My First Love

Chapter 8: The Bookstore

Saturday morning arrived clean and cold.

The rain from the week had cleared completely, leaving Boston in that particular post-storm state — air sharp, sidewalks bright, everything looking slightly more itself than usual.

I woke up with no specific plan.

That lasted approximately forty minutes before I found myself on Commonwealth Avenue.

---

I told myself I was just walking.

It was a reasonable cover. Commonwealth Ave was a good walking street — wide, tree-lined, the kind of Boston road that felt like it had been designed with Saturday mornings in mind. I had my coffee. I had my jacket. I was simply a person walking.

The bookstore was called Parrish & Sons. I reached it at half past ten and stood outside for a moment, looking at the window display.

Then the door opened from the inside and Prisca walked out.

She stopped when she saw me.

I stopped when I saw her.

A beat of silence passed — the kind that could go either way.

Then she looked down at the paper bag in her hand, then back at me, and said: "You came."

"I was walking," I said.

She looked at the bag again. Then at me. The corner of her mouth moved with the specific quality of someone choosing not to say what they were thinking.

"Come inside," she said. "I found the Berger but I want to show you something else."

---

Parrish & Sons was everything a bookstore should be.

Narrow and warm, the kind of narrow that felt intentional rather than cramped. Shelves from floor to ceiling with the slightly precarious lean of shelves that had been full for decades. A cat sleeping on the front counter beside the register — orange, enormous, completely uninterested in customers.

Prisca moved through it with the ease of someone who had been coming here long enough to know where everything lived. She led me to the back, to a corner section marked *Cultural Theory & Media*, and stopped in front of a shelf at eye level.

"Here," she said, pulling out a slim paperback.

*The Medium is the Message* — Marshall McLuhan. Not a rare edition, not particularly valuable. But the copy was old, the cover worn at the corners, and someone had left a dried flower pressed between two pages near the middle.

She opened it to the flower. A pale yellow thing, flattened thin by decades.

"Someone read this and left something in it," she said quietly. "And then it ended up here." She looked at it for a moment. "I find that kind of thing unbearably interesting. The traces people leave in objects without knowing."

I looked at the flower. Then at her.

"Are you going to buy it?"

"I already have this book," she said. "But I come back to look at this copy sometimes." She closed it carefully and returned it to the shelf. "Some things aren't meant to be owned. Just visited."

---

We stayed in the bookstore for an hour.

It happened naturally — she showed me sections, I asked questions, she answered with the particular quality she had of making information feel like conversation rather than lecture. She knew the stock well enough that the owner, an older man with reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, called her by name when we passed the counter.

"Morning, Prisca."

"Morning, Gerald." She held up the Berger. "Found it."

"Knew we had it somewhere." He looked at me with brief assessment. "Friend of yours?"

"Yes," she said, without hesitation.

Something small and warm moved through me at that word, the easy way she said it.

---

We left around noon and walked without particular direction.

The street was livelier now — weekend foot traffic, a farmer's market spilling off the sidewalk two blocks down, the smell of coffee and bread mixing in the cold air.

"How long have you been coming to that store?" I asked.

"Since freshman year. I found it by accident the second week of school." She held her bag with both hands. "I was lost, honestly. New city, didn't know anyone yet. I walked in because it was starting to rain and I didn't have an umbrella."

"And stayed?"

"Gerald was reading behind the counter and didn't try to help me or sell me anything. Just left me alone in the stacks." A small pause. "That felt like exactly what I needed."

I thought about that. "Do you get lonely? Being from Portland, being here?"

She considered the question seriously, the way she considered everything.

"I did freshman year," she said. "Less now. I've built things here." A brief pause. "Do you?"

"Sometimes," I said honestly. "Chicago is loud in a specific way. Boston is loud differently. I miss the specific Chicago loudness occasionally."

She nodded slowly. "I miss the smell of Portland. After rain, the whole city smells like pine and wet concrete. Nothing here smells like that."

"No," I agreed. "Boston smells like ambition and clam chowder."

She laughed — a real one, fuller than usual, surprised out of her.

It was the best sound I had heard in recent memory.

---

At the corner of Commonwealth and Granby she stopped.

"I'm meeting Dora for lunch," she said.

"I'll let you go."

She shifted her book bag. "Thank you for the tip about the Berger."

"Thank you for the bookstore tour."

A comfortable pause settled between us. The farmer's market noise drifted down the block.

"Daniel," she said.

"Yes?"

She looked at me with that direct, unhurried look. "You weren't just walking this morning."

It was not a question. It was not an accusation either. It was simply — Prisca, being clear, offering me the same.

I met her gaze. "No," I said. "I wasn't."

She held the look for a moment. Nodded once, slowly.

"Okay," she said.

The same word as before. The same weight.

She started walking, and this time she did not half-turn.

But she was smiling when she went.

I saw it before she turned the corner.

---

I stood on Commonwealth Avenue in the cold Saturday air and felt something shift — not dramatically, not loudly. Just a quiet, certain movement, like a door opening into a room that had always been there.

I bought a coffee from the nearest cart and walked home slowly.

No rush.

Some things, I was learning, were worth the pace.