ISLA
I stood at the window for a long time after he left.
My hand was still pressed flat against the glass. I didn’t remember putting it there; some part of me reaching for something solid to hold onto after he walked out of the room and took all the air with him.
“When I finish it, I want you to be ready for all of it.”
The words sat in the quiet of the library, and I turned them over the way I turned difficult texts; looking for the layer beneath the obvious meaning, the thing the language was actually doing.
But that wasn’t really what occupied my mind.
My body was still humming. A deep, resonant warmth. The kind that settled in and refused to leave, that kept pulling my attention back to what had happened against the library window not twenty minutes ago.
What I had let him do.
