: Chapter 9

The sound of Vincent’s voice makes my entire body clench.

We’re tucked in a somewhat secluded corner of the coffee shop, and the gentle indie music playing over the speakers is quiet, so Vincent doesn’t have to project all that much. He reads softly and deliberately. His voice is a low, rumbling, intimate thing. It reminds me that on the Friday night we met, when I was still thinking about a sex scene in The Mafia’s Princess and was struck dumb by the tall and brooding stranger who needed a reading recommendation, I briefly imagined Vincent reciting poetry to me. It seemed like a nice fantasy. Now I realize I was Icarus: an absolute fucking fool hauling ass toward the sun, completely unaware that the heights I sought would wreck me.

And oh, it’s wrecking me—the way his mouth forms the words. The way his wide palms and long fingers cradle the book. The way a stray piece of his dark hair drapes romantically over his forehead.

“Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

Vincent lifts his eyes expectantly. I try to reconcile myself to the fact that my insides have melted and my underwear is a little bit damp.

“Keep reading. I mean, in your head, if you—if you want, just to speed things up.”

Vincent, a man of no mercy, shrugs. “I don’t mind reading it out loud.”

I sit there, a trembling mess of caffeine and desire, as Vincent Knight reads the poem in its entirety. He trips over a few words and awkward, old-fashioned turns of phrase, but there’s something charming about it. Everyone else in this Starbucks probably thinks he’s as close to a deity as a college student can get, but I get to watch him smile in that slightly self-deprecating way when he slips up—and I get to listen to the confident cadence of his voice when he nails an entire stanza in two steady breaths.

I let my eyelids flutter closed, embracing my newest kink: being read to.

When Vincent reaches the last line, a part of me wants to tell him to read it again. He probably wouldn’t fight me on it—I’m the expert here, after all. Reluctantly, I peel open my eyes and meet Vincent’s. A moment passes in perfect silence. Then he looks back down at the page.

“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” he repeats from the second-to-last stanza. “So, he’s talking about God. He’s asking how God could make both of these animals.”

I clear my throat. “Exactly. You have to think about what Blake believed in, and what was going on around him with the industrial revolution. It was a lot to process. He’s asking himself how God could make something so innocent, so agricultural and romantic as the lamb, and also make a tiger—this beast from a faraway land that needs to kill the lamb to feed itself.”

Vincent stares at the page for a long moment, his dark eyes tracing laps over the lines.

“This is actually kind of fucking cool,” he says.

I hope he’s not being sarcastic. “You think?”

“Yeah. I finally get why you picked your major.”

“For all the high-paying job prospects, obviously.”

Vincent snorts. “You could definitely teach at the college level if you wanted to. You might be better at this than my tenured professor. I went to his office hours last week. Complete waste of time.”

“Let me guess,” I say. “Old white guy?”

“His name is Richard Wilson. Think he’s in his late sixties.”

“Knew it.” I lean back in my chair and fold one leg over the other. “I almost took a class with him my freshman year, but his Rate My Professor score was abysmal. Honestly, though, you could get the same interpretation I just gave you from a few Google searches. Like I said in the library . . .” My eyes skitter away from his. The next few words come out slightly choked. “The trick to most poetry is context. It’s like talking to a person. The more you know about where they’re coming from, the easier it is to understand them.”

Vincent leans back in his chair too and studies me for a moment.

“Have you always been a big reader?”

“Oh, yeah. I had sort of a rough start—I was diagnosed with dyslexia when I was in first grade—so it took me a little longer to learn than most of the kids in my class. But then I was insatiable. My parents used to take me to our public library twice a week because I kept blowing through the checkout limit every few days.”

“Damn.”

I feel my cheeks heat. Then, because I’m prone to oversharing, I say, “It’s easy to read that much when you’re a shy kid. I didn’t really have friends until the end of high school. And even then, it was mostly the people I sat next to in class. Books have always been a major part of my personal and social life.”

Vincent tilts his head. “Do you write at all?”

“I try to. I’m not as good at it as I’d like to be. But I’m taking a creative writing workshop this semester, so fingers crossed it helps. My professor is great. He’s written like twenty-five sci-fi novels, so he’s not super stuck-up about genre fiction, which I appreciate.”

It’s sometimes difficult to be a romance novel enthusiast in a sea of academia and internalized misogyny that suggests the genre is somehow less important and less worthy of praise than literary fiction.

Vincent nods. “Are most of the English professors at this school stuffy white guys like good old Richard, or do you have a good mix of women and nonwhite faculty? I don’t know much about Clement outside of my major.”

“There are a lot of younger women in the department, actually. And at least a third of the professors I’ve had are openly LGBTQ+.” Then, against my better judgment, I ask, “What is your major, anyway?”

“Human biology.”

I scrunch my nose. “Oh, yuck.”

“Told you. English was never my thing. I’m a STEM guy.”

“Wait a minute. I thought you hated memorization. Isn’t bio all about memorization?”

He shrugs. “It sticks better than poetry ever did. The material makes more sense to me—maybe because I’ve been playing basketball since I was seven or eight, so I’ve always thought a lot about our anatomy and the way our bodies work.”

I’m also thinking a lot about how our bodies work.

I shake my head. “You insufferable nerd.”

Vincent tosses his head back and lets out a surprised bark of laughter. The sound of it is glorious. “What? You don’t care about mitosis?”

“I’d rather take a class with Richard fucking Wilson.”

Vincent laughs again, and I’m so proud of myself for pulling the sound out of him that I have to press my lips together to hold back a self-satisfied smile. I shift in my seat, uncrossing and then angling my legs. Vincent’s gaze drops and lands on my bare thighs—the right one now sporting a big pink oval where it was sandwiched under the left—and his laughter dries up in his throat.

When his eyes meet mine again, there’s a curiosity burning in them that makes me feel like he can clear the distance I’ve tried to put between us.

“Maybe I can tutor you sometime,” he offers. “You know, in exchange.”

The heat in his eyes tells me that both our heads are in the gutter.

It’s both a thrilling realization—that maybe I’m not entirely alone in my thirst—and a terrifying one. Because I bet a more experienced girl would know what all the teasing smiles and innuendos meant. What if this is how Vincent is? What if he flirts with everyone (baristas, professors, classmates in his labs) and I’m just a girl who overthinks everything and has a bad case of main character syndrome?

The smile falls off my face. I tug at the hem of my shorts again and tuck my hair behind my ears. Vincent notices I’m pulling back. That little furrow between his eyebrows reappears.

“Are there any other poems you need to go over?” I ask. “I have a lot of reading to do before my class this afternoon, so if we’re done . . .”

Vincent’s eyes are heavy on me. The heat of his assessing stare makes me squirm, but then the seam of my denim shorts rubs the exact right spot and I’m reminded that I liked his little poetry reading a little bit too much.

“What?” I demand.

“Nothing.” Then, like it’s an afterthought: “You look good, Kendall.”

A startled laugh escapes me. “Oh, fuck off.”

“No, I mean it,” he says. “It’s nice to see you in broad daylight.”

I wish we weren’t in public. I wish I had the nerve to tell him, point-blank, that something about reading poetry with him makes me wet and wanting like a pent-up Regency woman.

Instead, I say, “Yeah.”

Yeah, it’s good to see you too. Yeah, I still think about you too. Yeah, I’ll let you bend me over this armchair and—

“You never answered my question, by the way,” Vincent says.

I frown. “Which one?”

He nods toward my backpack. “How’s the book?”