More Than This: Contemporary Christian Romance Novel (16 page)

“Mind? Of course, I don’t mind.” And it was the truth. As weird as that was, life felt so right with him around. Then excitement smashed into her. “Oh!  I didn’t tell you.”

Incredulousness crossed his face as it became clear he was concerned for her sanity. “No. I just got here, remember? What have you not told me?”

It was akin to jumping, and Liz was so excited about all of it, she just let herself do what she wanted without letting the rational side of her talk her out of it. She grabbed his hand, feeling how strong and right it felt in hers before dragging him to the couch where she plopped down.

“Wow. Okay. This must be really exciting.” He followed her down, and with her hand still in his, she let out a breath to gather her courage to tell him.

When she looked up, shy came over the excited. “I went today, to the Literacy Center, and it was amazing!” The exhilaration bubbled out of her, and she couldn’t stop it. “I watched one of the tutors with this guy, Charlie, and they were hooking sounds with letters, and he had just started, and then I talked with Mrs. McLaughlin, and she said I could maybe become a tutor in the Spring.”

Jake’s eyes sparkled with laughter the longer and faster she talked.

“I know, I’m like blalalalalalala, but I’m just so excited. I mean, I can’t explain it really, but this is just cool.”

He smirked at her. “I can see that.”

“And I never even really knew anything about this, but Mrs. McLaughlin was saying that people with dyslexia like don’t decode words. They see written words like pictures.” She launched into trying to explain it all the way Mrs. McLaughlin had, but she wasn’t very good at it. “I don’t know. I just… I guess I see how big of a difference this could make in someone’s life, and I want that. I want to help them.”

“I can tell.” He was at the point of laughing.

“You think I’m funny.”

“No.” And he grew serious with that one word. “I think it’s awesome that you love it so much.”

Her excitement dimmed for a moment as a thought crossed her mind that had been traipsing around in her brain for most of the day.

“What?” he asked, tilting his head to see into her eyes.

She glanced up but couldn’t hold his gaze. “I was just thinking… I mean, I don’t know what you’ve got going this afternoon, but I had thought I might run down to the library and see what books they have on dyslexia. But you don’t have to if…”

“The library it is.” Jake pulled himself off the couch. “Let’s hit it.”

“You don’t mind?”

“I wanted to spend the day with you. Where we spend it doesn’t really matter that much, does it?”

Liz wasn’t sure she should let him be so chivalrous, but she did want to go to the library, and he had shown up here unannounced. They walked to the coat rack where she retrieved her coat. She yanked her backpack up from the floor and anchored it at her shoulder. It wasn’t particularly heavy— just a notebook or two and some pens, but it would be enough if she found something to take notes about. At the door on the way out, Jake took her hand, and she kind of liked how normal that felt.

It was strange. She had always thought that getting a boyfriend would involve a crowded room or a friend-of-a-friend or something. Somehow she had never seen this one coming.

“So,” she said as they walked out into the crisp autumn air, “you’re not working today?”

“Nope. Day off. Good for the soul.”

“The soul, huh?”

“Yep. Or something like it.” He glanced at her. “And you’re not slinging coffee.”

“Day off,” she said back with a smile. “It’s good for the soul.”

His gaze lingered on her face. “I can see that.”

She felt the embarrassment rise in her, but she didn’t protest. Instead, she just swung her steps in time with his. This was nice. Just walking, being together. Other people mixed and mingled about them, but with her hand in his, it felt like they were the only two people on the planet.

“You’re not writing today?” she asked, glancing up at him. His rugged good looks were right there for anyone to notice. Trouble was most of the time they were hidden so deeply below the hunch of his shoulders and the dark way he carried himself no one would ever know.

“Nah. Taking the day off.”

“Is that good for the soul?”

He didn’t say anything.

The earth shifted a little in her heart. “You know, I’m over here jumping off cliffs for all I’m worth. The least you could do is join me.”

His gaze was at once sad and despondent. “That’s different.”

“Different how?”

“Different, different. You’re… moving… toward something. I’m just spinning my wheels.”

“How do you know that? I mean that’s the way I felt with all those education classes, and then all of a sudden all that spinning brought me somewhere I really wanted to be.”

Again, he said nothing.

Frustrated, Liz decided on a different tact. “So, what’s your story about anyway? This one, the one you’re working on?”

It was six steps before Jake got anything out. How had he gotten here? He couldn’t really remember. And the walking with a girl holding hands thing was the least surreal part of the moment. “Well, it’s about this girl, this woman who is a private eye, and she’s on the trail of this Columbian drug cartel. She’s in the jungles of the Amazon, and all of this stuff keeps happening to her. First, this car like explodes right in front of her, and then the hotel where she is catches on fire.”

“Wow. How’s that for a rough day?”

“Tell me about it, right?” His spirit started to ease up on the death-grip it had on life. “Then when she’s out in the parking lot waiting for the fire to be put out, she sees this one guy that she knows has been following her because she saw him before she left New York.”

“Wait. New York? I thought we were in the Amazon.”

“Yeah, but the drug lord guy is in New York. She went to the Amazon to get the evidence she needs to bust him.”

“Oh.”

“So anyway, she’s in the parking lot, and she sees this guy. He takes off, so she goes chasing after him on this wild-goose-chase ride.”

“Because he has the evidence.”

“Well, she doesn’t really know how he fits in with it all. Is he working for the drug lord? Or is he tailing her because of the other case she just worked on?”

“So this is the second book?”

“Third. The first one, she was tracking a diamond thief across the African desert.”

“Wow. She leads a really exciting life.” Liz went silent for a moment, and Jake hoped that meant they could move on to other topics. The death grip was coming back over his lungs. She was going to think he was nuts.

“Okay, so, she’s chasing this drug dealer guy,” Liz asked, looking up at him in genuine interest.

“Drug lord.”

“Drug lord. But somebody else is following her?”

“Well, in the second one, she threw this mafia dude in jail, so it could be one of his flunkies, too. Then again, it could be one of the drug lord’s minions too. Or it could be someone else entirely.”

“Wait. You don’t know who it is that’s chasing her?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet.”

“But you’re writing the book.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t quite have it all worked out yet.”

At the steps to the library, they climbed together, and at the top, he opened the door for her without really thinking about any of it. She slid past him into the airy space, and he caught the whiff of her perfume as she passed. He had to exhale the feeling it dredged up back down. How had he gotten here again?

When he turned to follow her into the library, he stopped wide-eyed. The floors soared high above them. Open balconies looked down on them as if asking what gave them the right to enter the hallowed space. Liz, however, hadn’t stopped until she had gone five steps forward without him.

She turned back with concern. “What?”

His gaze came down to hers as if he hadn’t realized he had quit moving. With barely a shake, he jerked himself out of the trance. “What? Nothing.” He nailed his gaze to hers, not letting it trail upwards. “No. I’m fine.”

With a soft, skeptical look that traced across her beautiful face, she nodded. “Let’s go over to the computers. I think that doing a search would be our best bet.”

“Okay.” He followed her, still in awe of the space. The lobby was a good four stories high, and it felt like it could contain the universe itself. Somehow she had retaken his hand. How that happened, he wasn’t quite sure, but it was right there, so he didn’t question it.

Together they walked all the way to underneath the ceiling that was the floor above them, and the space shrank around them, not in a bad way, but it did just the same. Liz never really slowed down until they were across the expanse and at a long bank of computers. Without pretense she swung her small backpack to the table and sat down.

“Grab a chair,” she said, and Jake complied, shaky but trying not to be.

He was amazed how easily she seemed to push into the experience as if it didn’t phase her at all. Him, however, it had gotten to in a deep way. He glanced around at the building and the people and the computers and the shelving…  Forcing himself to stop taking it all in, he looked back to her. She had her notebook and pen out, and she was typing away on the library’s computer. Bending forward, she stopped and perused the screen. She wrote something down, typed something else in, and stopped to read that. Everything else fell away, and he was completely and totally willing to just sit there and watch her forever. He could hardly keep himself from being completely enthralled by the experience. She was beautiful, yes. That was true. But her fascinating was far more than skin deep. She was intense and focused. Two things he couldn’t remember ever being.

She put the pen behind her ear and typed something else in. His gaze swung from her to the screen. The letters meshed and melded together in a tangle, and he shook his head, wishing he could decipher it all as easily as she seemed to. Frustrated with the deficiency that was him, he reanchored his gaze on her. A moment more. One more entry, and she scribbled something down and nodded.

“Got it. Okay. Let’s go.”

He didn’t have time to ask where or what, but it hardly made a difference. Instead, he stood and followed her first deeper into the library and then to a set of stairs that were ensconced between rows and rows of shelves. Of course he’d been in the library at his high school, but it was a pathetic replica of this one. Even the smell was a new experience. At the next level, she banked to the left and then back right, going down the rows, searching for he didn’t know what or how. It was all a complicated mystery to him.

Nonetheless, he followed, wondering if she had any clue where she was going because he was totally lost. Five more rows down, she banked left again. Then two shelving columns over, she stopped. He watched her, trying to figure out how she had any idea where she was going. Putting his hand to his head, he scratched it as he watched her bend and then sit on her heel. She fingered the books lined there and then stopped on one and pulled it out.

His eyes widened in all-out fear. The thing had to be about 500 pages long. It was huge.

He had to press the panic down. “Find something?”

“Maybe.” Putting her pen between her teeth, she sat down on the old, worn orange carpet. A moment and she scooted back against the books on the other side.

Feeling really out-of-place, Jake stood for another second and then swung his frame down beside her. He glanced over at her, trying to decipher what was happening in her world. It was strange to be this close to someone and have absolutely no idea what their experience might be. “That what you’re looking for?”

Slowly she nodded, her head barely even moving.

He sat another moment and then put his head back and studied the ceiling far above them. The arch of the bookshelf above him was interesting. The lines of books, broken and multi-colored like a rainbow that had exploded fanned out above him. He’d never quite looked at life from this vantage point. It was startling, intriguing, fascinating.

Suddenly she pushed forward, laying that book between them as she went back to the shelf. His gaze slipped down to it.
Overwhelming Dyslemia.
He took his gaze from it, hating himself for giving up, for being so stupid. What he wouldn’t have given to be someone smart, someone she would fall head-over-heels for, someone who was worth spending time with. He put his head back on the books behind him again. The view to the ceiling wasn’t nearly so fascinating now. It just looked like the rest of his life— weird, chaotic and broken. He stifled the sigh, out of concern that she might think it was about her.

He let his gaze find her again, and softness drifted through him. It would be so great to be her boyfriend, for real. To know how it would be for her to think he was worth having around.

And then, before he realized she was moving, she stood and scooped up her belongings. “I want to read a little more on these before I check them out. Do you mind?”

Jake stumbled to his feet, wishing he looked halfway smooth doing that. “No.” He brushed the dust off of his jeans. “I don’t mind.”