The Library After Dark: A Novel(6)
“Aria.” He rounds in front of me, blocking my view. His knuckle grazes my jaw. “I already have the tickets. You don’t need to worry about any of it.”
“That’s not…” I look away, into the oncoming headlights that bleach my vision before the car veers away in a squeal of tires on wet pavement.
There’s not exactly a date-friendly way to say I fear only one thing more than the law: Evangeline Riordan.
“I promise you a good time,” Jasper coaxes, the edge of his mouth lifted in a smile that might’ve tempted me to twirl my hair a second ago. “It’s not only a library tour.” He holds up the black gift box, and my stomach squirms. For a few blissful hours I’d brushed his gift from my mind, reveling in the slight give and crunch of the snow beneath my boots, the way his thumb brushed over my knuckles.
All things I can barely remember now.
“The Dark Hearth Tales—the original, the only one the world has ever discovered—has been in restoration for two years,” he says. “Monday’s the twentieth anniversary of it being housed at the Daedalus, and the collection will be returned for public display.”
It’s Saturday. “Okay?”
“Tonight, our private tour will be the first to see it.”
And there it is.
This would be like an artist scoring a private tour of the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa. If I were any other person—any other LIS student—I might’ve died and gone to heaven at the chance to see it up close and personal. It’s just my luck that Jasper happened to find the one and only person who had already seen the rare book and had no interest in seeing it ever again.
My upper arm prickles under my coat, the ghost of a hand clenching around it. They aren’t meant for you, Evangeline had hissed, tugging me away from the glass case. Little purple bruises peppered my arm for the next couple of days. I always avoided the Fairy Tales and Folklore room after that.
But Evangeline Riordan isn’t here anymore.
“Tour a haunted library with me, Aria Stokes,” Jasper says with the ghost of a smile, his hands sliding up my arms.
I want this. I want things to work out with Jasper, badly. He wouldn’t have been the first guy to delicately extricate himself from a date with a pasted-on-banana smile, but he’s still here. I’m constantly torn between playing dress-up with a pretty smile—trying to persuade everyone that there’s nothing to see here, I’m just a normal thirty-year-old—and wanting to rip off the mask and snarl, just to be able to breathe as myself.
But maybe I could be honest with him, a little bit.
Isn’t that what those therapists on social media who film themselves in their cars keep talking about? Letting go of abandonment issues and how to stop self-sabotaging your relationships?
Today is the best day I’ve had in so long—the last four months with him the best I’ve had in years. Carmen even said it—I am into him, a lot. More than anyone else I’ve dated in the last year, and possibly more than Ethan of the year before.
The crosswalk flashes green, and the river of black-clad people around us flows across the street.
All but us, like boulders in a stream.
I’m not a child anymore. I am not helpless, and I’m certainly not afraid of a building.
And Evangeline can’t tell anyone about me anymore.
“Talk architecture to me,” I finally say.
His answering grin, the way his arm slides around my shoulders, is almost enough to make it worth it. “The original structure was a rather short-lived psychiatric hospital in the nineteenth century. The Riordans’ real estate company acquired it after it shut down. About forty years ago, the owner’s widow, Evangeline Riordan, had it remodeled into a library.”
“That’s the history. I want to know what you see when you look at it—the building. Explain it to me like I’m five.”
“You’ve been before.” Not a question.
“Nope.” Then I curse inwardly, because wouldn’t it be better to say I’d come once, forever ago? Any other book-obsessed library student in New York City would, of course, have visited the Daedalus. “Tickets and memberships cost an arm and a leg, and there’s only so many organs I have left to sell.”
“But you know quite a bit about Evangeline Riordan,” Jasper says obliviously as I force bile back down my throat. “From your classes? I’d have thought she would fill the textbook on rare book acquisition.”
For my degree. Right.
I’d kept up with Evangeline enough to know how the public saw her. An immigrant turned billionaire widow who used her late husband’s wealth to create one of the most expensive and eccentric libraries in the country. In her later years, instead of knitting, she made a hobby of terrorizing antiquarian auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s.
If she’d been a man, she’d have been hailed as proof that the American dream is alive and well, and within anyone’s grasp. As is, the media called her a bitch.
The library’s steep facade veers over us, like the building itself is inching forward. Hidden lights shine up at the stained-glass windows, backlighting each sculptured gargoyle and grim reaper in all their twisted glory.
Memories bubble like champagne, trapping the breath in my chest.
The sting of Evangeline’s nails carving into my forearm, leaving half-moon craters in my soft skin. The low rasp of her voice sliding through my ears, the harsh lines of her beautiful face appearing in the mirror, out of the corner of my eye.