Chapter 9
780 Words
Julian did what composed men often do when something inside them shifts.
He introduced movement.
“Pick one,” he said, gesturing vaguely toward the tables.
Lia blinked. “Pick one what?”
“A book. You’ve been orbiting them for ten minutes without committing.”
“I like orbiting.”
“I can see that.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. Then wandered off again, slower this time — aware, perhaps, that she was being observed. Not watched. Observed. There is a difference, and bodies know it before minds do.
Julian slipped his hands into his coat pockets and told himself he was simply waiting.
Waiting is respectable.
Waiting has no emotional implications.
Across the shop, Lia crouched near a lower shelf. A strand of her hair fell forward. She pushed it back absently, twice, then gave up and tucked it behind her ear. Small gestures, unconscious ones. The kind people never perform for others.
He found himself cataloguing them.
Annoying.
He redirected his attention to a display near the register.
Travel journals.
Unused.
Their blankness irritated him.
Potential always had.
The bookseller approached without sound. A tall, narrow man whose sweater had seen more winters than either of them.
“You look like a man trying not to choose something,” he said mildly.
Julian glanced up. “Do I?”
“It’s in the shoulders.”
Julian almost adjusted them, then refused to.
“I’m fine, thank you.”
The old man nodded once, as if Julian had confirmed something interesting rather than dismissed him.
“People who come in during the morning,” he went on, “usually aren’t here for books.”
Julian did not ask what they were there for.
He had learned long ago that strangers sometimes say truer things when uninterrupted.
The bookseller tilted his head toward Lia.
“She has the look of someone who reads to survive.”
Julian followed the gesture before he could stop himself.
Lia was standing now, reading the first page of something with the deep stillness of full attention. The world could have nudged her and she might not have noticed.
“She’ll buy that one,” the old man added.
“How can you tell?”
“She forgot where she is.”
A quiet settled between them.
Then the bookseller said, almost idly, “And you have the look of someone who stopped reading when life became too real.”
Julian met his eyes then.
Sharp ones. Not unkind, just deeply acquainted with observation.
“I still read,” Julian said.
“Information,” the man replied gently. “Not surrender.”
Julian held his gaze a second longer than politeness required.
Then he said, “You make confident assumptions for someone who hasn’t asked my name.”
The bookseller smiled. Not broadly, just enough to crease the years around his mouth.
“Names are rarely the important part.”
He drifted away again before Julian could decide whether he’d been insulted or understood.
Across the shop, Lia closed her book slowly.
Not the casual snap of someone done browsing, but the reluctant closing of someone already slightly altered.
She approached him, holding it out.
“Don’t judge me.”
“I haven’t agreed to anything yet.”
She turned the cover toward him.
Letters to a Young Poet.
Julian felt something almost like recognition brush past him. Faint, decades old.
“My mother loved Rilke,” he said before remembering he does not offer personal facts easily.
Lia’s eyebrows lifted, but she didn’t pounce on the detail. Just nodded once, receiving it the way one receives a fragile object.
“I figured,” she said.
“You figured?”
“You have that… interiority thing.”
“That is not a word people usually apply in conversation.”
“I’m bringing it back.”
Julian felt the corner of his mouth shift.
He walked to the counter before it could become a smile.
“I’ll take this,” he told the bookseller.
Lia made a soft protesting sound. “No, you don’t have to—”
“I know.”
The second time he had said that to her today.
She went quiet after it.
Some phrases land deeper when repeated.
The bookseller wrapped the book in brown paper with slow precision, like the act still deserved ceremony.
“First winter here?” he asked Lia.
“Is it obvious?”
“You look upward when the snow falls,” he said simply.
She absorbed that.
Julian paid. Slid the parcel toward her.
She didn’t open it.
Just held it with both hands as if warmth might leak through the paper.
- Writer
