The Library After Dark: A Novel(4)
His laugh is heady. “Reminiscent of 1,001 Arabian nights?”
Reminiscent. I haven’t heard someone talk like that in a long time, and I like it. I like him. Dammit. “It’s been the winner for a while now.” I keep my voice light and fun, always fun. “This is actually the longest whatever-this-is I’ve had in a while.”
His head tips up, the streetlights catching his startlingly blue eyes, and the question in them he doesn’t need to ask. He does that a lot, I’m learning—says things without saying them.
I nearly fire off something cheeky, but the last guy I’d actually really liked had ended it because, according to him, I could not hold a serious conversation. I couldn’t even tell him the truth, that I’d never share in midnight whispers of deepest, darkest secrets, not with him or anyone. People claim to want to know you, but they lie; love and its shallower cousins are fickle guests.
My ex would’ve thanked me if he’d known what parts of me I kept locked in a coffin, but no. He ditched me before I could ditch him, and like hell would that ever happen again. I’d jump ship at the earliest, tiniest leak.
Jasper’s already seen through my attempts overboard, even if he doesn’t understand why I keep trying to bolt. He wants this, I want this, though letting him in could be a near death sentence. But maybe a teaspoon of honesty would be enough.
“This,” I finally say, “is hard for me.”
“?‘This’ being dating. I’m aware, thanks.”
“?‘This’ being relationships. People.” I slip a finger under my velvet choker, give it a small tug. Jasper comes from a large family, something I can’t even imagine. Not when it’s been just me for nearly two decades. “I’m really out of practice, but…never seem to say or do the right things. The things people are supposed to do or say. Or so I’ve been told by, you know, exes.”
“Considering I’ve already survived the riveting history of H. H. Holmes and his serial activities over french fries, that would indicate more about your exes than about you.”
I fight an involuntary smile. I don’t do vulnerability. Damn Jasper for making me want to. “Okay. You know when your brain is like, ‘Hey, maybe I shouldn’t test that knife against my finger too hard, because it might hurt’?”
A nod, his eyes squinted.
I keep my tone light. “Yeah, I don’t have that in most areas of my life. That inhibition is gone.” I think of my thighs, the shiny lines stitching across them. How I didn’t hesitate once before putting them there. “Like last year, a guy started following me in the subway station at night. No one else was around, and he started talking…” I shake my head; Jasper doesn’t need to know details. “And when I ran out of platform to walk, I bit—like really bit—the inside of my cheek and turned around. Smiled, with my little mouth full of blood.”
The look on his face is priceless: alarmed, but somehow…thrilled? “You did not.”
“Disturbed?” I can’t keep the challenge out of my tone.
“Extremely. Is there footage of this somewhere I can watch?”
I playfully shove him, hard, and he catches his footing with a smirk. “What happened then?”
In my head the beautiful, oft-pulled-out photograph unfolds of the man stopping short, face going slack in horror. The dark frisson of pleasure that had zipped through me like electricity. “I…started walking toward him. He bolted.”
Jasper’s startled laugh is a shot of serotonin. Relief flutters through me. “Apparently I didn’t get all the blood off my face, because the guy I was seeing was less impressed.” My throat corrodes. When I’d told him what the subway guy had said, he’d brushed it off as just talk. “Apparently that was an overreaction? He was pretty freaked. Thought I should’ve kept walking.”
Echoing up the street, a siren howls through the forest of stone buildings, and on instinct I cut a glance over my shoulder, away. I never can shake the adrenaline spike those flashing lights trigger, even though I don’t have as much as a parking ticket to my name. I’ve made sure of it.
“?‘Better the monster than the maiden to be devoured,’?” Jasper finally says. Then, at my puzzled expression, “It’s a quote.”
I keep my tone neutral. “You really think that?”
“I’m certainly not advocating for anyone to sit in a subway station alone and let a guy approach them.” His gaze is clear like quartz when his hand lifts, toying with the tail of my auburn Rapunzel braid. “Your exes,” he says, in that steady, aloof tone.
“Yes?”
The corner of his mouth sharpens into a half smile, and his gaze flits to my lips. “None of them were me.”
I let him tug me forward, biting my lip against a smile. The black asphalt glitters with wet snow. I’ve always flirted with the idea of fate, golden threads tied to our fingers and feet that guide our movements like marionettes, but meeting him…now I really might have to believe it.
The dark skeleton of trees ahead gives way to an intersection, and I stop cold.
Past the glowing headlights, half hidden behind the base of a steel-and-glass tower and illuminated by the New York streetlights, is a monstrous structure of chiseled stone.
The rectangular building spreads over an entire block like a cancer, the windows tiered and arched, the architecture dizzyingly intricate. The sharp spines of neo-Gothic spires jut from the rooftop and skewer the sky, and the limestone facade shines wet and black against the pale snow.