He leans closer to me too, like his body wants to give in to the same subliminal pull as mine. “I promise it’ll be worth it.” He inclines his head toward the rear of the bookstore, where rows of folding chairs surround a tiny wooden stage. “Come on, I saved us some seats.”
My booties click on the polished wood floor as I follow him toward the seating area, where his hunter green jacket drapes across two chairs to reserve them. We take our seats as the crowd fills in around us, and this tiny space—his leg and shoulder brushing against mine—feels like a bubble in the middle of the chaos.
It’s actually weird to sit next to Locke instead of face him. It’s the tiniest shift in position from our normal workday spots, but it feels a million degrees different. More intimate, somehow.
I study the name on the podium at the front of the sea of chairs. “Have you read Orion Crux before?” I ask.
Locke licks his lips and nods. I should drag my eyes back up to his, but I keep staring at his mouth—the kissable curve of it, the way his lips pull back to reveal straight, white teeth, and how his smile presses dimples into his cheeks. “He’s one of my favorite poets.”
Poetry—oh.
I’d expected fiction, but somehow I’m not surprised. Locke’s always struck me as the type of person who feels deeply, who’s not afraid of his sensitivity. One morning this summer he came into the office, his face damp with tears after listening to a podcast where a widower told a story about his late wife.
“You’re brave, showing emotion like that,” I’d whispered into the dark morning.
“Empathy makes you a better writer.”
“And a better human.”
He’d let out a surprised laugh like he’d never even considered how good he was. “Yeah, I guess, and that.”
Now Locke gestures at the stage. “He writes anonymously,” Locke says. “Orion Crux is a pseudonym, but he mostly just goes by Orion. He actually started as an Instagram poet, and he’s up around a million or so followers right now.”
“Damn,” I whistle. The only thing I have a million of is dust bunnies.
“Yeah. But the whole deal is he thinks being anonymous helps readers connect more personally to his work, so when he does book tours, he tries to stay as low-key as possible. He’ll probably show up tonight in a mask.”
I laugh. “A mask? Like Zorro?”
Locke grins. “Guess we’ll have to see.”
I nod and break the trance to glance out over the crowd. All around us, books reach toward the high, lofted ceilings and fill the air with the scent of paper and dreams.
Bookstores, god. They just do something beautiful to my heart. Like I’m surrounded by thousands of friends, like possibility and hope brim within every uncreased spine.
I catch Locke staring at me out of the corner of my eye, and I spin to face him. “What?”
“You just look…” He swallows hard, and his eyes search out mine. “Happy.”
I am happy. More than happy. I hold the knowledge of it in my chest, where it blooms into something dangerously close to love.
“I am,” I whisper. “Bookstores are my favorite place in the world. They just have everything you could ever need, you know?”
He smiles. “I know. It’s like, when you die, you don’t take any of this with you.” He waves around the room, and I understand this to mean things, stuff. “But stories live with you forever.”
Yes.
God, yes.
My heart physically aches—hurts so damn much I have to press a hand to my chest and suck in a deep breath. And I want to tell him, Don’t do this. Don’t let me fall in love with you. Because giving me a book is like giving me a piece of your heart, and if I like it, I will fall in love with you.
I lift my glasses to wipe a tear from the corner of my eye—why the hell am I crying?—and Locke gives me a second to compose myself, not hurrying me, just letting the emotions come.
“You ever have a book that’s so good you don’t want to read the last page because you don’t want it to end?” Locke asks.
His question does the trick, shimmying me back into my skin, where I blink at him, incredulous. “Are you kidding me? I need to know how things are going to turn out.”
He grins. “Want to know a secret?”
“Yes.” Obviously. All of them.
“In Orion’s last two books, I never read the last poems. For me, the books are perfectly incomplete.”
“Perfectly incomplete,” I murmur.
“Whole, but not whole.”
And maybe because it’s not fiction, I sort of understand. “Okay,” I tell him. “I still think you’re a freak. But I get you.”
His eyes crinkle at the edges. “I know.”
A hush falls over the crowd, then, and a man in a masquerade mask decorated with constellations takes the stage. The mask covers his eyes and nose, and a swirl of stars trails over its surface down to his exposed mouth.
“Thank you so much for coming out tonight for the release of The Feeling of Falling, a book of poems. I’ll read a selection for you, and then we’ll do a quick Q and A before the signing.”
He opens his copy to a dog-eared page and begins to read in a lovely, rumbling voice that feels like sunlight on a field of flowing grass and water trickling over rocks. And as Orion reads, I listen and try to find Locke in the words.
But they’re not just poems. They’re love poems.
“I think about you
more than I should
and less than I want.”
More than once as Orion reads, I look over at Locke and see the sheen of tears in his eyes. More than once when I look over, he looks back and seems to say something important to me without saying a word.
After Orion finishes reading, Locke and I wait in line to get copies of the
