The doorbell creaked as it always did—a thin whine of old bronze that Thomas had never wanted to fix. He said it was the bookstore’s way of greeting whoever came in. Clara raised her eyes from the spines she was organizing on the third shelf and saw a young man standing in the doorway, his backpack hanging from one shoulder, his eyes moving over the shelves as if he were reading a city for the first time.
He had the kind of face that took time to reveal itself. He wasn’t handsome in a way you noticed right away—he was handsome the way a verse was beautiful, only after you read it twice.
—Can I help you? Clara asked, climbing down from the little wooden stool she had been balancing on.
The young man blinked, as if he’d forgotten that bookstores had people in them besides books.
—I’m looking for something that might not exist anymore, he said, his voice low and slightly hoarse, as if he hadn’t spoken to anyone all day. —A poetry book. An old edition. Songs for No One, by Renato Villar.
Clara frowned. She knew every title on those shelves as well as she knew her own fingers, and that name sparked something—a memory of a dark green spine, faded gold lettering, third row of the poetry section, leaning against the back wall.
—I think I know where it is, she said, gesturing for him to follow her.
They walked through narrow aisles where the books pressed against one another like passengers on a crowded train. The wooden floor creaked beneath their footsteps, and the smell of aged paper grew denser the farther they moved from the door. Lucas—for that was his name, though Clara didn’t know it yet—followed behind, watching everything with an almost devotional attention. The way the light from the side window sliced the air into golden strips. The dust floating through those strips as if dancing a slow waltz. The way the young woman ahead of him touched the spines as she passed, a distracted, automatic caress, like someone stroking the fur of a sleeping cat.
—Here, Clara said, stopping in front of a tall shelf. —But it’s up there.
She reached out. He reached out. And at the same time, they both touched the same dark green leather cover.
Their fingers met over the gold lettering.
Neither of them pulled away.
It was a second. Maybe two. The kind of silence that wasn’t empty—it was too full, so full that any word would ruin it. Clara felt the warmth of his fingers against hers and thought, without meaning to, that a poet’s hands must be exactly like that: a little rough, a little hesitant, as if asking the world’s permission before touching it.
Lucas thought he couldn’t remember the last time an accidental touch had made him forget what he was looking for.
—Sorry, they said at the same time, and laughed at the same time, and the laughter broke the silence in a way that ruined nothing.
Clara pulled the book free and held it out to him.
—Songs for No One, she read aloud, running her thumb over the cover. —No one has ever asked for this book before.
—Maybe it was waiting, Lucas said, realizing only afterward that the sentence had come out more beautifully than he’d intended.
Clara looked at him for a moment longer than necessary. Then she smiled—not the polite smile of a clerk, but a smaller, truer smile, the kind that escaped before a person decided whether or not they wanted to smile.
—The register is up front. Thomas takes care of it.
Lucas walked to the counter, where a white-haired man with large hands was reading a novel with a piece of twine serving as a bookmark. Thomas looked over his half-moon glasses at the book, then at Lucas, then—over Lucas’s shoulder—at Clara, who had already returned to her shelves but had not yet returned to her thoughts.
—Good taste, Thomas said, and Lucas wasn’t sure whether he meant the book.
Outside, the fall wind pushed dry leaves along the cobblestone sidewalk. The sky was gray in that way that promised rain but never delivered, and the lighthouse atop the hill was already beginning to blink, though it was still late afternoon.
Lucas left with the book tucked under his arm and a strange feeling in his chest—as if he had entered the bookstore looking for a book and left carrying something else. Something that didn’t fit on a shelf. Something he didn’t yet know how to name.
Inside the bookstore, Clara straightened books that didn’t need straightening. She ran her hand along the shelf where the dark green volume had left an empty space. Small. Exactly the size of an absence you could feel.
Thomas turned a page in his novel and said, to no one in particular:
—He’ll come back.
Clara didn’t ask whom he meant. She didn’t need to.