We finished our food. When he reached for my hand to lead me across the street and toward the dorms, I briefly wondered what it would be like to do what my dad had been encouraging me to do all year.
To date Xander.
He was cute and smart, and we were getting along great.
He was also a really good guy who wanted the same things out of life as I did. Which was so hard to find these days.
I hadn’t gone to college yet or anything, so I couldn’t really be sure what the dating pool was like there. But there weren’t a ton of guys in The Fold in New York or Connecticut. Most members of The Fold were concentrated in Pennsylvania where it had been originally founded.
But I was starting to think that if I couldn’t have Hunter, Xander wouldn’t be too bad of a second choice.
Xander showed me around the common areas in his dorm. And because I told him I’d most likely be getting a single room since I didn’t want to run into the same issues I’d had my freshman year of high school, he took me up to the third floor to get a tour of his room.
When I walked inside, I could see why he had been okay staying here instead of getting an apartment on campus. His room was huge.
“Are all the rooms this big?” I asked as I looked around the open-room plan. He had a big living area with a couch and a loveseat. Along with a full kitchen.
This was nothing like the dorms they showed on all the college movies I’d seen.
Xander chuckled and tossed his wallet and keys on the counter. “My dad had this room renovated just a little when I moved in.” When I stared at him with my mouth hanging open, he added. “This is one of my dad’s buildings.”
“Oh.” I nodded slowly, looking around the room again and seeing it more clearly. “So this isn’t actually what my room would look like if I moved in?”
“It would be about half this size,” he said. “This used to be two rooms before I moved in.”
“Well, it’s nice.” My gaze went to the tall bookshelves on the far wall. He had so many books in here. And I was immediately curious about what types of books Xander read in his free time.
Did he read a lot of classics? Or nonfiction? The books all looked old, so I couldn’t imagine they were any of the recent bestsellers.
“Do you read much?” He took a seat on the arm of his couch as he watched me look over his book collection.
“A little,” I said. “It’s mostly for school right now. But in the summer, I read a lot more fiction.”
I ran my fingers along the spines, seeing many of the classics.
“Are these first editions?” They all looked so old and in various levels of condition.
“A lot of them are.” He cleared his throat. “I started collecting them in high school, but it’s kind of gotten out of control since then.”
“It’s really cool.”
Hunter would love to have a library like this.
He loved browsing the rare book collections in the libraries of New York and had talked about needing a library as big as the Hastings’s to hold all the books he’d have when he was older.
A library that I’d imagined sharing with him someday.
I pushed the thought away. I didn’t need to think about things that made me sad right now.
I finished scanning the row I’d started on before looking at the books on the next shelf over. That was when I saw a book with a faded maroon spine that actually looked kind of familiar—like I’d seen it in a museum somewhere or something.
I turned the familiar-looking book over in my hands. When I opened it up, instead of printed typography inside, the contents were actually written in old-fashioned cursive.
“Is this someone’s journal?” I looked back to Xander who was watching me with interest.
“It is.” He stood from the armrest and walked closer to me. Then taking the book into his hands, he opened it to the very first page. “It’s actually one of Samuel Williams’ journals.”
“What?” I gasped, not sure I’d heard him right.
