I broke off, swallowing hard. I knew this was hormones, theoretically—the doctor had told me that might happen, a flood of emotion like PMS dialed up to a thousand—but suddenly I wasn’t at all certain I wasn’t about to burst into tears.
It must have been achingly clear on my face, because Library Boy blanched. “You know what, it’s okay, actually,” he assured me. Then he grimaced. “I mean, it really isn’t, probably my boss is going to be kind of a dick about it if he sees you. But I won’t tell.”
I took a deep breath, bit my tongue until I tasted iron. God, I was not about to have a meltdown in front of this random person just because he’d been unlucky enough to talk to me. I was not going to have any more meltdowns at all, not ever, but I was most definitely not going to have one now. “I’m sorry,” I said again, more calmly this time. “I’ll get rid of it. I don’t want to be a rule-breaker.”
That made him smile. “Fair enough,” he said, letting go of the cart handle and scrubbing a hand over his scruffy chin. “I don’t want to be an enforcer, in case that wasn’t abundantly clear.”
“Is that your job?” I asked, the small talk steadying me a little. There was something about him, that stormy morning, that felt oddly, instinctively safe. “The library enforcer?”
He nodded seriously. “Do I look intimidating?”
I gazed at him for another minute, taking in his tortoiseshell glasses and the Red Sox T-shirt peeking out from underneath the collar of his flannel, the beat-up leather band of his Swiss Army watch around one wrist. “Not really,” I admitted.
He grinned then, holding his hand out. “I didn’t think so,” he said with a shrug. “I’m Ian.”
“I’m Molly,” I said, and we shook.
After that I fell into a routine of Saturday mornings at the library: textbooks stacked neatly on the table, water bottle tucked safely away inside my bag. The following week, Ian smiled and waved when he saw me. The week after that, he recommended a Barbara Kingsolver book he thought I might like. The week after that, it occurred to me that I was looking forward to seeing him, glancing up from my notes every couple of minutes and scanning the stacks for his kind, serious face.
Still, after everything that had happened back in Star Lake and after, I definitely wasn’t looking for anything romantic, on top of which I couldn’t imagine who in their right mind would possibly want to date me if they knew the kind of skeletons I had rattling around in my dorm room closet. Which is why I was so surprised, right before Thanksgiving, when Ian came over to the carrel I’d started to think of as mine and asked, so haltingly it sort of broke my heart, if I wanted to go see a Springsteen cover band at the Paradise that night.
“Um,” I said, taken aback and caught off guard and so deeply pleased I physically couldn’t keep from smiling, like the Boss himself had shown up in the reference section, climbed up onto one of the study tables, and launched into “Born to Run.” It occurred to me, somewhere at the very back of my secret heart, that I hadn’t felt anything like that since Gabe. “Hm.” I put a hand against the side of my face, felt the blood rushing there. “So here’s the thing. It sounds really fun and I promise I’m not just saying that. But I’m—” I broke off. “Just . . . not really in a place to be dating anybody right now.”
Ian raised his eyebrows. “What makes you think I’m trying to date you?” he asked. When I blanched, he grinned.
“I mean, I’m definitely trying to date you,” he admitted, jamming his hands into the pockets of his olive-green khakis and rocking backward on the heels of his boots. “But if it’s not on the table, I can respect that. Honestly, no pressure. I’d also really like to just be your friend.”
I squinted at him, looking for the catch but not finding one. “Really?” I asked.
Ian nodded and held his hands out like one of the street magicians posted up by the T station in Harvard Square, nothing here. “Really.”
“Okay,” I said, nodding slowly. “Then let’s be friends.”
And that’s how it started, as a friendship: turkey-melt lunches in the dining hall where he asked about my business classes and told me about the books he was reading for his Irish-American Writers seminar; a trip to the Ben and Jerry’s on Newbury Street because somebody had left a stack of two-for-one coupons on top of the trash can in the hallway of my dorm building. “What’s the deal with you guys?” my roommate, Roisin, asked the week before Christmas break, pulling me aside at student-discount ice-skating night on the Common. Her hat had a giant pom-pom bobbing on top of it; her brown skin was faintly rosy with the cold. “I feel like he’s been staring at you piningly all night.”
I shook my head, reaching out for the paper cup of hot chocolate she was offering. “We’re just friends,” I told her, and I meant it; still, when Ian mentioned going on a few dates with a girl in his teaching cohort in the middle of January it put me in such a bad mood that I blew off the superhero movie we were supposed to go see and jammed my sneakers on my feet instead. I ran all the way to Jamaica Pond in the screaming, skin-cracking cold.
Don’t be spoiled, I scolded myself as I swallowed down deep gulps of the dry, stinging winter air. After all, it wasn’t like there was anything I could do about it. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know if or when I would be. Ian might have thought he wanted to date me for a minute there, sure. But only because he didn’t actually know me at all.
Still, as the weeks went by I saw him more than I didn’t: we ate mushroom and ricotta slices at the trendy pizza chain across from the BU arena. We sat in the oversized chairs on the second floor of the student center and studied for exams. In March we went to an extremely long, extremely awkward improv show in the black box theater on campus, after which we stood bewildered on the sidewalk and tried to figure out what we’d just watched.
“Okay,” Ian said, rubbing a palm over his face. He shuddered visibly, like a dog shaking off water after a bath. “Wow. That was . . .”
“Special?” I supplied.
“That’s one word for it, certainly.” Ian grinned. “I think I need a beer. You wanna come over for a beer?”
I looked at him for a moment, his cheeks ruddy in the streetlight, his hair growing out past the collar of his warm-looking woolen coat. “Sure,” I said. “That sounds great.”
We followed the trolley tracks back down toward Kenmore Square, still totally unable to get over the weirdness of it: “I think my favorite part was when that one guy sang the Barney theme song and then meowed like a cat for six minutes,” Ian said thoughtfully, and I laughed. It was only a couple of weeks until spring break, but Boston was still freezing and damp, the winter clinging endlessly on; my mittens had long since gone gray and dingy, a hole in the webbing between my fingers and my thumb. It had snowed again a few days before, everyone in the dining hall looking out the window and groaning in unison as the fat flakes began to come down, and now I picked through the slushy black remains of it, water seeping into my ankle boots. “Easy,” Ian said, catching my hand when I almost slipped on a patch of ice slicked over the cobblestone sidewalk. “I gotcha.”