“It must be dark brown anyway; why do you dye it black?” he asked again, his eyes narrowed intently on her face.
She wanted to laugh at his confused expression but kept a straight face as she answered, “Because it’s almost black, but not quite.”
“I don’t understand.”
She looked at him over the reference desk, a small smile flirting at the corner of her mouth. “I just felt like it hadn’t really committed to a color, Gio. I don’t do things half-assed. I don’t want my hair to, either.”
He set his pencil down and leaned back in his chair. “So, you’re saying you dye your hair because you think it’s…lazy?”
He cocked his head in amusement.
She shrugged. “Not lazy, more indecisive.”
He smiled. “You realize that makes no sense, of course. Your hair color is determined by your genetic make-up and has no reflection on your personality or work ethic.”
She glared at Giovanni playfully before sticking her tongue out at him.
He looked at her in astonishment for a moment before he burst into laughter. She was startled by the unfamiliar, but not unwelcome, sound and joined him before she looked at the clock on the wall. It was already ten to nine.
Still chuckling, she said, “All right, hand over the book. I’ve got to lock up.”
He smiled at her and began to pack the manuscript for storage. She walked over, picked it up, and began her nightly closing ritual.
In the weeks since he’d joined her and her grandmother at the festival, Giovanni had become surprisingly friendly. She found him lingering around the student union on random nights of the week, holding cups of coffee he never drank and wandering through the student-study area in the library. He made a point of chatting with her, but she found his intentions as puzzling as his profession.
She had searched his name online, and though she found a myriad of rare books and antiquities dealers, his name never appeared. She found a copy of his business card with Charlotte Martin’s notes, but the only contact information on it was a phone number she was reluctant to call, though she did program it into her phone.
When she asked her grandmother about the intriguing bookseller, she was shrugged off.
In the weeks that followed, Dr. Giovanni Vecchio became a small obsession to her.
He was rich, she determined, after noticing a silver-haired man hold open the back door of a Mercedes sedan for him on more than one occasion when they left the library. Giovanni had taken to walking her to her small, hand-me-down Civic some evenings when she got off of work, most often to continue a conversation they were in the middle of. He’d also tried to convince her that a brisk walk down five flights of stairs was the key to good health. She sometimes joined him and sometimes simply waited near the elevators. He was an unusually fast walker.
She also determined he was in his early thirties. He looked younger but had casually mentioned too many foreign universities for her to think he had seen them all in less than that.
What bothered her the most was that something about his appearance stirred memories of a time in her life she had tried very hard to forget, and reminded her of a face she had relegated to the back of her mind. She’d tried for years to put that dark chapter of her teenage years behind her, but the more time she spent with the mysterious book dealer, the more thoughts and memories began to surface.
He stood before her now, his soft smile and beautiful eyes the very picture of politeness. He was wearing a moss-green sweater that evening which made his eyes look both green and grey at once.
“Can I walk you to your car?”
She paused, and he must have been confused by the odd look on her face because he stepped away.
“I…sorry, kind of lost in thought.” She smiled. “You know, thinking about my indecisive hair.” She closed her eyes and shook her head, embarrassed that she’d used thinking about her hair as an excuse for her quizzical expression.
He frowned. “Did you want-”
“Sure,” she continued. “I’d like the company. Just let me shut the computers down. Can you get the lights by the door?”
He paused almost imperceptibly but turned to walk toward the doorway. As she waited to log out of the library’s system, she glanced at him from the corner of her eye. He slipped his hand into his messenger bag and pulled out a pencil to flick the lights off before he tucked it back in his bag. His movements were smooth and practiced, and if she hadn’t been observing him, she realized she never would have noticed.
She forced herself to look back at the computer and stood up straight when she heard the electronic sigh that indicated the machine was off. Gathering her bag, Beatrice plastered a smile on her face and walked toward the doorway to meet him.
“Join me on the stairs tonight?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. My feet are killing me. Join me in the elevator?”
He looked at her for a second, surprised by her question. She’d never asked him to join her before and was curious how he would respond.
“No, thank you. You know me-I like the exercise.”
She chuckled a little and smiled. “Right.”
“I’ll meet you downstairs.”
He turned and loped toward the stairwell, his quick feet almost noiseless in the dim corridor. She muttered under her breath as she watched him.
“Right…sure I know you.”
She ran into him again two nights later while she was working on a paper for her Medieval Literature class. She’d just finished her paper on the role of illuminations in devotional manuscripts when she saw him watching her from the archway by the coffee shop. She caught a glimpse of his pale face and was immediately thrown back to a memory from the summer she turned fifteen.
