You (You #1)(106)

We take breaks to talk about the Opus Dei and the Priory of Sion and we both wish Robert Langdon were real and I find clips of the film adaptation online for both of us to devour when we need to rest our eyes and our fingers. You have never felt so compelled to read and I admit the same is true for me.

“I mean, I love Stephen King books,” you say. “But that’s different because his work is so well crafted. The Shining is fucking literature, you know?”

I do know and I remember Benji and his refusal to admit that he loved Doctor Sleep. We read late into the night and you wake me up the next day by sliding the drawer back and forth and back and forth. “Come on!” you squeal. “I’m dying over here.”

We start to read but we need coffee and I bolt up the stairs and through the shop and down the street and you aren’t just passing the test. You’re acing it. There is a long line at Starbucks but you deserve that salted caramel stuff you drink every so often and our book club is the best.

“Is it twisted that I can relate to Silas?” you asked me last night. “This will sound sick, but when I found out Peach was dead, I was more angry for myself than I was sad for her. She was the best friend in the world because I was the world to her. She was obsessed with me and I couldn’t even remember the exact date of her birthday.”

“You were the church,” I said.

“And she was the Silas,” you said.

I reminded you of the first conversation we ever had in the bookstore, when you teased me that I was a preacher and I said I was a church.

“Wow,” you said. “Wow.”

I smile at nothing and everything as I walk back to the shop, carrying your salted caramel. We are a dream couple, we are what happens after Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks finally kiss, after cancer-free Joe Gordon-Levitt and sweet shrink-in-training Anna Kendrick eat their pizza in 50/50. We are Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke after U2 finishes singing “All I Want Is You.” When I reach the bottom of the stairs, you clap but you are puzzled.

“Joe,” you say. “That tall cup is too tall for the drawer.”

“I know,” I say and I love you for living in here, for not fighting.

“So how are you going to get that to me?”

I smile and show you the low, wide mug I bought for that specific purpose and you say it again, “Wow.”

You’ve said that word more in the past twenty-four hours than you have in the past twenty-four weeks and you call me a genius and ask me to tell you again about how I got Benji to go to the shop. We have our coffee together on opposite sides of the cage and when I finish telling you the story you shake your head and here it comes again, “Wow.”

“Nah,” I say.

“One thing though,” you say and you set your coffee on the ground. “That last Benji tweet, you said in Nantucket. And I remember reading that tweet and thinking he must be seriously fucked up because he knows that it’s on Nantucket and not in Nantucket.”

“Nice work, Sophie,” and I grin and there is no mourning and there is no war because we are united, we are Unicef. We give.

“Thanks, Professor.” You glimmer and you wink.

“Break?” I say.

“Perfect,” you reply and we are so good in here and I play “We Are the World” and you laugh and ask why I chose that song and I tell you about how I feel like we improve upon the world in this basement and you are serious and you know what I mean and you agree and I have never been this connected to another human being in my life. You know the way my senses work, the way my brain works. You like it in there, in here.

The hours fly by and something in The Da Vinci Code leads into a conversation about the Dickens Festival and costumes leads to hats and I blush and you realize that I know about the Holden Caulfield hat. You close your Da Vinci Code. You hug your knees the way you do when you are truly, totally sad.

“That must have been horrible for you,” you say.

“It doesn’t look good on him either,” I say and I am as stealthy as Robert Langdon. But you still feel bad.

“I’m a phony.”

“Beck, no you’re not.”

“You’re like this nobleman of the Priory of Sion running around figuring me out and I’m so inept I can’t even properly hide a hunting cap, let alone a disgusting and cheap and shitty fling.”

Disgusting! Cheap! Shitty! Fling! It is a relief to hear you talk this way and I smile. “You give it your all, Beck. You just have to be more careful about who you give it to.”

“You’re right,” you say. “Nobody is more dedicated, more intense than you, Joe.”

“Except for you,” I say and you smile. You wink.

We read. When we are both in it we are quiet. We get sucked into a book in the same kind of way and at some point we both fall asleep. I wake up first—Yay!—and I let you rest. I go up into the shop and stretch. Ethan has texted me:

Joey my man! Congrats to Beck. Blythe tells me she is getting published in The New Yorker! That’s amazing! Let’s meet up for a drink next week! On me! Or housewarming, moving to Blythe’s as we speak!!!!!!

Exclamation Point Ethan finally has reason to use exclamation points and I feel happy for him. I go to Fiction A–D and find Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and I am dizzy. I anticipate our future, the day I tell you about following you to Bridgeport, to the Dickens Festival in Port Jeff. You will say wow. Again.