Page 47 of The Library of Borrowed Hearts

“You won’t, but I figure it can’t hurt to try.” She winked. “See you next week.”

Jasper mumbled something evenhecouldn’t interpret and ducked his head as he left the city hall. Across the street, he could just make out the beige brickwork of the tiny library, but he didn’t direct his stepstoward it. There was no point. He already had the book in hand, and Catherine wasn’t on shift right now anyway.

Once upon a time, the library had been his happy place, his sanctuary. He’d been able to duck in there any time of day, grab a book off the shelf, and walk away without anyone engaging him in discussion, conversation, or—worst of all—banter. Now, every time he entered those hallowed walls, he became acutely aware of his every breath.

In and out:Lonnie would be watching him with a mischievous twinkle in her eye.

Out and in:Mrs. Peters would step in the way whenever he tried to scrawl a note in the book’s margin without getting caught.

In and in and in:There she’d be. Catherine.HisCatherine, her head bent over a book, the wisps of her hair trailing over flushed, softly rounded cheeks.

She always knew when he came into the library, though she never gave any indication of her awareness other than a brief flutter of her eyelashes. Jasper knew because he felt it, too. Anytime they stood in a room together, the air shifted to make space for them. It had no other choice—the world wasn’t designed to hold them in close proximity for long. Like a chemical reaction, they were unstable, combustible, and, most dangerous of all,explosive.

Unable to wait another second, he ducked into an alleyway and pulled out the book, hoping no one would walk by and see him. The streets of Colville were annoyingly wide, built to accommodate the sixteen-horse logging carts that used to clog the throughways. The extra space was nice in the winter or for the annual parade that wound up and down Main Street, but terrible when a man wanted a little privacy—and privacy was the one thing Jasper wanted most in the world.

At least, itusedto be.

His fingers fumbled as he searched for the correct page. As soon as he saw his own illegible scrawl followed by Catherine’s pretty, slopedwriting, he felt the air leave his lungs.

Each was so bent upon her own despair that escape into darkness was vital, and, containing themselves in that tight, vulnerable, impossible cloak which is fury, they stamped along together, each achingly aware of the other, each determined to be the last to speak.

If you’ve ever wondered why I sometimes find it hard to say the words out loud, it’s this right here: fury and despair, both of them binding me tight. I wish I could offer you a whole heart, but I can’t. Not while those two things still exist within me.

You’re so dramatic sometimes, J, she’d written, and he could almost hear the laugh in her voice as he read the words to himself.

That was the thing he liked best about her—the thing that attracted and repelled him in equal proportions. From the top of her shining brown hair to the tips of her dainty, well-shod feet, Catherine was the poster child for everything bright and beautiful in this world. Her main trials and tribulations were parents who cared too much about her; her biggest worries centered on how far to push the boundaries that chafed her at every turn.

He didn’t want to resent that about her—he didn’t want to resentanythingabout her—but when you were a man with only forty dollars in his pocket, it was hard to quash those feelings. Thirty of those dollars would go to his weekly room and board, five to the savings bundle he kept hidden in his mattress, and five to everything else.

Five dollars didn’t afford much of a life, even in a backwoods place like this. A book or a night out at the cinema, a new potted plant to brighten up the dingy walls that no amount of decoration could makefeel like a home.

He heaved a sigh as he flipped a few of the pages, searching in vain for more writing. Either Catherine had been forced to move quickly, or she was running out of things to say, because he didn’t find anything.

Just those five words:You’re so dramatic sometimes, J.

The worst part was, she wasn’t wrong. Hewasdramatic. He always had been. For as long as he could remember, he’d always reacted to situations in the worst possible way. He laughed when he should have smiled, cried when he should have sucked it up, curled into a ball when what the situation needed was a stiff upper lip.

I’m sorry, he wrote back.I wish I knew how to turn it off.

He shut the book and dropped it into the library’s return box. With any luck, Catherine would see the message and understand: that he was a man who felt things too much, too quickly; that every day was a struggle to find the balance between what the world expected of him and what his heart demanded of himself.

With his head bent low to the ground, he shuffled along the sidewalk toward his apartment. The forty dollars felt uncomfortable in his pocket, as if it had no right to be in his possession. In many ways, it didn’t. He’d promised his mom a long time ago that he’d send his earnings back to her and his brothers and sisters. It was a promise he’d kept for three long years—first as a sixteen-year-old away from home for the first time, and now as a nineteen-year-old taking on the rigors of a job that regularly ground fully grown men down to skin and bone.

He wasn’t skin and bone—not yet anyway—but every day, he felt himself grinding further and further away. Six hungry mouths to feed would do that to a man.

“Hey. You. Lumberjack boy.”

At the sound of that voice, Jasper kept his gaze fixed on his feet, hoping he could feign ignorance or, at the very least, stupidity.

A pair of booted feet planted themselves in front of him. “It’s Jacob,right? Or…Jeremy? Jerome? I’m sorry. I know it’s something with a J.”

Jasper sighed and glanced up. “Jasper,” he said in the surly voice that had won him so many enemies in his short lifetime.

“That’s right. Jasper.” The man—William McBride—smiled brightly at him. “I’m good with faces but not with names. Mind if I walk with you for a bit?”

Jasper did mind, actually, but he couldn’t think of a way to say so. He tilted his head in a gesture of assent.

“I don’t think we’ve formally met, but I’m William McBride. I work at the radar base.” He said this with all the air of a man conferring a treat on a young schoolboy. “Second Lieutenant McBride? Maybe you’ve heard of me?”