18 | For a Greater Delight

JEN'S MENTAL STATE had not been at its best lately. That wasn't to say that she was doing badly, and nothing could compare to how miserable she'd felt for months after the wreck, but there was no denying that she had been in a bit of a mental funk for the past few weeks.

She thought she ought to feel mortified for kissing a man at work – though it could hardly be considered a real kiss – but she didn't, and she saw this as evidence pointing towards how peculiar of a turn her life had taken since she started this job. Before this year, the oddest thing that had happened to her in the romance department was a man asking her if she'd like to come see his taxidermy collection (which, to be fair, was pretty odd).

No, she didn't regret kissing Robert, but what happened had certainly resurfaced a lot of complicated feelings. She couldn't stop thinking about her mother and how she had been wearing the same shoes once as Jen was now, having kissed a man and wanting to feel remorse but not being able to. It gave Jen this frustrating urge to go apologize for judging her so harshly, but you couldn't exactly walk up to someone and say sorry that you judged them for something they had no knowledge of themselves ever doing.

And even if Maggie had been able to extend grace to her daughter, Jen didn't feel like she deserved it. She couldn't tear herself away from the shadow that followed her – the memory that a tiny piece of her had been happy about the accident. At least she's in love with her husband again, she had thought once, satisfied that Mom could not remember Victor.

Now that Jen was older, she could understand her mother's side a little bit better. At least, she imagined she could, though she'd never be able to actually talk anything out with Mom herself if the memories of her affair never came back to her. In truth, some days Jen blamed Dad for it all more than she blamed Mom. She never would have run away to another pair of arms if he had been willing to set them all free from the cage that was Woods Crossing. Maggie and Jen were never happy there, but they'd always tolerated it because he refused to sell the hardware store and let their family move to the city.

Jen was reminded of one of those Bible verses they always told you to guilt-trip you into being a nicer person. He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. She felt like she'd been gripping at a stone for the past four years, longing to lash out and blame someone else for her pain. But it was getting harder and harder to point fingers at her mother for chasing after someone who made her happy when she herself felt like she wasn't all that different now.

Unfortunately, the neverending dilemma of not being able to talk to Mom about any of this remained. But Jen needed something to refresh her mind, so she decided to wander around Judson's on Saturday and see what stories she might find there.

The little secondhand bookshop on the street corner was not where one went when looking for something in particular, but rather where one looked for something to speak to them. The building had the appearance of being even older than the books inside of it – though there was truly no telling how old some of those were – but it did not need to be made new. It was not ramshackle or boring; it was loved by those who worked in it and those who visited it alike. Its most loyal employee was a small tabby cat (whose name Jen had learned was Reginald) who had been taken in years ago and loved to affectionately rub up against the legs of each visitor who stepped foot inside. The air perpetually smelled of crisp pages, and today the scent was accompanied by that of the dewy spring air that wafted through the door each time it was opened.

It was no wonder that there were many others besides Jen who enjoyed roaming through these aisles, but the shop was surprisingly empty for a weekend. She had no complaints about this—it meant that she could take as much time as she pleased to linger in front of each shelf without feeling like she was in someone else's way. She never constrained herself to just one section of the store – how would she ever discover something new if she refused to branch out from a singular genre? – and today she even allowed herself to roam past the shelves of children's books. It was hard not to feel at least a little bit lighter after looking at all their bright colors and silly illustrations.

Near the end of the last shelf was one of her childhood favorites, The Velveteen Rabbit. She smiled, recollecting the long summer days when she would sit on her grandmother's lap in the white, creaky rocking chair that lived on the front porch and listen to the endless stories that were read to her. She surprisingly found herself unable to walk away from it, and after a moment of consideration, she reached out and took the book from its spot on the shelf, wishing to more often be reminded of that childhood innocence and thinking in the back of her mind that it would be a good thing to hold onto if she ever had kids of her own one day.

She shouldn't have daydreamed about this hypothetical future, the sort where she was married to a man she loved and they built a family together. Because much like Nora had shown up at the department store right after Jen was thinking about her, a familiar black-haired boy now made an appearance.

His head was bent over a book, so he didn't see her, fortunately. She imagined he had that concentrated look in his eyes, though she couldn't see them well past his hair—it had grown out slightly since she met him, and she noticed now that the few untidy strands that hung down in his face were curling even more than usual in the springtime humidity. Outside of work, when he was under no obligation to maintain a professional demeanor, he looked more like the barely-out-of-college boy that he was and less like a man, but it didn't make her any less fond of him. It was easy to forget sometimes that they were both still trying to find their way in this world, not quite grown up.

She held back the sigh that wanted to puff out of her. It had only been a matter of time, she supposed, before she was bound to run into him in public again, and they'd even talked about Judson's that one day at Spill the Beans. She still had time to avoid him now, if she could just back away and slip down the next aisle–

She lost her footing and clumsily stumbled backward into a shelf, sending several books toppling to the floor with an embarrassing thunk. Jen felt warmth rush to her cheeks as she scrambled down to her knees to pick them up, but the good news was that there was only one person in the immediate vicinity to hear the commotion.

The bad news was that the one person was Robert.

She purposely kept her head low, trying to hide her face through her curtain of hair, but she wasn't dumb enough to think that she would actually succeed in concealing herself from him. She could sense him faltering, torn between wanting to help her and wanting to avoid any contact with her for as long as possible after how awkwardly their last encounter had ended.

She did not look at him or speak to him, but she could feel him – feel the slight catch in the rhythm of his breath when he knelt down across from her; feel the warmth of his slender, tanned hands close to her paler ones; feel him looking at her through long lashes. He was wearing a thin, blue sweater with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows, and she noticed for the first time that there was a very faint spattering of freckles on his forearms.

He tucked the books into the crook of his elbow and then held out his free hand. It took Jen a moment to remember that she was still clutching onto The Velveteen Rabbit and that he, believing that it was supposed to go back on the shelf, was motioning for her to hand it to him.

"Oh," she mumbled shyly. "No, I'm getting this one."

"Oh." He quickly pulled back his hand and softly cleared his throat.

Jen, scrambling for something to say besides thanks for the help, but please get away from me now, fixated on the book sitting on the floor next to him, which he must have picked out for himself. It was a copy of Madame Bovary. "Acquainting ourselves with the classics, are we?"

He too looked a little relieved that she had given them a polite segue. "I read it once before, but that was a while ago, and I don't think I appreciated it enough. I thought I might like to read it again."

She slowly rose to her feet. Her leg muscles, which had started to go numb from being crouched down, ached in protest. Robert followed suit, brushing some nonexistent dirt off of his shirt.

"I don't know if I could endure all of that drab about Charles a second time," she said, hoping her expression wasn't giving away that she apparently had the knee joints of an eighty-year-old. Charles, Emma Bovary's husband, was a character so boring that conversation with him was described as being "as flat as a sidewalk."

"But the prose is so good," Robert insisted, flipping to a random page and reading off of it to prove his point. Though Jen did not want to get into another The Sun Also Rises-esque debate, he had such a nice reading voice that she couldn't bring herself to interrupt him. "In the city, with the noise of the streets, the buzz of the theatres and the glimmer of the ball, they had existences where the heart swells and the senses blossom. As for her, her life was as cold as an attic with a skylight that faces north, and boredom, a silent spider, spun its web in the shadows that stretched to every corner of her heart." He closed the book. "See? How do you even come up with something like that?"

Jen did have to agree that Flaubert's writing was not nearly as dry as Hemingway's, and she supposed she couldn't complain too much about his characters when she herself could relate to Emma Bovary's dissatisfaction with her life. "Fine, I'll let you win this one."

His lips briefly formed a little grin upon hearing of his victory, but it faded as they both fell back to reality. They couldn't avoid their issues by means of literary discussion forever, and as silence lodged itself back in between them, Jen was re-reminded of how close they'd come on Monday to letting their secret get out. They would apparently wind up lip-locked if they let themselves get too close to each other for too long, and she couldn't let herself teeter too close to that edge again. If she fell, she wasn't sure how she would come back—the most dangerous kind of trouble was the enjoyable kind.

"I'm, ah– I'm supposed to be getting something for my friend," Jen fibbed, using the unconvincing excuse as a way to make an escape to the other side of the store. If she went straight to the register, it would be even more obvious that she was lying, so she'd have to wait it out in the corner for a few minutes.

She pretended to be very interested in a lone cookbook she found in the nonfiction section, her eyes occasionally darting up from the pages to see if she spotted Robert. Finally, after what was only a few minutes but felt like twenty, she saw him checking out at the register. A moment later, the jingling sound of the doorbell signaled that he had left.

Jen made a beeline for the checkout, which was currently being run by a girl who looked no older than eighteen. She wore round glasses and was lazily scratching behind Reginald's ears.

"Just this one," Jen said quietly, setting The Velveteen Rabbit down on the counter.

"Oh, that dude who just left paid for yours." When Jen frowned, the girl did, too. "I assumed you were, like, friends or something."

"We...I guess we are," Jen mumbled, grabbing the book back. "I, um– thanks."

The poor girl looked confounded as Jen, blushing, turned and bolted out of the store after Robert. She didn't know if she would even find him, or if she should find him, but she was feeling even more horrendously awkward now for how she'd snapped at him on Monday.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how she looked at it), he had stopped at a little coffee cart right down the block. She caught him just as he was tucking his wallet back into his pocket, and he – apparently not having noticed her – let out a surprised yelp as she grabbed his sweater sleeve and pulled him aside.

"You didn't need to do that," she said plainly. If this was some sort of pity party for her because he ruined her shirt or whatever, she didn't want it.

His eyes were wide and he nervously shoved his hands into his pockets, but he raised his eyebrows and tried to play nonchalant. "It was a dollar. It's not a big deal."

"Don't do that."

His eyebrows knitted in confusion. "Don't do what?"

"You know, this." She gestured vaguely at him and then crossed her arms. "You're nice behind my back, but then to my face, you act like you don't care about anything. It's annoying."

She seemed to have struck a nerve. He frustratedly ran a hand through his hair and let out a tiny, exasperated noise like he didn't know what to do with her. "I know I owe you apologies for a million different reasons, Jen, but whenever I open my mouth, I seem to make everything worse instead of better."

"Making things worse?" The corners of her mouth turned downwards, her flash of irritation with him ebbing away like the tide. "No, that's not it at all. You don't make things worse...I need to explain myself a little bit if you'll hear me out."

He nodded.

"I don't want you to think you...offended me," she said slowly. "It's not– it's not what I'm sure I made it look like. What happened the other afternoon reminded me of something that ended horribly, something that has nothing to do with you at all. That was why I got panicked all of a sudden. I could tell I startled you—that wasn't what I intended."

He had fallen silent, but it wasn't the worst kind of silence, and she was painfully aware of what gears must have been turning in his head; if she hadn't actually been rejecting his proposition on Monday, then...?

Her voice became much softer. "But if you really want...whatever this is, then please just wait for me. I'm not asking you for years, just weeks. I'm not going to be at St. Catherine's much longer and even if we rushed into something now–"

She could feel warmth spreading across her cheekbones like a fire. She didn't have the slightest clue how to talk about romance aside from what she'd read in books.

But she tried again. "I think you know that this is the right choice, too. On Monday, when you said...for a moment, I was happy, but I realized that you were asking way too little of me. You deserve so much better than someone who wants to keep you a secret."

Her heart was pounding with nervousness, but she lifted her chin slightly and met his eyes. If she had been hoping to find obvious warmth there, she was let down; they were as dark and unknowable as the edges of the galaxy.

"So I'll wait for you, if you'll w–"

In a blur of motion, Robert had closed the space between them and lifted his thumb to her lips, hushing her. "Don't finish that sentence," he murmured, and she tried not to shiver as his finger trailed along her lower lip.

She stubbornly swatted him away. "Why not?" she demanded, trying not to feel embarrassed about the fact that he quite possibly just rejected her.

"Because I know you," he insisted. "So I know that you're going to feel annoyed with yourself later for asking me this. You don't have to beg me to wait for you, Jen—I will."

A breath of relief escaped from her, and she suddenly found herself tugging him towards her by the fabric of his sweater so that she could wrap her arms around his torso. He gave a small laugh of surprise, but his arms lifted to hold her like she wanted him to. Oh, how she missed this. The soft cashmere of his shirt smelled of something pleasant – tea, maybe? – and she felt the same way she did the first time he hugged her, like she fit there in his arms so nicely.

Finally, all was well.

____________________

A/N:

:)

fun fact: that little Madame Bovary excerpt that he reads is actually a translation I did from the French for one of my college classes. thought I might as well get some use out of it lol

I hope you enjoyed this one!