Aleksei pulled off his helmet and dark glasses. “This is it. When I can’t find a library and I need to get away, this is where I come. I call it my cathedral. I’ll show you why in a minute.” He gave her that slow, devastatingly beautiful smile.
The burn started immediately in the pit of her stomach and just continued to move lower. She shivered, awareness of him in every cell of her body. “How did you discover this place?”
“Sometimes my head feels like it’s going to explode when I’m around too many people for too long.” He rubbed his forehead with his gloved hands. “That sounds bad. It isn’t that I don’t like people, it’s just that sometimes their emotions are … overwhelming to me. I need quiet places. Even that makes me sound like I’m crazy.”
It didn’t. She understood completely. That was why she was a librarian. Libraries were quiet and most of the people who entered were there for the purpose of studying or finding books to read or reference. They weren’t there for counseling. Unless you counted the occasional teen.
“I don’t think you’re crazy.” She didn’t remove her gloves either. She watched him take a blanket and a rolled-up small duffel from a compartment of his bike. There was the faintest of trails and he indicated for her to follow him. “This is still a long way from the library, Aleksei.”
“My brothers, sisters and close friends call me Absinthe.”
She was silent for a moment, processing that. “Like the drink?”
“Yeah. Like the drink.”
For the first time he sounded wary, as if he didn’t want her to question him on why his friends would call him that. It would be natural to ask.
“If I ask why your family and friends call you that, are you going to tell me?”
He gave a heavy, exaggerated sigh. “Because they think they’re funny, that’s why.”
He walked a few more steps and she stayed silent, just waiting. She knew he was going to tell her. He didn’t look back at her, but she could tell he was a little embarrassed. This wasn’t about drinking too much. He hadn’t drunk anything alcoholic when they’d gone to dinner the other night. But maybe that was the reason. Maybe …
“In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in France, artists and writers were particularly fond of the drink. I like the written word. I sometimes write shit down. They know it and they just like to give me hell for it. So that’s how it all came about.”
She found herself smiling again. She could see family doing that, particularly brothers. Aleksei did seem to be a man who, on the surface, looked as if he could really take care of himself, but she could see he had the heart of a poet. She knew he read poetry. He never had her get those books for him, he always got them for himself, but she saw them. He seemed confident in himself, not someone ashamed or embarrassed to be caught reading poetry, so more than likely, it was about writing it, or just admitting how the nickname came about.
“Do you prefer Absinthe or Aleksei? Because that matters to me.”
He did look over his shoulder at her and something moved in his blue eyes. Something deep. He turned away from her before she could figure out exactly what it was, but her heart immediately accelerated at what she’d glimpsed.
“Everyone I care about calls me Absinthe. Aleksei died a long time ago.”
The sorrow in his voice had her reaching out to him. She pushed her fingers into his back pocket and kept pace with his longer strides. It was an intimate thing to do. Scarlet wasn’t the type of woman to ever take the lead when it came to intimacy between a man and a woman. First, it wasn’t in her nature, it wasn’t what she preferred, but more, she hadn’t been attracted to anyone in years. She was learning that intimacy and sex weren’t always the same.
Scarlet didn’t know what to think about that declaration. Aleksei died a long time ago. What did it mean? Everyone had a story. She wasn’t alone in hers. From the moment he’d come into the library and chosen that table far away from everyone else, looking so alone yet wanting to be that way, she had known there was a reason for it. She’d touched him deliberately, seeking to find out and yet she hadn’t been able to uncover his secrets.
Absinthe stopped abruptly, reached back and gently took her wrist to remove her hand from his back pocket, retaining possession as he pulled her up next to him, closer than she’d ever been, right up under his shoulder. She found herself staring at the natural arrangement of the tall redwoods. They formed a circular towering wall, with a thick mossy carpet covering the interior. The small “doorway” was two larger trees that were really one that had spread out and looked to have split at some time perhaps a hundred years earlier.