Page 19 of Night Shift

I sit there, a trembling mess of caffeine and desire, as Vincent Knight reads the poem in its entirety. He trips over a few words and awkward, old-fashioned turns of phrase, but there’s something charming about it. Everyone else in this Starbucks probably thinks he’s as close to a deity as a college student can get, but I get to watch him smile in that slightly self-deprecating way when he slips up—and I get to listen to the confident cadence of his voice when he nails an entire stanza in two steady breaths.

I let my eyelids flutter closed, embracing my newest kink: being read to.

When Vincent reaches the last line, a part of me wants to tell him to read it again. He probably wouldn’t fight me on it—I’m the expert here, after all. Reluctantly, I peel open my eyes and meet Vincent’s. A moment passes in perfect silence. Then he looks back down at the page.

“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” he repeats from the second-to-last stanza. “So, he’s talking about God. He’s asking how God could make both of these animals.”

I clear my throat. “Exactly. You have to think about what Blake believed in, and what was going on around him with the industrial revolution. It was a lot to process. He’s asking himself how God could make something so innocent, so agricultural and romantic as the lamb, and also make a tiger—this beast from a faraway land that needs to kill the lamb to feed itself.”

Vincent stares at the page for a long moment, his dark eyes tracing laps over the lines.

“This is actually kind of fucking cool,” he says.

I hope he’s not being sarcastic. “You think?”

“Yeah. I finally get why you picked your major.”

“For all the high-paying job prospects, obviously.”

Vincent snorts. “You could definitely teach at the college level if you wanted to. You might be better at this than my tenured professor. I went to his office hours last week. Complete waste of time.”

“Let me guess,” I say. “Old white guy?”

“His name is Richard Wilson. Think he’s in his late sixties.”

“Knew it.” I lean back in my chair and fold one leg over the other. “I almost took a class with him my freshman year, but his Rate My Professor score was abysmal. Honestly, though, you could get the same interpretation I just gave you from a few Google searches. Like I said in the library . . .” My eyes skitter away from his. The next few words come out slightly choked. “The trick to most poetry is context. It’s like talking to a person. The more you know about where they’re coming from, the easier it is to understand them.”

Vincent leans back in his chair too and studies me for a moment.

“Have you always been a big reader?”

“Oh, yeah. I had sort of a rough start—I was diagnosed with dyslexia when I was in first grade—so it took me a little longer to learn than most of the kids in my class. But then I was insatiable. My parents used to take me to our public library twice a week because I kept blowing through the checkout limit every few days.”

“Damn.”

I feel my cheeks heat. Then, because I’m prone to oversharing, I say, “It’s easy to read that much when you’re a shy kid. I didn’t really have friends until the end of high school. And even then, it was mostly the people I sat next to in class. Books have always been a major part of my personal and social life.”

Vincent tilts his head. “Do you write at all?”

“I try to. I’m not as good at it as I’d like to be. But I’m taking a creative writing workshop this semester, so fingers crossed it helps. My professor is great. He’s written like twenty-five sci-fi novels, so he’s not super stuck-up about genre fiction, which I appreciate.”

It’s sometimes difficult to be a romance novel enthusiast in a sea of academia and internalized misogyny that suggests the genre is somehow less important and less worthy of praise than literary fiction.

Vincent nods. “Are most of the English professors at this school stuffy white guys like good old Richard, or do you have a good mix of women and nonwhite faculty? I don’t know much about Clement outside of my major.”

“There are a lot of younger women in the department, actually. And at least a third of the professors I’ve had are openly LGBTQ+.” Then, against my better judgment, I ask, “What is your major, anyway?”

“Human biology.”

I scrunch my nose. “Oh, yuck.”

“Told you. English was never my thing. I’m a STEM guy.”

“Wait a minute. I thought you hated memorization. Isn’t bio all about memorization?”

He shrugs. “It sticks better than poetry ever did. The material makes more sense to me—maybe because I’ve been playing basketball since I was seven or eight, so I’ve always thought a lot about our anatomy and the way our bodies work.”

I’m also thinking a lot about how our bodies work.

---