Page 126 of The Librarians
“You were at all the JV basketball games last year,” said Ryan, peeling open his own clementine.
A sharp, citrusy tang filled the air. Jonathan breathed in deeply. “Yeah,” he mumbled again.
“Are you coming to the varsity games this year?”
“I don’t know.”
But of course he’d be there. To watch Ryan.
Ryan’s dad arrived then to pick up Ryan. Ryan lifted his chin in Jonathan’s direction, a gesture of goodbye, then he was gone. Later Jonathan found out that Ryan usually went home after practice with a senior on the basketball team who lived three doors down from his house. But that day the senior was out and Jonathan got to see him for a few minutes.
He kept the clementine in his nightstand drawer for two days before heate it. It tasted like his favorite orange juice, except fresher and tarter and a hundred times more delicious.
Ryan in the present day drops the clementine back into his pocket and exhales. He is waiting for Jonathan to say something.
“So…you just want me to tell you no?”
A net made of vinyl cords hangs from the steel frame of the lounger, forming a protective circumference. Ryan plunges his right hand into the net. “Yes.”
For the first time, Jonathan notices a strand of white in Ryan’s otherwise thick, black hair. Ryan can pass for twenty-nine any day, but time has tiptoed up to him too.
Jonathan hasn’t quarterbacked in almost twenty years. But in that moment, he reads the field and knows exactly what to do. “We don’t need to wait until your willpower fails another day,” he says. “Go ahead and tell me that you want us to get together. I can refuse you right away.”
Ryan’s hand tightens around the net. “I’m not sure I want to be refused right away.”
“You do, trust me. You didn’t bring everything up for me to react in six weeks. You wanted an answer today.”
Ryan gazes at Jonathan, as if he’s trying to commit every last detail of Jonathan’s appearance to memory. For the first time, in front of Jonathan, he looks openly apprehensive, openly vulnerable. “Okay, here goes. Jonathan, you want to spend the night at my place?”
Jonathan pulls him close by the lapels of his varsity jacket and kisses him softly, carefully. Not only because they are in public, but because he wants to let Ryan know that even though they are fucked-up and failure hangs by a thread overhead, he will still approach their relationship with all the attentiveness and diligence of an archaeologist starting on a new dig. Sure, there might be nothing worthwhile, everything ransacked by tomb raiders long ago. Or there could be enough buried treasures to astonish the whole world.
Ryan breaks free, breathing hard. “What happened to refusing me right away?”
“What for?” says Jonathan, his heart pounding so hard he can barely hear himself. “So I can go home and think about you all night?”
They have been thinking about each other since they were fifteen. That’s long enough.
Ryan studies him. Does he see the years on Jonathan’s face—the beginning of crow’s feet, the incipient lines on his forehead? “You’re right,” he says solemnly. “Let’s not be wusses anymore.”
He places his hand against Jonathan’s beard. His thumb traces over Jonathan’s left brow, his ring finger behind Jonathan’s earlobe. “Let’s not waste any more time.”
Chapter Thirty-four
Upon Hazel’s return to Singapore the humidity immediately wraps her in a moist blanket. It takes her a couple of days to adjust to the tropical heat, the metric system, and the cars coming from the wrong side of the road. And then she is back in the flow of things, buying coconut rice from holes in the wall and freshly squeezed guava juice from her favorite stalls.
She has not gone back home, however, for a change of climate and the abundance of street foods. Or even to see her mother and grandparents.
The day after her flight lands, she greets Detective Chu of the Singapore Police Force in her penthouse apartment. Not in the soaring two-story reception area in which he’d interrogated her in spring, but in a more modest living room on the other side of the building, overlooking, a little further northwest, the Singapore River, which meanders through the heart of the city.
Hazel stands with her back to a glass wall, a cup of tea in hand, bleary-eyed from jetlag. Halfway across the room, Detective Chu, a pair of cotton gloves on his hands, examines the old books spread out on a large coffee table, a doubtful look on his face.
“This one is worth at least five million American dollars, you say?”
He gingerly lifts the cover onThe Birds of Americaby John James Audubon, one of the 119 complete copies known to exist.
“Five million is a conservative estimate,” Hazel informs him. “Most likely it will go for at least eight million at an actual auction.”
Yesterday her mother met her at the airport with three bodyguards intow. They drove directly to her grandparents’ house, where two antiquarian experts waited to authenticate the books, which included, among others, three fifteenth-century volumes of theYongle Encyclopedia, not one but two copies of the First Folio, a mostly complete copy of the Gutenberg Bible, a 1478 edition ofThe Canterbury Talesprinted by William Caxton, and a Quran handwritten on paper that seems identical to the gold-flecked reams beloved by Chinese calligraphers.
