Page 130 of The Librarians
He lifts a thick section and flips it back, and the book—well trained to, apparently—opens exactly to a photograph of Hazel—three, in fact. She is climbing up a steep street in a white Cape Verde T-shirt, a pair of camo cargo shorts, and, of course, that gigantic visor. Yet somehow, through his lens, she doesn’t look dorky but rather cool and breezy.
“When did you take these pictures?”
“When you were busy texting on your phone. I was looking for a panoramic shot though, not to creep on you.” He sighs. “But then I saw you.”
She raises a brow. “Are you going to tell me you weren’t lost?”
“Not only was I not lost, I’d already walked around the botanical garden and left.”
“I knew you were hitting on me.” She really did.
He smiles down at the coffee table. “Thanks for letting me. I was—I don’t think it was love at first sight, but I was struck by this impossible curiosity about you.”
He turns two pages and there she is again, laughing uproariously at the ginormous beef skewer that has just been put on the table between them.
“Huh,” she says. “I have a vague memory of you with your camera out at this point. I thought you were taking pictures of the beef skewer.”
“Well, the beef skewer is there.”
As foreground for her thorough hilarity. Come to think of it, she doesn’t know if she’s ever been captured in another picture laughing so hard, having such a good time.
“So you always had pictures of me,” she murmurs. “I kind of forgot what you looked like, but…”
She opens her carryall and digs out a small box. “I remembered that you had pierced cartilage. So I got you an ear barbell every year for your birthday—except during the time I was married.”
He looks at her, opens the box, and then looks back at her in astonishment. “I thought you meant some goth trinkets. These are—museum quality.”
“It’s nice to have visuals when I beat myself up over my mistake,” Hazel answers, half-joking. She reaches into the carryall again and extracts a glass jar. “I also made these for you, one hundred every year, even when I was married.”
The jar contains tiny lucky stars. The ones in this jar are folded from strips of pastel pearlized paper and shimmer with an iridescent sheen.
“I have a whole shelf of those jars in Singapore. I didn’t bring them all.”
He turns the jar in his hand and regards it with a fierce concentration. The soft-hued lucky stars inside shift and glide against one another.
“All I have is a jar of botanical garden tickets, at least three of them from Singapore,” he says quietly. Then, after a moment, “And that.”
He points to the large ship in a bottle that she noticed on her first visit because it’s so intricately detailed that it has a sailor throwing a message in a bottle overboard. “Remember I changed my number?”
How can she forget?
“The message in the bottle has my new number—not the best way to give it to you, is it?”
No one speaks. After some time, she realizes that they are no longer almost touching, that somehow, in the giving and receiving of gifts accumulated over the years, they moved apart.
She casts about for something to say. “Where’s Ryan?”
“Jonathan’s hosting a poetry slam somewhere up north. Ryan will be in attendance.”
This makes Hazel smile despite her uneasiness. “Ryan has it bad—but then again, so does Jonathan.”
Conrad smiles likewise. “Last night I got home from the airport at about midnight and ran into Jonathan in the kitchen. Never seen a grown man blush like that. It was cute.”
“So tonight Ryan will be at Jonathan’s place.” Hazel bites her lower lip.
“I imagine,” says Conrad. He caresses the shoulder of the jar of lucky stars with his thumb.
She feels electrical currents zigzag across her shoulders. “Do you want to—”
