Page 25 of Crow

If you can trust anyone, it’s me.

Tarynn peeks her head in the doorway right as I’m finishing up, looking like a kid on Christmas morning, eyes wide and sparkly. “You have Dickens.”

“Yes.”

“Can I read to you? While you fall asleep?”

She’s not taking no for an answer. Not when she skips away and plucks the red leather volume off the shelf, not when she curls up in the reclining chair and pulls the lever so forcefully, she almost flips over backwards. Not when she opens the book and stares me down expectantly.

I’m practically dead on my feet. I feel like shit. My head is throbbing, my stomach could still rebel. I’m clammy, sweaty, and need a shower. My face is a wreck, my hand is now a mess, and all I want to do is climb into bed and sleep for a few hours until I wake up and feel like a regular person again.

Hilarious.

Fine. About as regular as someone like me can be.

“Five minutes,” I mumble, throwing myself down on the bed and flopping my bandaged hand over my eyes. “That’s it, then we’re going.”

“Five minutes with Dickens is better than five minutes without.”

Well… shit. That might be the truest thing I’ve ever heard.

It’s an instant relief to close my grainy eyes. My body presses into the bed like a jet just dropped out of the sky and landed on top of me while I already had the world’s worst case of food poisoning.

So dramatic, baby doll.

Tarynn’s voice drowns out Raven eventually, or he just shuts up to listen too. We both happen to like Dickens.

I can’t help but get lost in it, lost in all of it. I try counting the minutes until I have to get up, but all that does is let the black suck harder at me until I can’t count any longer and Tarynn’s voice fades away.

Chapter 8

Tarynn

Iread from the book for a long while after I know Crow is asleep. It’s the kind of deep, dead to the world rest that can’t be faked.

Eventually I stop, closing the book and giving the room a slow perusal. I’m tired after not sleeping all night, and the chair is extra comfortable, but with everything that happened this morning, my adrenaline is still pumping far too hard for me to even think about drifting off.

Every single inch of space that can fit a bookshelf, has one. I think that a library is defined as a collection of a thousand or more books. If that’s true, then Crow basically lives in one.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find that ridiculously attractive.

I could try to sleep, but the room is too enticing. I have to get up, all those books calling out to me. My heart beats like a hammer with excitement. This is almost as good as walking into a used bookstore. They’re my absolute favorite, followed closely by any, and all other bookstores.

Each book has been sorted into sections by genre and then by author. The regimented organization tells me a lot about Crow. I wouldn’t have pegged him for someone that likes to read, but then, he’s quiet and solitary, so why not?

There are so many things I don’t know about him, primarily why he decided to help me. He’s one of thoseperpetually hard to read people who probably has so much going on in their head that it makes them ultra quiet.

I bet that he’s wicked smart, with a well above average IQ. Does he have a photographic memory? Most of the books here aren’t fiction unless they’re classics. Does he remember each and every detail about every book he’s read, or does he read more for the overall feeling? Does he feel that he needs to escape? It seems like he’s already living a life most people could only wish for, even if it is outside the law.

Bikers espouse a certain brand of freedom. I think that it’s part of the whole bad boy allure. Not that I’m falling into that or anything. Crow could have been anyone, and I would have been intrigued.

But he’s not just anyone.

No. No, he’s certainly not.

There are tons of books on psychology, but just as many on anatomy, biology, zoology, chemistry, and physics. I’m not entirely surprised to find a section on religion and philosophy. Two entire bookcases are dedicated to art theory and artists, another on history from just about every different period of the world from the dawn of time until the present day.

I have to say that my favorite bookcase is the one that is bursting full of classics. It’s clearly the fiction bookcase. There are authors that I’ve tried, but quit after deciding that getting a hundred pages in and not understanding a thing that was going on, just wasn’t for me.

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