“You’re leaving an awful lot of room for human error, don’t you think? What if you inadvertently copy a number wrong?”
“Then it would be a wrong number. A problem easily fixed.”
“If you say so.” Ivan’s eyes widened skeptically. Maxwell ignored his concern.
“I need white paper and a pen to declutter my brain. I appreciate the old way of doing things…sometimes. I like to have notes with my contacts. Those notes are in here.” Maxwell tapped his temple. “Importing wouldn’t tell me everything I need to know.” His list was thorough. Birthdays were scribbled by a few entries, preferred coffee shop for meetings by others, office hours, and even spouses’ names for some. It’s how he kept track of people. And he wasn’t sure why more people didn’t do it.
“Like your many campus conquests?”
“Ha-ha.” Maxwell stared deadpan across the table.
“How are things with Tamara?”
“It’s not a thing. It’s a mutually beneficial friendship.”
“With zero strings?” Ivan pressed.
Maxwell lifted his brow but remained silent. Everyone else could talk about him all they liked. He would never breathe a word. But Ivan did make a good point. Maxwell scrolled through the work contacts, found her number, and paused.
Out of respect for Tamara, Maxwell had never saved her number in his old phone. If it went missing, no one needed to know what they discussed off campus. Maybe he was overly sensitive to the whole thing. But people talked. Obviously. He scribbled her initials—TK—instead of her name above the number. He could create an alias for her later.
Above Tamara’s name in the Talmadge numbers, another K entry caught his eye—Talia King. A smile caught the edges of his lips. Without thinking, he scribbled that number down, too. But with his mind running so far ahead of his pen, he neglected to write down the name. Instead, he spun the pen on his fingers and decided to ask his colleague about their new coworker.
“Have you met the new special collections librarian?” Maxwell stretched his arms upward and hooked them behind his head. Looking through the branches to a clear blue sky while he thought.
“Mrs. Copeland is gone?”
“Unfortunately, yes. Seventy-year-old hips shouldn’t be climbing shelving ladders.” Maxwell reached over the table for his cup of Earl Grey.
“Hmm…hadn’t heard that. But I’m always the last to hear campus gossip.” Ivan pushed his glasses up his nose, resting an elbow on the table and propping his chin in his hand.
“It’s not gossip, Ivan.”
“Who replaced her?”
“Talia King. She was a student here. Graduated recently. I never had her in a class.”
“Talia…” Ivan looked off to the side, the name obviously sparking something in his brain. “I had a Talia Crump in freshman seminar a few years back. Very conscientious student, from what I remember.”
Maxwell took a sip of tea and rested it on his chest. Then took up his pen and scribbled a simple note in the margin—prefers life’s edges. He smiled. Those were the types of things importing contacts couldn’t help you with.
“Talia Crump?” Maxwell’s brow wrinkled as he wrote. “Was she a petite little pixie of a thing?” He chuckled at his description, but it had been kicking around in his mind all afternoon. With her pouty lips, snow-white skin, and strikingly angular face, she reminded him of Tinker Bell.
“I guess so.” Ivan nodded, slowly thinking about the description.
“I guess she married, then.” Maxwell frowned. The thought felt heavier than it should have. “She goes by Talia King now.”
“Possibly. Talia is what I would consider an old soul.”
“She doesn’t seem old at all. She’s, what, twenty-two, twenty-three?”
“We’re the ones getting older.”
“Speak for yourself. I’m not forty yet.”
Ivan chuckled at Maxwell’s insistence and went back to his papers. Maxwell tapped his pen against the table, his mind lingering on their encounter.
“Have you read Wuthering Heights?” he asked absently.
“Mm-hmm.” Ivan’s answer was just as absent.
“Did you like it?”
“Sure.”
“What would you say is the most compelling edge of reason the book flirts with?”
Finally, Ivan put down his papers and huffed out a breath that caught in his lips like sails as he thought.
“It’s been a while, but from a psychological standpoint, I remember there being a lot of needless, self-imposed suffering. They loved each other but were too stubborn to do anything about it, right?”
“I believe they were separated by class.”
“No, they were raised as siblings. The guy was an orphan. It’s somewhat incestuous.”
“Incest?” Maxwell jerked at the suggestion and then added, “You realize this is the fundamental reason why we will never get married, right? Some people consider Wuthering Heights a beautiful love story, but our profession forces us to see it in the most fucked-up way.” Maxwell’s thoughts came back full circle in that moment, and Talia’s comment made sense. A scientist sought to classify Heathcliff and Cathy’s love as incest. She chose to see more possibilities. What did that say about her? What didn’t it say about him?
“Since when did either of us want to get married? You’re doing pretty well last time I checked.”
“Meh.” Maxwell shrugged in a noncommittal way, setting down his cup with a smirk. He was about to go back to his list making when the double doors of the library opened, and a small figure made its way onto the quad opposite him.
At that same moment, water hissed to life and the quad was instantly awash in huge, pelting drops.
Chapter 7
Talia
One moment, Talia was enjoying the sunshine on her face, thinking about how perfect the day was. The next she was engulfed in a hissing spray that soaked every inch of her body.
She whirled to the left, to the right. Ran forward, then back. Unable to keep her eyes open in the deluge of drops that relentlessly pelted her, she was blinded to any escape. There was no way this could be a rainstorm. The sun was shining. But it felt like a monsoon was bearing down on her.
“Help!” she shouted, unable to see her way out of the water.
“Hey!” In the distance, a voice boomed over the rushing water. “Cut it off! Cut the line! Somebody’s in there!” The voice she recognized, and her feet instinctively moved in its direction.