Page 14 of Play With Me
London Nora takes risks, remember?
“Okay. I’ll come to the party for a few minutes. But no matchmaking!”
Sasha squeals, then throws her arms around me. “Thank you, thank you, thank you! Also, I didn’t really hear that last part.”
I gasp.
“But don’t worry, he’ll be absolutely drawn to you without interference from me. You’re just his type.”
My stomach turns, though I smile, if only because she’s happy.
But what about me and my type? Is he tall and blond and silly and fun?
After firming up details, Sasha walks backward, blowing me kisses.
“Watch the water!” I call after her.
Sasha laughs, then backs smack into the stodgy librarian, who lets out a whoosh of astonished breath.
“Young lady!” he exclaims.
“Don’t worry,” Sasha says in her sweetest voice. “I’m the problem, and I’m leaving.”
The librarian scrunches up his nose, but finally stands aside with a warning look at me as Sasha disappears around the corner.
I smile as I take a moment to stretch my legs. But instead of heading back to the desk, I stand there a moment, realizing I’m next to the tiny section of “juvenile texts.”
The closest thing this library has to a children’s section.
“You’re really moving away?” Cap had managed to squeak out the last day I saw him in person. We were in Jude’s car, on our way to the airport after Jude told me he’d sent my taxi away.
I’d reached back with my throat thick with tears and held his hand. “It’s not forever,” I promised. “Just two years.”
Of course, there was the possibility of a post-doc certificate, and work in London too. But I didn’t need to tack anything onto two years. To a six-year-old, two years was an eternity.
This is what you want. You need to spread your wings.
With the sound of planes roaring and airport announcements echoing in the icy wind around us and Cap rolling my suitcase back and forth up the sidewalk, Jude had turned to me, his expression serious. I thought he was going to talk about the kiss. That it was an accident. Or it was no big deal, and he didn’t care.
But he just shoved his hands in the pockets of his coat and said, “Are you sure this is what you want to do? This archival thing?”
I’d blinked. “Of course, it’s what I want.” It was. It was perfect for me, and it meshed my hobby of documenting things on film with my librarian skills.
More importantly, it was a nice surgical removal of me from their lives.
Then I realized what he was really asking me. If leaving him was what I wanted.
To that question, I didn’t have an answer. So as usual, I said nothing, just fiddled with my camera, which I hadn’t turned on at all. I didn’t want to preserve the pain of that day.
Jude had studied me for a moment, then pressed his lips together. “Okay.”
Normally, I’d have told him thatokaydidn’t sound okay. I would have poked at him, demanding he tell me what he was really thinking.
But I knew what he was thinking. He knew my story, how I set my expectations low, and ducked and covered when things got hard. He was shocked to see me sticking my neck out and doing something risky.
“You’ll thank me once I’m an archivist,” I’d said, as if that was really the question at hand. “I’ll be way better equipped to actually solve this hotel ghost mystery.”
The ghost story—less so a story of haunting than a cold case over a hundred years old—was what had brought us together.
