Page 43 of Must Love Libraries and Libations
Moving quietly, I made my way into the library to discover it was very, very late. The clock in the central part of the library showed it was just before six o’clock in the morning. The sun had not yet risen, but the sky had turned gray in the hours before dawn. A whole day had passed.
The bookwyrms barked loudly.
“I am sorry, friends,” I told them. “You missed your meal, thanks to the witch’s meddling. I will see to you directly,” I told them.
Behind me, I heard a soft gasp.
I turned to find Primrose there, her eyes on the Wyrmwood tree. In those hazel depths, I could see the reflection of the ruby-red blossoms.
“It’s so beautiful,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.
So are you.
“Wait… Is it night?” she asked me, her face screwing up with worry.
“Nearly dawn. We’ve lost a whole day.”
“A whole day! But the party and… Oh. My. Gods. My mother. My mother will be beside herself,” she said, then inhaled and exhaled deeply, calming herself once more. “She can wait,” she muttered, then turned and stepped toward me. “Erasmus, what happened between us was?—”
“A mistake,” I blurted out, not knowing where the words were coming from.
“What?” she asked, so startled, it was as if I had struck her.
“We were under the influence of the spell…and the wine. The witch tricked us. We weren’t thinking clearly.”
“Are you saying I wasn’t thinking clearly?” Her tone had gone dangerously quiet.
“I’m saying we both might have acted on impulses we wouldn’t normally have.”
She smoothed down her skirts with sharp, angry movements. “Right. Of course. Because why would someone like you want someone like me? Too loud, right? Not intellectual enough? Not serious enough? All sparkle and no substance?”
“That’s not what I meant, I?—”
“Isn’t it?” she seethed. The hurt in her hazel eyes was like a dagger to my chest. “You told me you were falling for me, Erasmus. Was that just the wine talking, too?”
I wanted to tell her no. I wanted to tell her that every word had been true, that I’d never felt anything like what I felt for her. Instead, I said, “We should probably forget it happened.”
The words tasted like ash in my mouth, but they came out anyway. Better to hurt her now than to let her waste time on someone who could never give her what she deserved. She deserved a life full of light and joy, sunshine and happiness. I was…well, that was not me.
“Forget it happened,” she repeated, her voice flat. “Right. Okay, consider it forgotten, but for what it’s worth, Erasmus, I meant what I said. All of it. But you’re clearly not ready to be part of the present, so I’ll leave you to your past. After the party, I won’t come back here ever again,” she said, her voice cracking with emotion. Turning, she stormed off.
I heard the front door of the library open and close behind her with a soft click that was somehow louder than a slam. She would never slam a door. That wasn’t her way. As mad as she might have been at me, she wouldn’t have dared disrupt the bookwyrms or the library itself.
I sighed heavily.
But the moment was shaken when a book hit me on the side of the head.
“What the?” I asked, looking around and finding a red-scaled bookwyrm glowering at me from atop a nearby bookcase, tapping another book in his hand as he threatened to take aim.
“I know, I know,” I told Stevenson, rubbing my head. “You don’t have to lob the next volume. I’m fully aware that I’m ruining the best thing that has happened to me. But it’s not about me, it’s about her. She deserves better than me. I am little more than a relic.”
Stevenson squinted at me.
“I know,” I told him.
He huffed out a small puff of disappointed smoke, then fluttered up to join the others in the Wyrmwood tree.
I sat down on the couch and stared at the tree, trying not to think about how right she’d felt in my arms, how her laugh made something in my chest come to life, expanding in a way I’d never felt before. She had looked at me like I wasn’t an artifact, but simply a man worth caring about.
