AN: It's been a super long time since I wrote/updated. It's a somewhat continuation of The Cowards, but about 2/3 less angst, Lol. They are both post series and aimed at B/A.
A quick thank you to the authors here that inspire and entertain me. I know every here is already super busy with their own RL, so I just wanted to say thanks.
It was easier to find him there, she supposed, among the stacks and rows. Each aisle omitted that familiar scent of decades old papers that, no doubt, drugged his mind.
She imagined how easy it would be to find him here; she had, after all found him here so many times. Mini skyscrapers surrounded him as he sat, benevolent, among them; a quiet Kong. This would make her smile before she stepped nearer.
Timing was everything. Arriving before breakthrough, could breed hostility; he in frustration and her an annoyance. Post breakthrough left him ecstatic and her waiting to be asked to dance.
When the sweet spot came, it was clandestine seduction. It was questioning faces turning into recognition. Finishing each other's sentences just became another cliché part of it all. The sweet spot came more often than not, breeding familiarity and no children. This, she thought was maybe why the hurts and professional slights had dug so deep.
She hoped not though.
She felt no active contempt for the man.
When he hurt her though, contempt would seep from her pores and flow down her face, unchecked.
His ghost had dried up that well and a sweetness had remained, a sticky residue.
That briefness and bitterness made her know she would never run into him here anymore. He was off in the ether and they no longer share the opposite ends of the same tether. Even if he somehow wandered back into this centrally located and densely stacked bookstore, she'd probably never know it. She was nonfiction these days and he was likely the exact opposite. "And never the twain shall meet," she mused.
In the blind quietness of the bookstore, she thumbed over the biographies. Names and titles registered to her, but none sunk in. Her own autobiography wrote and rewrote itself. The variations always included him and all the different versions of "we" they could have been.
"Now who's dealing in fiction, Alex?" The wry smile from the self-inflicted punchline faded and turn to bite her lip. She would prefer anything other than this phantom limb feeling.
She turned out of the biographies, not wanting to read about lives already lived and set in stone. She glanced briefly at the adjacent aisles for a moment of reprieve from the internal glimpses.
No aisle was safe. Ghosts filled them and kept her remembering. The sweetness in them overran her senses and she overdosed, unable to process them in any form.
What had been a meander, suddenly went fight or flight. Flight won as she went straight to motion.
Her quickness and saved her life many times. She couldn't even begin to count the times her innate quickness got her up and away, out of the fray. She could stand and fight with the best of them, however her mind was quick too. It could calculate the odds and point to a true North.
At that moment, she was neither. Her mind simply said flee, with no calculations. Her body, even needing reason, was slow to initiate. Once in motion, her body forgot direction and she swayed into the nearest bookshelf.
"And apparently forgot spacial relationships," she thought once she steadied.
She wasn't sure why she went to the bookstore that day. Despite being there, she had no real desire or need for books (née a book) that day. She hadn't been to a library, not to mention a bookstore, without him, for years. She felt like a fake among the book lovers and couldn't remember a time when she had ever felt so small and out of place.
All that, she thought as she looked over her handi-work. It had been a nice little corner display of new books, no doubt mounted by and enthusiastic employee.
"Too quick this time…" she thought in small doses of self-loathing. "Timing really is everything."
Spread all over the floor, the cover caught her eye first. Different shades of blue contrasted the pen and ink illustration. The illustration being a whale shouldn't have surprised her, and it didn't really. His name in print did. looked fitting in Baskerville bold. The title, Dispatches from Maine, charmed her immediately. He probably paced for hours over the title, she thought with a smile, completely sure.
Her fingers played piano over the front, braided slowly over the spine and landed at the back. Pride filled her as she grasped his book greedily in her hands. No doubt he had poured everything he was, into that book. Knowing this, the book almost felt alive in her hands. Bringing it closer to her face, she almost thought it smelled of him.
She knew he was writing, or was going to, or planned on it; completion seemed so far off in her mind. Their last random and awkward run-in left it all up in the air. Working on his memoir in Maine seemed like a good idea, he had explained. He joked about never finishing and wandering the earth, like in Kung-Fu. Both their faces slacked as they remembered Kung-Fu marathons, not a lifestyle possibility. He was still the same, he had said. But who was he now, without her? Who was she?
"He's someone who finishes tomes on long sabbaticals in Maine," she supposed. Who she was now, she couldn't answer.
She flipped through the book furiously, without thought to delicate pages or future owners. This book would always be hers.
"For Alex...", the dedication page spoke. Her breath caught as the words really reached her. She anchored to the spot and reread it over and over, and even once more.
Her eyes lowered to read on.
"...but we met in another life when we were both cats. Our owners were neighbors, how funny is that?"
She laughed and broke her own thoughts. It had some meaning, other than to make her laugh, but what, she didn't know.
Somewhere, at a simple rented house near no one in Maine, he wrote this for her. To make her think or to make her laugh, she couldn't decide. That he tried, made her smile.
She tucked the Dispatch under her arm and stepped over the book pile at at her feet. She briefly acknowledged her callousness at that but it passed as it had come. It wasn't every day someone dedicated a book to her... Let alone, her someone.
Funny, she thought. A piece of him could be surrounded by books forever now.