We met in a second-hand bookstore on a Sunday when rain kept sensible people indoors. I was reaching for a worn copy of Neruda when his hand got there first. Instead of apologizing, he simply held it out to me, fingers brushing mine in the transfer.“Love poems?” he asked.
“Only the ones that leave bruises,” I replied.He smiled like I’d passed a test I didn’t know I was taking.We wandered separately for a while, pretending interest in different shelves, but always within peripheral vision. Every so often our eyes would meet across the aisles and hold just long enough to acknowledge the game. When I moved to poetry, he appeared at the end of the stack holding a volume of Anaïs Nin. He didn’t say anything; he simply opened it to a dog-eared page and tilted it so I could read the underlined sentence: “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”I took the book from him, let my thumb rest exactly where his had been, and underlined the next line with my nail: “I want to be undone by someone.”The shop owner was dozing behind the counter. Rain drummed steadily on the tin awning outside. We had the poetry section practically to ourselves.He leaned against the shelf opposite me, arms folded, watching as I flipped pages. I stopped at a poem that began, “I have been a thousand different women in the dark…” and read it aloud, barely above a whisper. When I reached the last line, I closed the book and pressed it to my chest like a secret I wasn’t ready to release.He stepped closer—not crowding, just near enough that I could see the faint freckles across the bridge of his nose I hadn’t noticed before. “There’s a café two doors down,” he said. “They serve coffee in mismatched cups and never rush anyone.”I understood it wasn’t about coffee.We spent three hours in that café, reading passages to each other under the table so no one else could hear, tracing footnotes with fingertips that occasionally wandered to wrists, to the inside of elbows, to the soft skin just beneath the jaw—never lingering, always retreating, like tides testing the shore.When we finally stood to leave, the rain had stopped. The sidewalks glistened. Neither of us suggested exchanging numbers. Some conversations are perfect because they end before they have to become ordinary.He walked me to my corner. At the curb he reached out and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear with the same care someone might use turning down a page they intend to return to.“Same time next Sunday?” he asked.
“Bring something dangerous,” I said.He smiled, and I felt it in places smiles aren’t supposed to reach.Some stories are written between the lines, in the white space where the real heat lives.