Ink & Obsession

SOME STORIES YOU DON'T WRITE. YOU LET THEM HAPPEN TO YOU.

Ink. Silk. Silence.

Mr. Abernathy died on the second Tuesday in June, between the poetry shelf and the register, with a first edition of Rebecca open in his lap. He left me the Bookshop on Maple Lane in one line of his own crabbed hand.

To Kinsley Quinn, who knows what it's for.

He also left me a second mortgage, two liens, and eighteen months of property tax he'd paid with promises.

So I teach sophomores until three-fifteen, open the shop at four, close it at nine, and sell eleven books on a good day. The manuscript in my desk drawer at home, two hundred and twelve pages of a girl and a lighthouse and a secret under the floorboards, hasn't moved since the funeral.

I can still write. I just can't write that.

The app finds me at two in the morning. Third glass of wine, the shop's ledger open on the couch beside me like a body I can't bury, and then an ad on my phone. Black screen. Thin gold letters.

NOCTURNE. Tell us what you want. Not who you are.

The rules fit on one screen. No names. No faces. No photos, ever. You write a fantasy and post it without your name. If someone wants to make it real, they answer, and you decide whether to let them. Masks at every meeting. A safe word before the first night. Break a rule and the app erases you like you never existed.

I open a blank page and do the only thing I've been able to do since June.

I write.

He comes after closing.

The shop is dark except for the lamp over the poetry shelf. The door is unlocked. I don't turn around when the bell rings.

He doesn't speak. Not my name. Not his. Not one word.

He doesn't ask. He doesn't have to. I said yes when I unlocked the door.

He takes me against the shelves, between the books I've loved since I was six years old, and when it's over, he leaves the way he came, and I never see his face.

I don't want to know who he is.

I want to know what it feels like to stop being careful.

I post it before I can read it back.

He answers on the third night.

No profile. Nocturne doesn't allow them. A black square where a face should be, and one line.

Friday. Ten o'clock. Leave the door unlocked.

Under it, the question the app won't let you skip.

Your safe word?

I type the only word that belongs to the shop.

Rebecca.

The reply comes in under a minute.

Then say it, and I stop. Say nothing, and I don't.

I read it on the couch with the wine glass forgotten on the floor and my thighs pressed together so hard it aches. Seven months of grief, ledgers, and condolence casseroles, and a black square on a screen just did more for me with eleven words than any man in Maplewood has managed in years.

I confirm.

Friday, I close at nine like always.

I count the drawer. Sixty-three dollars. I sweep. I turn off every lamp except the brass one over the poetry shelf, the one that leans like an old man reading over your shoulder. From his velvet cushion, Hemingway watches me with an expression of profound moral disapproval.

"Don't look at me like that," I tell him.

He does anyway.

In the little bathroom behind the stockroom, I take off my bra and drop it in my bag. I look at the woman in the mirror: gray pencil skirt, cream blouse, hair pinned up the way I wear it to teach. I undo the top button. Then the second. Then the third.

At nine fifty-eight, I unlock the front door.

I don't wait by it. I wrote that I wouldn't turn around, so I go to the poetry aisle and stand with my back to the room and run one finger down the spines. Mary Oliver. Neruda. Plath. My pulse is beating in my wrists, my throat, between my legs.

At ten o'clock exactly, the bell rings.

Not the bright, foolish chime it's made since Eisenhower. Low. Muffled. A hand has closed around it on the way in.

Then a second sound. The deadbolt, turning.

He's locked us in.

Footsteps. Unhurried. Heavy enough that he has to be big, quiet enough that he's choosing every sound he makes. Down the main aisle. Past the register. Past the green armchair.

He stops behind me.

He doesn't touch me. Cold air rolls off his coat, and heat rolls off the body under it, and between the two is a smell I'll know for the rest of my life. Cedar. Smoke caught in wool.

A gloved hand comes past my shoulder and settles flat on the shelf beside my head. Black leather. Big. The other lands on my other side. I'm caged in two hundred years of literature and a stranger's arms, and I have never in my life felt so free.

I turn my head an inch.

A black mask, close-fitting, matte as a shadow, covering him from brow to cheekbone. Below it, a hard mouth and a jaw dark with stubble. Above it, nothing but the shine of his eyes in the lamplight.

He tips his head. Well?

Seven letters sit ready on my tongue.

I reach back, find his wrist, and pull his hand off the shelf and onto my hip.

That's my answer.

His mouth finds the back of my neck, right below the pins, open and slow and hot, and the sound that comes out of me belongs to a woman I've never met. The leather on my hip tightens. He turns me around and puts my back against the poetry.

He doesn't kiss my mouth. He takes the pins out of my hair instead, one at a time, and lets each one fall to the floor between us. Tink. Tink. Tink. I count them. I lose count. My hair comes down around my shoulders, and he winds his fist in it, not hard, just enough to tip my face up into the light so he can look at me.

He looks for a long time.

Then he pulls off one glove with his teeth.

His bare hand is warm and rough at the fingertips. It slides inside the open collar of my blouse and finds out what I left in my bag, and a low sound rumbles out of his chest. Not a word. Pure approval. It goes through me like a struck bell.

He unbuttons the rest of my blouse one button at a time, in no hurry at all.

I'm the one in a hurry. I grab his collar to drag him down to me, and he catches my wrist and pins it to the shelf above my head, and slows down even more. Just to show me he can.

Mary Oliver tumbles off the shelf. Neither of us looks.

He pushes the blouse off my shoulders and leaves it hanging at my elbows, trapping my arms just enough. Then he lowers his head and takes his time. His mouth on my throat. The hollow of my collarbone. My breast, hot and wet, his stubble rasping my skin, until I'm arching off the shelf into him with the spines of a dozen poets digging into my back, and I don't care.

His bare hand finds the hem of my skirt.

He drags it up my thigh inch by inch, gray wool bunching over his wrist, and stops. Waits. Lets me feel exactly how close he is.

I push my hips into his hand.

He gives me one light stroke over the lace, and I nearly come apart right there. Then he pulls the lace aside and slides two fingers into me, slow, all the way, and holds them there while I gasp against his shoulder. When he curls them, the whole world narrows to a single point of heat.

He works me with the patience of a man who has all night. Every time I chase it, he slows. Every time I sag against the shelf, he gives me more. His thumb finds the spot that buckles my knees and stays there, and the gloved hand spread across the small of my back is the only thing keeping me on my feet.

I come with my face buried in his coat, cedar and smoke in my mouth, shaking so hard the shelf rattles.

He doesn't stop. He doesn't even slow down.

I wrote he takes me against the shelves. I didn't write the scrape of his stubble along my jaw, or the cold leather against my spine, or my own voice coming apart in the dark of my own shop, saying please, saying yes, saying things I've never said out loud to anyone.

Then I hear his belt.

He lifts me like I weigh nothing. My legs lock around his hips, and the whole case groans. A paperback slides loose and hits the floor. He holds me there, pinned between his body and the poetry, and lowers me onto him so slowly I feel every inch.

The breath goes out of both of us at once.

Then he moves. Long, deep, deliberate strokes that drive me up the shelf and drag me back down, his gloved hand braced on the wood above my head, his bare one gripping my thigh hard enough to leave marks. Tomorrow I'll find them and press my thumb into them, just to feel this again.

The front windows face Maple Lane. When I get loud, he covers my mouth with his bare hand.

I bite his palm.

His breath breaks against my ear, hot and ragged. The closest thing to a laugh he'll give me. Then he stops being slow.

Hard and fast now, the case knocking against the wall, books raining down around us, his mouth open against my neck and his rhythm going rough and real. I feel him lose control. I feel it in the way his fingers dig in and his breath stutters, and knowing I did that to him, a man with no name and no face, tips me over a second time.

He follows me over the edge with his face buried in my neck and his whole body shuddering against mine.

For a while there's no shop, no ledger, no funeral, no Kinsley. Just the dark and the shelves and him.

He sets me down slowly. Holds me by the waist until my legs remember how to work. Then he straightens my skirt, picks Mary Oliver up off the floor, and slides her back into her place on the shelf, spine out, flush with the others.

He pulls his glove back on with his teeth.

Two leather fingers under my jaw tip my face up. One long look, his mask to my naked face.

Then he's gone. The bell gives one low note behind him.

I slide down the shelf until I'm sitting on the floor of the poetry aisle with my blouse open and my hair down and twelve bobby pins scattered around me like I've been shot full of them. On the top shelf, Hemingway stares at me with his tail wrapped around his feet.

"Not a word," I tell him.

I'm grinning like an idiot. I can't stop.

My phone buzzes on the counter.

Nocturne: You have one new message.

It's from the black square. One word.

Next.

Not goodbye. Not thank you. A promise.

I spend the weekend finding bobby pins in strange places and wondering what I'll write for him next.

Then the letter comes Monday morning.

I find it in the shop's mail slot, cream envelope, heavier than the rest. I open it with Mr. Abernathy's brass letter opener and read it standing at the counter where, three nights ago, I couldn't stand at all.

NOTICE OF ASSIGNMENT.

The second mortgage. Both liens. The back taxes. Every note against this building, bought up over the summer by a single holder.

H. P. Holdings, LLC.

Balance due in full within thirty (30) days, failing which the holder will take possession of the property.

A representative of the holder will call upon you in person this week.

I read it until the words stop meaning anything.

Thirty days to save the only thing anyone's ever left me.

And a man with no face who knows exactly where to find me inside it.