Page 123 of Dark Love

We stop at the landing for her office and library.

The office it is.

At least that will give me an opening to ask her what she does without her asking any questions that I’m not ready to answer. There’s no way I will ever be able to tell her the truth about my life. Instead of moving towards her office, Dahlia stops in front of her library door.

Is she embarrassed to read books?

“So. Um… It’s just… A mess.” Her shoulders sink down. “I can’t decide how I want to decorate it so… well, everything is everywhere.”

That’s why the room is so different from the rest of her home. “Show me.”

“You aren’t going to—”

I reach out and take her hand. “The only thing that matters to me is why you love whatever is inside that room. I couldn’t care in the least if it’s decorated, or if it’s a mess.”

“It’s a mess. A huge mess.”

“So. Show me your mess so that I can tell you’re a real woman with flaws and not a perfect dream that came to life.”

Her lips form a cute little oh.

I reach past her to turn the knob, but don’t push the door open. That brings our bodies close enough that I could lean down and kiss her bemused lips.

She leans forward… taunting me… tempting me… One little taste of her wouldn’t be so…

Dahlia isn’t ready. No matter how much I want to kiss her, she needs to be ready. “You can open the door now.”

“Door? What door?” Dahlia blinks up at me a few times. “Oh.” She pushes it.

A blush runs up her face, drawing my attention away from the room.

“So… I… um… like to read.”

That’s a bit of an understatement compared to other people. “I see.” But what I want to see are all the spines.

“Every time I start to put them on the shelves, I freeze up.”

“Why?” It seems pretty obvious that books go on the shelves, not all over the floor in boxes or massive stacks.

“Sometimes I want to sort them by color because it looks so pretty. Other times I want to sort alphabetically by author, so it’s easy to find the book I want to read. Then other times I want to have a trophy shelf of all my signed books. Then there’s always the Dewey Decimal System.”

The walls are filled with whitewood shelves and a few haphazard piles of books. “Why don’t you do all of the above?”

“Huh?”

“You use your special edition books as decorations on random shelves. You take all your standalone fiction books and sort them by color. The fiction series can go in alphabetical order. Any non-fiction books go by Dewey.”

Dahlia gapes at me. “That’s brilliant. But what if I forget where a book is?”

“You ask me.”

Dahlia raises an eyebrow at me. “You’re going to remember where every book is on my shelves?”

I’m going to remember every detail about your bookshelves. That’s the gift and the burden of having a photographic memory. “Yes.”

“Seriously?”

Her crinkled nose and brow are awfully cute. “You don’t store your dried seasonings alphabetically. They’re in order of use. The top row is garlic powder, onion powder, paprika…”

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