The Book Club Rules

I met Noor at the train station at Fort Augustus on a Friday in April, which sounds fancier than it was. The station is basically a platform and a bench and a chip shop that closes at four. I'm Danny, I'm twenty-four, and I run sheep and cattle on my family's ranch beside the loch. I'd driven the pickup in wearing my good jacket, the one without manure on the sleeve, and I'd cleaned out the cab twice because I was nervous.

She was easy to spot. Twenty-five, dark hair pinned back, standing there with a canvas bag and a paper tube slung over her shoulder like a sword. A map tube. She'd told me she was a cartographer a hundred times in the forum and I still didn't fully believe it until I saw the tube.

"Danny," she said, and put her hand out like we were at a job interview.

"That's me." I shook it. Her hand was cold from the train. "You found it okay?"

"The train found it. I just sat on the train." She looked past me at the hills and then at the sky, which was doing that thing where it can't decide between drizzle and sun. "This is flatter than I drew it. I'm going to have to apologize to the loch."

We got her bag in the truck and drove the eleven minutes back to the ranch. On the way she asked about the sheep and I asked about the train and we both pretended the last year of online flirting hadn't happened, which took some doing.

Here's the situation, for anyone just tuning in. Noor and I met on a book club forum about a year ago. We'd never so much as video called. We talked about novels three nights a week and about everything else the other four. She lives in Edinburgh, works for a company that makes maps for hiking guides, and has a laugh that comes out through her nose when something really gets her, which I know because I've heard it over a hundred voice messages.

The book club thing was my excuse to get her up here. Our little group assigns a novel each month, and April's pick was some Scottish family saga I'd checked out of the library and not opened. Neither had she, it turned out, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

I gave her the guest room and let her unpack, then took her down to the boathouse. That's my favorite building on the property. It's old, weathered grey, sits right at the water's edge. Half of it is fishing gear and nets my grandfather left behind. The other half has my workbench, and for the weekend I'd cleared it off and put a table lamp on it, because Noor had said in a message once that she liked working under warm light.

She unrolled the map tube the second she saw the table.

"I brought these," she said. "Maps of the loch. I know that's weird."

"It's not weird."

"It's a little weird. I made this one myself." She flattened it out and there was the loch, the shoreline, the depth soundings, and a small inked square where the ranch sat. A smaller square beside it, unlabeled. "That's the boathouse. I guessed at the shape."

"You got the shape right," I said, and something in my chest did a stupid little flip.

We walked out onto the dock after that. The evening was cold but still. We sat with our legs hanging over the water and that's where she told me, sideways, not looking at me, that she hadn't read the book either.

"So we're both frauds," I said.

"Complete frauds. The meeting is a sham." She pulled her knees up. "We should have rules, then. If it's a fake book club, it should have fake rules."

I laughed. "Fine. Rule one."

"No touching for the first hour," she said immediately. "Of any meeting. That's a real book club rule, sort of. Nobody hugs at book clubs."

"Nobody hugs at book clubs," I agreed. "Rule two. No removing clothing!"

"During the meeting."

"During the meeting," I said, and we both sat there being extremely normal about it.

"Rule three," she said. "Nobody mentions the book. Since neither of us read it, and since mentioning it would just be lying."

"Those are good rules," I said. "Very enforceable."

"The hour starts now," she said, and checked her phone, and set a timer, and I swear to God she actually did it.

We talked for most of that hour about nothing. Her flatmate's cat, my brother who was off at agricultural college, whether haggis counts as a food or a dare. The timer went off just as the light started going orange on the water, and she looked at it, and then at me, and then at the rowboat tied at the dock's end.

"Can we go out on the water? I want to see the shoreline from the middle."

"You want to survey it."

"I always want to survey it. It's a problem."

The rowboat was my grandfather's, wooden, heavier than it looks. I got in first and held it steady against the dock. Noor stepped toward it with her bag and her map tube, and her foot came down on the wet edge of the dock, and she slid. I did it before I thought about it, my hand out, catching hers, holding her arm until she got her balance and stepped down into the boat.

"There," she said, laughing, sitting down hard on the bench. "Rule one, broken. By you. Ninety seconds late, technically."

"The hour was over."

"The hour was over, but you grabbed me before I could fall, and I might have fallen on purpose to test you."

"Did you?"

"No comment!" She was still holding my hand. I noticed that neither of us had let go, and after a second she looked down at it and smiled and then let go slowly, like closing a door gently. "Row, rancher. I have a confession to make and I can't do it while you're watching my face."

I rowed us out toward the middle. The loch was doing its glassy evening thing. When we were well out, she reached into her canvas bag and pulled out a folded piece of paper. Typed, I could see, proper typed, like a formal document.

"Okay," she said. "So. In the spirit of full honesty at this fake book club. I typed this on the train." She unfolded it and read aloud.

"'To the membership of the book club. I did not read the assigned novel. Instead I spent the three nights before this meeting studying ordinance survey maps of the loch and the surrounding glen, and drawing my own. I did this because I have been imagining this place for a year based only on Danny's descriptions, and I wanted to arrive already knowing it. I wanted to have charted it in advance so that this weekend, when it happens, feels like a place I've already been. I also drew a map of the weekend itself, which is impossible, and I know it's impossible, and I did it anyway. Signed, N.'"

She folded it up. I'd stopped rowing somewhere in the middle of it.

"You drew a map of the weekend," I said.

"Four drafts. They were all terrible. You can't map something that hasn't happened yet." She put the paper away. "But I tried, because I wanted it to go well so much that I couldn't stand not doing something."

I didn't say anything clever. I said, "It's going well," and she said, "It is, isn't it," and I rowed us back in before the light went completely.

That night we ate in the ranch kitchen, lamb and potatoes my mother had left instructions for, and talked until nearly midnight. The rules stood, technically, since no meeting was in session. She went up to the guest room and I lay in my bed listening to the loch and feeling as if I had won something without entering a competition.