Page 32 of Love and Other Paradoxes

“I’ve been trying,” he protested. “But—I think the problem is, I have tomakeit happen. I just don’t know how.”

She exhaled, her shoulders dropping. He sat down on the steps. After a minute, she sat down beside him. “Here’s a crazy suggestion. Have you tried asking her out?”

When she put it that way, it sounded simple. “No.”

She patted him lightly on the back. “Then maybe start with that.”

“‘If this is love,’” said Diana.

She stood by the window that looked onto the court, a ray of pale sun turning her collarbones to sensual art. “‘Then douse me in it. Set me aflame, set me...’” Midflow, she cut herself off. Her posture changed entirely, as though she were shifting selves. It was a compelling illustration of her craft, and, he had to admit, very sexy. “Douse,” she said thoughtfully.

He coughed, trying to focus. “Uh. Yeah.”

“In what sense?”

“I, uh—” He had forgotten whatdousemeant, and indeed the meaning of all words. “What sense were you thinking?”

“Extinguish. As in dousing a candle.” Her elegant fingers made a snuffing gesture. “So the poet is annihilated by love. Destroyed by it.”

He nodded sagely. “Makes sense.” When she rolled her eyes, he protested, “Look. What I intended when I wrote it—that’s not the point.”

“Death of the author is very passé, Joseph.”

“I look forward to my immortality.”

She smiled a small, reluctant smile. “Be serious.”

He tried. He was surprised to find he disagreed with her. “I don’t think I meantextinguish. I think I meant more like, uh, drench. So the poet is...” He tailed off, gesturing vaguely. He couldn’t say it better than the poem already had.

“Soused in love,” she filled in, her voice low. “Soaked to the skin.”

Their eyes met.And this was the moment, said the narrator in his brain,that Diana Dartnell looked into Joseph Greene’s eyes and knew—

She dropped her head, with a soft exhalation that might have been a laugh. “I looked him up, you know. McGonagall.”

She remembered his Halloween costume. He didn’t know whether to be flattered or horrified. “So you have a new favourite poet?”

She ignored his attempt at a joke. “Interesting that you chose to dress up as a man universally acknowledged to be the worst poet of all time. Very psychologically revealing.” She fixed him with sharp attention. “Laughing at your own ambition before anyone else can. A classic defensive tactic.”

He felt like she was running her nails lightly over his soul. He desperately needed to deflect. “So why were you dressed as an angel?”

“We dress up as what we aren’t.” A smile played around her mouth. “That’s the point, isn’t it?”

He felt the jab at his hypocrisy. “Or, it’s a double bluff. You dress as what you really are, under all the pretence.”

She threw her head back in a delighted laugh. “If you think I’m an angel, you obviously don’t know me very well.”

The line came to him easily, like he’d always been meant to say it. “I’d like to know you better.”

She raised an eyebrow. He caught the invitation to back off, to turn it into a joke, but he refused. He held her gaze until it was unambiguous what he meant.

She shook her head with a slight smile. “Joseph, I have a boyfriend.”

The name came out by reflex. “Crispin?”

Her eyes widened with the ghost of an expression he hadn’t seen since that first disastrous night. “How do you know that?”

Fuck.He flailed for an explanation that didn’t involve him having read her future history. If they had been at the same college, or had any friends in common, it would have been easy, but what he’d told Esi was true: they existed in non-overlapping worlds.What about the poetry thing?At least once, those worlds had collided. He seized on it. “Someone at the ADC mentioned him.”

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