Chapter 27

“Emmit,” she breathes when she sees it’s him and not Aidan who has backed her into the corner. “What the hell are you doing?” She jerks her chin at the stacks. “What the hell are you doing here?”

The crooked smile animates his lips, but the expression seems nervous, his normal mannerisms pressurized, like he’s pure carbonation, about to explode. He brushes a lock of hair away from his forehead, and Saoirse stares at him, full of dismay and incredulity at his actions. She grits her teeth and says in an angry whisper, “Seriously, what are you doing here?”

“I always come to the Athen?um to write on Wednesdays,” he says, and there’s something in his voice she can’t place. “So, imagine my surprise when I looked up from my work and saw ...” One side of his mouth jumps up again, the movement automatic, agitated. His eyes flick to the right, and he turns his head slightly, as if checking to see if anyone is behind them. Saoirse follows his gaze to the alcove she was in earlier, to where she imagines Roberto sits still, pen in hand, working away. “... you with another man,” Emmit finishes.

So that was the note in his voice she didn’t recognize: jealousy. And here she’d insisted to Jonathan that Emmit was above this. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she whispers. “I’m with Roberto. Roberto , one of the three writer friends I told you about. The ones I’ve been spending time with since moving here.” She narrows her eyes. Is this really another instance of her and Emmit ending up in the same place at the same time? Or did he follow her here? And what exactly is he accusing her of?

“ Did you tell me?” Emmit asks. His voice is low and measured. “I don’t remember you saying anything about a Roberto. Maybe you didn’t mention their names, and I just assumed all three of your new friends were female?”

He emphasizes new as if to point out that new friends couldn’t possibly be close ones. Saoirse tries stepping back, but there’s nowhere to go. “Whether I told you or not,” she says, “you know I’m allowed to hang out with whomever I want to, right? Male or female?” She looks out across the library, then back at Emmit. “Were you really at the Ath, or did you follow us here?”

For a second, Emmit looks properly chastised. Then his eyes search her face again, more intently. “So, this guy hangs out with you and two other women all the time?” he whispers, ignoring her last question. “Is he gay?”

A flash of white-hot light explodes behind Saoirse’s eyes. Her heartbeat jumps from a trot to a gallop, and she puts the heels of her hands on Emmit’s shoulders and tries to push him away.

“Well, is he?” Emmit presses, undeterred by the shove or her anger. For someone whose build isn’t particularly muscular, he’s far stronger than she expected.

“Not that your arrogance deserves a response, but yes, Roberto is gay. He also doesn’t ask me ridiculous questions or confront me in public places when I’m writing.” She whirls away from Emmit and steps toward the aisle, then stops and says, “You’re way out of line right now.”

She makes herself sound disgusted, but what she’s feeling is something far more primal. Something she does not want to admit she’s feeling. His turning up like this, his jealousy, the physical intimidation, the manipulation. What she’s feeling is the first thin, spiky tendrils of fear.

She gets two steps out of the stacks when Emmit grabs her again. This time his touch is gentle. He pulls her toward him, into an embrace. “You’re right,” he says into her ear, his breath warm against her skin, and she hates herself for wanting him, right here in the corner of the library, wanting him to take her the way he did in the hotel room, in her bedroom, in the Shunned House.

“Saoirse, I’m so sorry. Jesus, I don’t know what I was thinking, what came over me. It’s just, I was writing, working on that new idea that came to me last night with you, that came to me because of you, and I looked up and saw you with someone else, and I just saw red.” He pulls away and stares into her eyes. He smiles at her fully but in a pleading, apologetic way. When she doesn’t return the smile, he says, more desperately, “I promise I didn’t follow you. I always write here on Wednesdays, I swear it.”

The lie zigzags through her brain like lightning, and her heart pounds wildly. Saoirse rips her hands away from his. “I thought you were in Baltimore on Wednesdays.” She shakes her head, feeling sick. “You told me you’re in Baltimore every week, Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays.” Should she call out for Roberto? Or yell for one of the librarians? Ask that they call security?

But Emmit is closing his eyes and murmuring to himself, like he’s forgotten some key piece of information, not like he’s been caught in an outright lie. “Of course,” he says evenly, as if trying to calm a spooked horse. “Of course you’re right. I meant that, before I accepted the position at Johns Hopkins but had already become a professor at Brown, I wrote here every Wednesday. And today ... I mean, gosh, Sersh, it’s been a whirlwind. Last night with you, it broke apart something inside me. It tore down the block! I wrote all night, and I’ve been writing—feverishly, fantastically—right in that alcove across the way”—he gestures across the open air of the second floor—“since the Ath opened this morning. And none of it would have happened without you! It’s like I knew it would be, from my premonition. You are my momentous thing; you are the catalyst. You are the Whitman to my Poe, the Sarah behind my ‘To Helen.’”

Saoirse takes a breath, tries to quell the canter of her heart. Could he be telling the truth? “I’m glad you’re writing,” she whispers. “But you sound manic. You’re scaring me. And regardless of how excited you are to be over your block, that doesn’t give you the right to give me the third degree about who I’m here with. And it doesn’t give you the right to ask anything like what you did about Roberto.”

He grabs her shoulders again and rubs her arms in slow, rhythmic circles. “You’re right. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I haven’t slept. I haven’t eaten. I’ve had way too much caffeine. Please, forgive me. Of course you can spend time with whomever you want. Of course you can do whatever you want. I feel so lucky to have met you, and—”

Saoirse holds up a hand. “Wait a minute. You feel so lucky to have met me because you like me, or so lucky to have met me because I’m the thing that’s gotten you writing again?”

He pulls her close to him again. “ Of course it’s because I like you.” His eyes do not blink as they stare into hers. “You know that what’s between us is real,” he continues. “You know it. I know you’ve felt it. It doesn’t feel like we’ve known each other a matter of days. It feels like a lifetime. Like when we stepped into that graveyard behind your house, we did go back in time, then forward again, but all the while, we were together.”

He trails the back of one hand down the side of her face. Her skin pulses with electricity. “And I think you know that I don’t just like you, Saoirse.” His mouth jumps into an anxious half smile. “I’m falling in love with you.” He slides the hand caressing her face behind her head and pulls her into him.

Their kiss is long and hard and breathless. It steals the strength from her legs. When he pulls away, Saoirse sees how tired and wrung out he is. How jumpy and forlorn and desperate for her to forgive him. Maybe his behavior is due to a sleepless night, a morning of caffeine and frantic writing. And after the evening they had last night, full of sex and brandy and powder-filled capsules, anyone would be a little erratic.

He’s holding her face with one hand and biting his bottom lip. He’s waiting for her to say something, but she can’t. Between the kiss and the admission, and with the silence of the library pressing in around them, she’s too overwhelmed to say it back. Or, is it that, in the wake of Emmit’s recent behavior, she knows saying I love you too would be untrue?

He kisses her again, and slides his hands up the sides of her shirt. She gives in to his touch, then, remembering where they are, ends the kiss and pushes him away. “I have to go,” she whispers. “Roberto’s going to wonder what happened to me.”

Emmit’s smile slips, but he recovers quickly. “Of course. Though, we are in the library where Sarah and Edgar courted one another. It’s practically made for romance.”

Saoirse groans and slides past him. “Enough from the original Goth English major quoting Joyce from the back of the lecture hall. I have to get back. Not just because I’m being rude, but because I have to get some words onto the page.” Emmit looks like a lost, sad puppy, so she gives him another quick kiss and whispers in his ear, “I’ll call you later. Maybe we can get dinner?”

He nods. “That would be fantastic. And Saoirse. I really am sorry.”

She watches him hurry down the stairs, then smooths her hair and the hem of her shirt, and starts toward the third alcove from the back wall.

Roberto barely looks up when she slips into the seat across from him. She tries to focus, to recall the earlier words of the strange, old-fashioned poem that had come to her while standing across from Sarah Whitman’s portrait, but the lines remain hazy, like mist curling from the surface of a glassy lake.

She’s about to give up when Emmit’s face flashes through her mind, the way he’d looked when he’d tried to keep her from leaving, the hint of something naked and dangerous in his eyes. As she considers their interaction, a new poem takes shape. It’s razor-sharp and venomous, full of shedding insect skins and carnivorous mantids, chitinous wings patterned with owl eyes—an impressive feat of mimicry meant to fool potential predators—and of parasitic vines that twist around the mortal pillars of men’s earthly souls.

Saoirse composes and considers, slamming metric frameworks around stanzas like tiny prisons, her pen catching up to, then surpassing, the speed of Roberto’s. She could almost believe Emmit’s appearance in the stacks was the product of her imagination, if not for the taste of him on her lips, the feel of his hands on her sides, and the way his presence bleeds into every word she carves—like the indentation of an insect—onto the page.