d looked at him the other night he’d had to close the scrapbook.
He’d put the cursed thing back on the shelf and taken a walk around the building.
“This way,” David said, leading Shoshana around the grand piano to a smallish door in the corner. It was the kind one would find under a staircase, the top cut into a kind of triangle to fit in the oddly shaped corner. This part of the sanctuary was a difficult architectural detail. The building curved round and, to compensate, behind the dressing room was a machinery room for the electrical paneling and the Wi-Fi. Above them was the balcony and the choir loft.
“I thought this was a closet,” Shoshana said, laughing. He pulled a ring of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door, glancing over his shoulder at her. She looked beautiful in the light from the skylights. The afternoon sun was doing things to her hair, making the colors blended in really stand out. The billowy cotton dress was designed specifically so that a person would try to take it off, he decided. It was perfectly modest, it covered her from her wrists to her knees, and was belted besides, but the gauzy material was meant to be touched.
He didn’t remember being so tactile before.
The room was long and narrow. If he stood in the center of it and reached out on either side with both hands, he could almost brush the walls with his fingertips.
There was a water closet in the corner, just a small toilet and a sink with a mirror. A row of hooks by the door held his robes. It wasn’t big enough for a desk, but there was enough space for an old loveseat. The kind of utilitarian thing one would find in a hotel.
Shoshana stepped around him, taking in the space. Like his office, this room had books piled on every available space. Stacks of papers. She eyed the music stand he’d sat next to the loveseat. He was using it as an impromptu desk of sorts.
“Has anyone ever told you, you hemorrhage knowledge?” Shoshana’s mouth twisted in a way that said this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, and she was actually amused by the idea. “The light in here is great, by the way.”
He agreed with her about the light. Because of that trick of the architecture, this room didn’t have any windows, per se, but they had allowed small, narrow rectangles of space. If he didn’t know better, he would say they were arrow slits, high up in the eaves. And of course, there were the actual electric lights. The room was so small it didn’t take much.
“What do you mean I hemorrhage knowledge?” he said, crossing his arms over his chest as though he were possibly offended by this. Shoshana grinned, the smile lighting her entire face. She reached for him, wrapping her arms around his neck. David’s hands went to her waist, because he couldn’t not touch her when she was so close. Shoshana’s fingers ran through the hair at the nape of his neck, teasing.
“Every single space of yours that I’ve seen so far, if you work there, it’scoveredin words,” she said, indicating the piles around them. “It’s not a bad thing, I just think it’s funny.”
“Occupational hazard,” David said, surprised that he was a little embarrassed by this observation. He didn’t make a habit of defending his process. His office down the hall, that he used for temple business was generally much neater, only the desk was a disaster.
“I made you uncomfortable,” she observed, pushing up on her toes so that she could press her lips to the hollow of his throat. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be, I don’t know why it hit me weird,” he said, shifting against her body. “Did you want to go to dinner tonight?”
“Actually, I was hoping we could stay in? Work was a lot today and I’m peopled out,” she murmured, leaning her head on his chest. “I just want to go home, strip down to my underwear, eat some food, and then--”
“Dessert?” he suggested, dipping his head to catch her lips in a deep, scorching kiss.
Twenty-Three
They had the dessert first.
Because, as Shoshana pointed out, he’d said not terribly long ago that the best part of the meal should be eaten first.
Of course, in this case, dessert meant sex.
Intense, sweaty, and mind blowing, but it was definitely sex. Not food—or at least not the kind of food you eat. She knew it was sustaining in other ways. Shoshana’s stomach growled and she rolled onto her back, staring up at the ceiling of her bedroom as she tried to stop the fit of giggles this caused.
“Your stomach is just as good at getting attention as you are,” David said, pulling a pillow to his chest and curling his arms under it. She turned on her side to look at him. His bare back was distracting. She wanted to trace every curve with her fingers. Then her lips. Then trace every letter of Hebrew on his tattoo with her tongue.
