The Bookbinder's Taste

Robyn was twenty-eight, though she'd been telling people she was thirty just to see if it landed differently. It didn't. She still got the same look, the one that said you're a baby, what do you know about supporting weight... wait, about joists. The job had come through Rafael, the baker two doors down from her workshop, who said his cousin ran some kind of archive and needed real shelving, not IKEA garbage, and would Robyn please go take a look because the cousin was new in town and didn't know anybody.

So on a gray Tuesday morning Robyn showed up at the Gilded Page with a tape measure, a pencil behind her ear, and a coffee she'd already finished.

The place smelled like old paper and wood polish, the good kind of dust, the kind that had settled in decades ago and made itself at home. She followed the hallway back past the reading room to a door left half open, and that was where she found the archivist, bent over a big leather-bound book on a work table, holding a small jar and painting something shiny onto the spine of the book with her finger.

"Oh, hello," the woman said, straightening up. She was maybe thirty-five, dark hair pinned up with what looked like a letter opener, sleeves rolled to the elbow. "You're the carpenter. Rafael said you'd come."

"Robyn," she said, shaking the offered hand and immediately regretting it, because the hand was sticky.

"Vivian. Sorry about the hand. Honey."

"Honey," Robyn repeated.

"For the leather." Vivian said it the way a person says two plus two, like Robyn was slow for asking. Then she saw the look on Robyn's face and laughed. "You think that's strange."

"A little, yeah."

"It's an old preservative method. Beeswax, honey, a trace of oil. The leather drinks it up and the spine stays supple for another century." She dipped her finger in the jar again, held it out. "Here, taste. People always expect it to be gross and it never is."

"I'm good, I just..."

"Come on. You drove all the way over here. One taste of honey won't kill you."

Robyn took her finger, more because backing out felt ruder than doing it, and licked the honey off. It was warm and a little floral and way better than the stuff in the bear-shaped bottle at the diner.

"Okay, that's actually good."

"Right?" Vivian went back to the book, drawing her coated finger along the spine in slow, even strokes. "Everything natural. No chemicals. The Victorians knew what they were doing, mostly."

Robyn got out her tape measure and started in on the wall, calling numbers, trying to be professional. It was hard to be professional when every thirty seconds the other woman lifted her finger to her mouth and cleaned it, unhurried, thorough, like there was a whole ritual to it and she had all day. Lips wrapped around the fingertip. A slow pull. Back to the honey. Robyn wrote down thirty-two and a quarter and had no idea which wall it belonged to.

"So the shelf, it holds the really old stuff?" she asked, to say something.

"The fifteenth century and earlier. Temperature matters, humidity matters, and the wood matters most of all. No pine, no oak. What were you thinking?"

"Chestnut, maybe. Or walnut if the budget holds."

"Walnut." Vivian said it like a yes. "Rafael said you were good."

"Rafael says everybody's good, he's a baker, it's his whole personality."

That got a real laugh out of her, and Robyn felt something in her chest go tight and warm and curious, which was a feeling she hadn't had in about five years and didn't have a plan for.

* * *

The shelves went in two weeks later, on a Tuesday, walnut with brass pins, and Robyn was proud of them and said so about four times while she leveled the last one. Vivian's assistant had gone home early, so it was just the two of them back in the restoration room with the door open and the evening light coming in sideways.

There was a plate of strawberries on the work table and a bowl of cream next to it.

"You want to help sample the spoils?" Vivian asked, like it was the most normal offer in the world. "Rafael sent them over. He sends me things I can dip in things. He's been doing it since we were kids, it's how he shows love."

Robyn was twenty-eight years old and she'd been single since a bad fling with a coworker when she was twenty-three, and she had built a lot of shelves in those five years and eaten a lot of dinners alone. She looked at the strawberries and she looked at Vivian and she felt bold in a way that surprised her.

"Yeah, okay. I could sample something."

Vivian picked up a strawberry, dragged it through the cream so the red disappeared under white, and held it out. "Open."

Robyn opened. The berry was cold and sweet and the cream was barely sweet at all, and Vivian watched her the whole time, and Robyn's ears went hot.

"Good?" Vivian asked.

"Really good."

"There's a right way and a wrong way to eat a strawberry in cream, you know. The wrong way is fast. The right way is..." She took one for herself, dipped it, bit it off slow, and Robyn lost the end of the sentence entirely because she was watching.

"Is what?" Robyn managed.

"Unhurried." Vivian held one out to her again. "Your turn to feed me. Fair's fair."

So Robyn dipped a berry, maybe too much cream, and brought it over, and Vivian bit it off her fingers and got cream on her lower lip, a white stripe of it, and Robyn's hand was not steady anymore. The plate rattled faintly against the table when she set it down.

"You've got..." Robyn started, and then stopped, because there was a fork in the road and she could hear her own heartbeat. "Can I? I mean, is it okay if I..."

Vivian didn't say anything clever. She just tipped her chin up a little, an inch, an invitation, and waited.

Robyn leaned in and kissed the cream off her lip, which turned into kissing the lip, which turned into a real kiss, slow, tasting like strawberry, and Vivian's hand came up and held the back of her neck like she'd been planning the placement for two weeks.

When they broke apart Robyn was breathing like she'd carried the walnut up a flight of stairs.

"Well," Vivian said. Her voice was lower than before. "That was the right way to do it."

"I've never..." Robyn laughed, shaky. "I don't actually know what I'm doing."

"Neither do I, most days. We'll figure it out." Vivian picked up another strawberry and held it up between them. "More? Or is this the part where you remember an appointment?"

"I don't have an appointment."

"Then more."

The berry was cold and Robyn was not, and somewhere between the plate and the bowl Vivian murmured, close to her ear, "Fair warning, I like things messy. Food, specifically. It's kind of my whole thing. If that's a dealbreaker, tell me now and we'll just eat strawberries like normal people and you'll build me more shelves and it'll be fine."

Robyn thought about it for maybe two seconds.

"I'm a carpenter," she said. "I get sawdust in my coffee every day. Messy is kind of my whole thing too."

"Oh good," Vivian said, and dipped the next strawberry so deep it came out practically white, and reached over and dabbed a little of it, deliberately, on the side of Robyn's neck, just below her jaw. "Then hold still."

Robyn held still. The cream was cold and Vivian's mouth was warm and the shelf she'd built held exactly the weight it was supposed to, and nobody knocked anything over yet, which Robyn would later understand was the last calm moment of the evening.

* * *

Two days later a note showed up taped to the door of Robyn's workshop, written in slanted brown ink on paper that looked like it belonged in one of Vivian's cases. Come by the Gilded Page Saturday night, after closing. Seven o'clock. I have a special project. Wear something you can wash.

Robyn read it eleven times. Wear something you can wash. That meant food, probably, or stain, or, no, she had a whole theory by lunch. She told Rafael about it over a sandwich at his counter the next day, because his bakery was two doors down and her feet just walked there on their own now.

"She's into you," Rafael said, boxing a dozen rolls. "She asked me what wine goes with walnut."

"Wine goes with walnut?"

"I said the same thing. I think she meant the color." He slid the box across. "Saturday, huh. You're gonna shave your legs and everything."

"Rafael."

"What, it's true. I've known her since we were kids. She does this thing where she plans out a whole evening like it's a recipe. Just, uh, don't be weird about it if she gets a little..." He trailed off, wiped the counter. "Just don't be weird about it."

That was not reassuring. Robyn spent the afternoon at the hardware store pretending she needed things, and then an hour deciding on a shirt, which was stupid, because Vivian had already seen her in work jeans with a pencil behind her ear and had still taped a note to her door. She settled on a dark green blouse, low enough in front to be a decision, and walked the four blocks feeling like she was going to a wedding.

The Gilded Page was dark from the street. The front door was unlocked, which was odd, and the lamps in the back were on, and Robyn followed the smell of wood polish down the hall and stopped in the doorway of the restoration room with her mouth open.

Vivian was in a canvas smock with the sleeves rolled up. The big work table had been cleared of everything except books, and around the books, covering almost the whole surface, were jars. Small jars, squat jars, one big ceramic bowl sitting over what looked like a candle warmer. There was a plate of figs cut in half. A dish of dark chocolate, broken into rough squares. A little pot with a brush resting across it like a