Page 71 of Bookworm
“Or… just stay with me. Use my apartment as a sort of home base you come back to between jobs.” His smile twitched higher. “Any of the above. Speaking of, do you have another job lined up?”
It was such a simple question. And yet, I could see the corded muscles of Adam’s throat go tight as he asked the question.
“I have a call scheduled with the head of the classics department at Brown tomorrow morning.”
“Brown,” Adam repeated. “Rhode Island.”
“There’s no guarantee I’ll even get the job!” I hurried to add.
Adam smiled, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Oh, you’ll get it,” he said with a wink at me. Then, standing, he peeked into the oven to check the casserole despite the fact that he’d only just put it in a few minutes ago.
“You’re… you’re not mad?”
“Mad?” His brows furrowed as he swiveled to look at me. “I can’t be mad at you for pursuing your career. Not anymore than you could be mad at me for not hitting the road with you and traveling.”
It hadn’t even occurred to me that Adam might want to join me on these trips. “Would you want to join me?” I asked. “When I go to the different universities?”
Adam gave me a sad smile. “For a weekend here or there, yeah. But, I teach here year round. I don’t think I could spare a lot of time.”
Tears pricked at the edges of my eyes, burning, but I refused to let them fall yet. “So we’re just destined to live apart,” I whispered. “Even if I moved in with you, there’s just not enough business here in the Northeast for me to be able to stay here as a book restorer.” Unless I took a job as a librarian. Which was an amazing career… it just wasn’t what I wanted to do.
Not right now at least.
I clamped my eyes shut, willing the tears to stay away.
“Hey.” I felt Adam’s arms fold around me and then the press of my cheek against the slab of hard muscles of his chest. “We have time to figure it out,” he said. “And Brown is only three hours from here. We can make that work…”
…For a little longer. Those were the words he didn’t finish his sentence with.
We could make it a little longer.
But not forever.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Ms. Meyer, you have an incredible eye for spotting these books,” Professor Emily Wilson, the head of the department at Brown says to me over our zoom meeting. “I have to admit, I wish your email about the peacock edition ofPride and Prejudicehadn’t gone into my spam folder last month. I’m jealous O’Macklin gets that one.”
I give her a warm smile. “I promise if I ever come across another, you’re my first call.”
I tug my sweater tighter around my torso and shift my weight in the wicker chair that’s outside a coffee shop. I didn’t have a ton of options for this zoom call since I didn’t have an official office. And a zoom call in the library would have been an uprising of epic proportions that would have rivaled even the Storm Troopers.
So I figured sitting outside at a cafe was a decent solution.
And no one else was crazy enough to sit outside in 55 degree weather, so the call wasn’t bothering anyone. But just in case, I’d put my headphones on.
Professor Wilson smiled into the camera at me. “I think I can convince the board to buy the Poe works to add to our campus,but I have to admit, I’m interested inCharlie and the Chocolate Factoryfor my own personal collection!”
“Oh, I know,” I said. “The gospel according to Roald, am I right?”
“Amen,” she snickered. “Well, look. I have to run these numbers by my board first, but I feel pretty confident we can come to some sort of agreement. Do you think you could get here by the first of the month?”
The first of the month only left me a couple weeks here in New Hampshire. I’d finished restoring all the books at Dartmouth a few days ago, so I’d been moving what little I had into Adam’s apartment for the time being, freeing up the Dartmouth campus housing for whomever was next.
It’d been a surprisingly natural transition moving in with Adam, even if it was only for a short period. Still, I expected it to be more of a challenge. But his apartment was bigger than mine with a lovely little balcony and two bedrooms.
Even Jules seemed to be thriving, sharing her space with Verne. The two kept each other company while Adam and I worked.
“Yes,” I said. “I think that can be arranged,” I said, even though my heart sank at the thought of leaving.
