Page 24 of So This Isn't Love
"Thank you for your service hours." She's out of the car. The door doesn't slam behind her. She closes it carefully, with both hands, which is somehow worse.
And she's gone, hurrying up the stairs beside the bookshop to her second-floor apartment, and I'm sitting in a Ferrari doing the one kind of math I've never been any good at.
Not the odds. The arithmetic. The actual count of it—every laugh I collected off her back at fourteen, multiplied by every kid who heard it and went looking for a target, multiplied by a father walking out on his family and a town that whispered about it.
No wonder she wanted to punish me this weekend.
Somehow, I don’t think the score will ever be even.
I sit there a long time, staring after her.
Then I put the Ferrari into gear and roll away from the curb.
CHAPTER 10
DARCY
The library on a Sunday afternoon is my favorite place in the world, and today I'm hiding in it, which at least is traditional.
My creative-writing workshop meets in the back corner by the tall windows. Eight teenagers, a circle of mismatched chairs, and a folding table holding the good snacks, which is to say the snacks I buy myself because the Friends of the Library budget believes teenagers can be sustained on butterscotch discs.
Eight regulars today—Lisa, Dee, Michael, two of my fourth-period sophomores, the Oakley twins, and Joshua Cline, who joined three weeks ago and has spoken aloud in the circle exactly twice. We're in the last half hour, the share circle, where everyone who wants to can read a page of what they wrote this week to the rest of the class.
I am being an entirely adequate teacher and an absolutely terrible listener. Lisa is reading a piece about her grandmother's kitchen that deserves my whole attention and is getting maybe sixty percent, because the other forty is still in a red Ferrari at my curb, listening to myself go off like something I'd been storing in a sealed jar since middle school.
I meant every word. That's not the problem. The problem is the look on Finn’s face when I said them, which was not the look of a man being told something he already knew. And the problem underneath that problem is the morning itself—four hours of Finn Bardot bleeding for a cat's approval and being a chew toy for a herd of puppies and not quitting on a job that has made grown men surrender both their stomachs and their pride.
I mean this sincerely. What am I supposed to do with a villain who is an otherwise amazing person, except, apparently, when it comes to me?
"Ms. Gable?" Lisa has finished. The circle of students is looking at me.
"Good work, Lisa. The sentence about the steam on the window," I say, because sixty percent of me is still a professional. "Read it again, please. Everyone listen to what the verb is doing."
We're two readers from done for the day when the lobby door opens outside our makeshift classroom. Slow footsteps walking carefully, the air seeming to hold a charge. I know before I look. I feel him the way I feel a storm gathering. Eight teenagers swivel like weathervanes.
Finn Bardot, showered, changed, is standing at the edge of the stacks looking like he rehearsed a speech the whole drive over and lost every word of it crossing the parking lot.
"Sorry." He half-raises a hand. "Mr. Albrecht from the bookshop said you'd be... Never mind. I can wait. Or go. I should probably go."
"Oh my God," whispers one of my sophomores, with the volume control native to her species. "That's the guy from the auction. That's the billionaire."
The circle detonates into murmurs. And then Joshua Cline, who eleven days ago could not return a library book without rehearsing the transaction, stands up out of his chair.
"Mr. Bardot! We're doing share circle. You can come listen. There's snacks."
I watch Finn take in Joshua, the circle, me. Whatever he came here to say folds itself up and goes into a pocket. "I don't want to interrupt."
"You're not," Joshua says, with the new authority of yesterday's archway behind him, and drags a ninth chair into the circle. And that is how Finn Bardot ends up sitting between a sophomore who keeps photographing him with her eyes and a folding table of off-brand cookies, in my library, in my student circle, two rows of shelves from where I used to hide from him.
The anger I feel toward him is still in the jar on the counter where I left it. I'm aware of it the whole time, a kettle that hasn't whistled yet.
Michael reads his piece about the ferry. A girl named Dee reads a poem she disclaims four times before starting, and Finn listens to all of it with that total attention I watched him spend on Joshua's drill grip yesterday. Afterward he asks Dee which line came to her first when she wrote it, which happens to be the exact right question, and I hate how much I notice that it's the exact right question. Dee, who disclaims everything she's ever written, sits up like a plant getting water.
I hate, more specifically, the warmth doing slow laps under my sternum. Nursing a grudge requires the grudge to hold still, and he keeps picking mine up and handing it back to me as something else. This morning I emptied a sealed jar of accusation over his head and he took every word of it. Now he's sitting in a folding chair asking shy teenagers the right questions about their writing, and the part of me that is not angry—the part I keep declining to acknowledge—is leaning toward him across the circle like a sunflower with no self-respect.
Then Joshua opens his folder.
"I finished this story," he tells the circle, and then, hesitantly, turns to Finn. "It's got engineering in it. There's a bridge." He pulls out two typed pages and holds them across the circle. "Will you read it out loud for me, Mr. Bardot? You'd do the voices right."
