Page 4 of Night Shift

“Do you have anything”—he hesitates—“simpler than this?”

“I’m afraid Dr. Seuss is twentieth-century American.”

Vincent cuts me an annoyed look. I tip my chin up, refusing to apologize.

“Look,” he grumbles, “I’m sorry. My wrist is killing me, I haven’t slept right all week, and I’m way out of my comfort zone with this—this poetry shit.” Twin spots of pink bloom on his cheeks, but surely it’s only a trick of the light. “English was never my best subject.”

I slot the three books back on the shelf.

“A lot of people struggle with it,” I admit. “Especially poetry. Which honestly isn’t surprising, given the way it’s taught.”

Vincent snorts bitterly. “I hated high school English. I was shit at it. I almost had to sit out basketball my freshman year because my teacher was going to fail me for not memorizing a Shakespeare poem.” He cuts another sideways glance at me. “I got my grades up, obviously. I was smart enough to graduate high school.”

“Just because poetry never clicked for you doesn’t mean you’re not smart. Poetry is—it’s almost like another language. It doesn’t matter if you can recite every word from memory. Learning a bunch of vocabulary won’t do you any good if you don’t learn the grammar and cultural context too.”

If Vincent finds my monologue embarrassingly pretentious, he doesn’t say anything. His eyes are patient. Locked in. His attentiveness gives me the confidence to keep going. I run my eyes over the rows of books in front of us, then I pluck a familiar and very thick tome—Engman’s Anthology, Twelfth Edition with Extended Prologue—off the shelf and flick through it until I find the section on Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

“Okay, this one’s good,” I say, tapping the page with my fingertip.

Vincent shifts closer to read over my shoulder. I hold myself very still, determined to neither flinch away nor lean into the heat of his large body.

“If thou must love me,” he reads, warm breath ghosting over my collarbone and the back of my outstretched hand.

“It’s a sonnet,” I say, pulling my hand into a fist. “Fourteen lines, iambic pentameter. Very easy to spot. The trick with sonnets is usually to watch for a turn toward the end. Sometimes it’s in the last couplet—the last two lines—if the rest of the poem is split into three quatrains—”

“That’s four lines, right?”

I glance up at Vincent. It’s a mistake. He’s so close I can see freckles on the bridge of his nose and a little white scar just under his right eyebrow. His eyes aren’t on the poem. They’re on me.

“Um, yes.” I clear my throat and consult the book again. “Four lines. But see, this is a Petrarchan sonnet. One octave and a sestet. So, the turn is in the sestet—those last six lines.”

“If thou must love me, let it be for nought.” Vincent reads the first line.

“Except for love’s sake only,” I continue.

The air around us slows, and the world narrows to this one corner of the library. I read the rest of the sonnet out loud, tripping over a few words as I go, but Vincent doesn’t snicker or correct me. He’s silent. Reverent. It feels sacred, somehow, to read the work of a woman long dead in a chapel built to honor words and their makers.

“. . . But love me for love’s sake, that evermore thou mayst love on, through love’s eternity.”

There is a moment of silence—a shared breath—after I read the last line.

Then Vincent asks, “What does it mean, Professor?”

I laugh in a quiet exhalation, thankful he’s the one who’s broken the tension.

“Elizabeth wrote this for her husband. She doesn’t like the idea that he might love her for her intelligence or her beauty. I love her for her smile—her look—her way of speaking gently. She doesn’t want that. Those things can change. She’ll get old. She might get sick. She could just . . . change. And she doesn’t want his love to be conditional.”

Vincent steps back, the heat of his body lingering for a moment before I’m cold again. I shut the anthology and turn to face him.

“Shit,” he says, a genuinely stunned smile tugging at his lips. “You’re good.”

His words send a flood of heat through my body. I think I’m damp between my legs. It’s humiliating—that one silly little compliment can have such a strong effect on me. That one kind word said in a quiet corner of the library can make me feel like I’m on fire.

“That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” I joke, my voice weak as I shove the book at Vincent. “Well, actually, I make minimum wage. Although we get an extra buck an hour for the night shift, which is pretty sweet.”

Vincent weighs Engman’s Anthology in his good hand like he’s considering something. “How late do you work?”

For the life of me, I can’t tell why he’s asking.

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