His Gentle Guidance After Hours

Nik texted me at six to say he was locking up soon, and I typed back one line: stay late, food's coming. Three dots, then "whose food?" then "ok" before I could even answer. Three years of dating him and I still liked that he never made me explain myself twice.

I'm Rani, I'm thirty-two, and I do graphic design out of a spare room that used to be a dining room. Nik is thirty-five and owns a bookstore called Castro & Co., on a side street downtown where nobody's in a hurry. We'd been together three years as of October, and most Friday nights I picked up takeout and we ate among the shelves after close like a couple of raccoons in a nice restaurant.

That Friday I got us saag paneer and chicken tikka from the place on Fourth, the one with the plastic booths and the owner who always called me sweetheart. I balanced the bag against my hip and knocked on the glass door with my knuckle, because my hands were full and the bell above the door had been broken since March.

Nik came down the aisle with his glasses pushed up on his head and that look he gets when he's mid-thought about something old and paper.

"You brought the good place," he said, taking the bag from me. "This is a special occasion or you're softening me up for something."

"Can't a woman buy her man paneer for no reason?"

"He can. She can. Whatever the correct version is, yes." He kissed me quick, then held the door for me and flipped the deadbolt behind us.

The shop smelled like it always does, old paper and dust and the lemon oil he wipes the shelves down with. I've spent enough evenings there that I don't really notice it anymore, except when I've been away a few days, and then it hits me like walking into a hug.

We ate at the little table by the register because the back room table was stacked with a delivery of art books he hadn't unpacked. He told me about a first edition that came in that afternoon, some thing from the fifties with a torn jacket that he'd been grumbling about all week. I told him about a client who wanted their logo bigger. Bigger, and also more subtle. He laughed into his rice and said that captured the entire design industry in one request.

After we ate I helped him stack the delivery boxes and he said, "Come here, I want to show you something before you get comfortable."

He led me past the history section into the back stacks, past where the overhead lights gave up, into a little corner where there was one amber lamp on a timer and a reading chair nobody had ever sat in, far as I knew.

"I forgot this was back here," I said.

"It's always been back here. I just finally cleared the boxes out of it." He ran his hand along a shelf of old leather bindings, and I knew what was coming, because he does this, he touches them like they're sleeping animals. "You smell that? That's the good stuff. Old leather, old glue, paper that's had time to think. People say books smell like vanilla sometimes, and they're right, it's a compound in the paper breaking down, but that's not the part I love. It's more like a house that's been lived in."

"You're a weird man and I love you," I told him.

"You love me for my money, obviously. All eleven dollars the shop made today."

He was standing close, close enough I could feel warmth off his chest through his flannel, and I looked up at him and he looked down at me, and it hit me the way it still hits me sometimes that this is mine, this person, this dumb corner, this Friday.

"Can I kiss you?" I asked him.

"You never have to ask that."

"I like asking. It means I get to watch your face."

So he made a face, an exaggerated one, eyebrows up, and I laughed and kissed him. It was a familiar kiss, the kind where my mouth knows his mouth and my hand knows the back of his neck, his hair shorter now than when we met. He set his hand on my waist and we stood there in the dim corner among books that cost more than my car, and I felt that settled warmth I get with him, three years deep, no nerves left in it.

Except I did have one nerve left. I'd been carrying it around all week.

I pulled back a little, kept my hands on his chest.

"Okay," I said. "You were right. I am softening you up for something."

"Ha. Called it. What is it. Do you want the first edition. Because it's not for sale, and also it's not paid for."

"Not the book." I took a breath. "You know how we've talked about, um, stuff we haven't done. And you always said whenever I wanted, no rush."

I watched it land on him. His eyebrows did a thing.

"Yeah," he said. "I remember."

"I want to try it. The thing we talked about in June. With me."

"You're sure?" he asked, and his voice had gone quieter, careful.

"Yeah. I've been sure for about two weeks, and I kept chickening out of bringing it up because it felt like a big deal to say out loud."

"What changed?"

"Nothing changed. I just got tired of rehearsing it in the shower instead of saying it." I laughed, embarrassed. "Also you fell asleep at nine twice this week and I was like, I can't keep losing my nerve window."

He smiled at that. Then he got serious in the way he does, the patient way, the way he is when someone brings him a water-damaged first edition and expects him to panic.

"Tell me what you're imagining," he said. "So I'm not guessing. What part of it are you curious about?"

"That it's, I don't know. Close. That's the part that keeps coming back to me. It's the closest thing two people can do, basically, and I keep thinking about that. That it's you, specifically, and it's that close."

He nodded slowly, taking it in.

"And what worries you?"

"Being bad at it, I guess. It looking weird. It hurting even though I know we'd go slow, you've said it like a hundred times."

"Because it's true a hundred times." He took my hand. "For the record, we'll have everything on hand. Lube, the whole thing, done right, not some improvisation with hand lotion like amateurs. I already bought the supplies months ago, if you can believe that, and then felt weird about the receipt."

"You bought supplies months ago?"

"I like being ready. It's a bookseller thing, you stock the shelf before the customer asks."

I swatted him and he caught my hand and held it.

"Here's what I want," he said. "I want us to go at your pace, tonight, and I want you to say stop whenever you want for any reason, even a dumb reason, and I'll stop and we'll just be two people eating leftovers on the floor of my shop. That's the deal. No score to hit. We're not checking a box, we're just trying a thing you're curious about, and if it's great, great, and if it's not, also great, because I get to find out things about you either way."

"That's very reasonable."

"I'm a very reasonable man who bought anal supplies months ago on faith."

"You planned for a book nobody had ordered."

"I always keep one in stock," he said, and grinned, and I shoved his shoulder, and he grabbed me around the waist and pulled me in.

We stood there a minute in the lamplight, and I could hear the old radiator ticking, and somewhere in the walls the building doing its old-building noises.

"Okay," I said into his flannel. "Then take me to the back room. The back room has a futon that's seen things, I assume."

"The futon has seen three previous decades of things, yes. It is experienced."

"Good. One of us should be."

He turned off the lamp in the corner and took my hand, and we walked back through the stacks, past history, past poetry, toward the back room, and my stomach was doing the thing it does before something new, not bad, just awake.

* * *

The back room smelled like old paper and the coffee he'd spilled in there sometime in July and never fully mopped. The futon sat against the wall under the one window that looked out on the alley, and there was a cushioned bench along the other wall that he used for sitting on while he priced boxes of donations. He steered me toward the bench instead of the futon.

"Bench first," he said. "Futon is a later decision."

"You have a plan."

"I have a vague outline. Like a proposal for a book that may never get written."

He went to the coat rack by the door where his jacket was hanging, the brown corduroy one with the broken zipper pocket, and dug around in it. He came back with a small plastic bottle and held it up like he was presenting evidence.

"You actually keep it in your jacket," I said.

"Emergency lube. Water-based, body safe, I checked the label twice. It's been in that pocket since the day I got optimistic. And now this." He set it on the bench next to a stack of price stickers. "I also have the good stuff in the desk drawer, the actual supplies, but this seemed like a funny thing to hand you first."

"It is pretty funny." I was laughing, and then I stopped laughing because he was looking at me in that patient way, waiting to see if I was actually okay, and I nodded and got serious back. "No, I'm good. I'm nervous but I'm good. Nervous like first-day-at-a-new-job nervous, not like something-is-wrong nervous."

"That's the right kind of nervous." He sat down next to me on the bench. The bench was old too, everything in that shop was old, and it creaked under both of us. He put his arm around my shoulders. "We can stop before we even start. I mean that. You can say you know what, actually, let's just eat the leftover noodles, and I will be one hundred percent fine."