“Not really. We talk most days, but… well, sometimes we don’t. It just depends…”
“On what?” Homer inquired.
“I’m sorry?” Wes asked, and when he lifted his glass, Bette saw a slight shaking, though he tried to hold the glass steady.
“What does it depend on?” Homer asked.
“Oh, well. I mean if I’m busy or she’s busy.”
“So you’re saying it has happened before since you started dating? You’ve gone three days without talking to Crystal?”
Weston’s eyes shot towards the bar, scanned the other people, and returned to Homer before flicking down to his glass.
Bette realized Weston was struggling to look Homer in the eyes.
“No, not really. We talk almost every day.”
“I see. And where do you think Crystal is right now, Weston?”
Wes’s gaze jerked up and he glanced at Bette before taking another drink.
“I… we sort of had an argument. I thought she needed a couple of days to cool off. Maybe she took a drive somewhere. She has friends out west…”
Bette sputtered, planting both hands on the table. “Are you kidding me? Crystal would never hop in her car and drive out west without telling any of us. That’s insane!”
Again, Homer’s hand crept to hers. He gave her finger a little pinch.
She shot him a furious look.
Wes looked back and forth between father and daughter.
“I didn’t know you hadn’t heard from her,” Wes explained. “I assumed she was only ignoring me.”
“And what exactly did you fight about?” Homer asked.
Weston blushed and looked away. “Nothing really. Just… The usual couple stuff.”
“No, I’m sorry, you must elaborate,” Homer insisted. “Couples are very unique after all. I’d imagine the arguments myself and my wife had were very different than those between you and Crystal.”
Weston shifted his hands into his lap.
“I had to go out of town next weekend, and that bothered Crystal. Her friend is in a play at the Wharton Center and she hoped we could go together. She got upset about it and left.”
“That doesn’t sound like Crystal,” Bette interrupted.
“I have to agree with my daughter there, Weston. Crystal is not one to get upset about such things.”
Weston sighed. “She did. I don’t know why. Maybe there were other things she didn’t say.”
Officer Hart met Homer and Bette in the lobby.
“Come on back,” he told them, leading them to his cubicle. He dragged an extra chair from a nearby desk. “I put Crystal’s information in the system as a missing person’s case yesterday and there’s a Be On the Lookout for her car. No sightings have come in. Based on the information you’ve provided we’re going to escalate to a potentially endangered missing person, but this can be deescalated any time if we receive information that implies Crystal left of her own free will.”
“She didn’t,” Bette insisted, “and we just questioned her boyfriend. He cut his hair and shaved off his beard, and he was clearly lying.”
Hart frowned. “You questioned him?”
“We simply had a drink with him to ask if he’d spoken with Crystal,” Homer clarified.
“Okay. Well, that’s our job from now on. Got it? I need a list of her co-workers, last people to see her, friends, everyone,” Hart said.
He handed a sheet of paper and pen to Bette and she started writing.
9
Then
Crystal didn’t see Professor Meeks until class that Wednesday.
He kept his gaze carefully averted from her own, but slipped once, and when their eyes met, he lost his train of thought as he’d done previously in his lecture. He apologized, returned to a stack of notes on his desk and veered into a topic about opening lines.
“Unlike books, poems do not have to make their intentions known in the first line,” he told the class. “Though I challenge you to do so. Consider Merciless Beauty by Geoffrey Chaucer: Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly. Their beauty shakes me who was once serene. From those two lines, what do you think the poem is about?”
A girl in the front row raised her hand.
Weston nodded at her.
“I think it’s about unrequited love,” she said.
“Good. Why?” he asked.
“Well, he writes that her beauty shakes him when he was once serene. So, he’s in love with her, but it’s not reciprocated because he’s using words like slay and shake.”
“Very good.” He pointed to another student with his hand raised. “Tell us your thoughts, Ronnie.”
“I thought maybe he was facing down a dragon,” the student said. “Or a Medusa. I mean, Medusa turned men to stone when they looked at her, right? Maybe he’s talking about a literal she-monster.”
The students laughed, Weston included.
“We know from history that Chaucer wasn’t talking about a literal she-monster, whatever that is,” Weston explained. “But I like where you’re going, Ronnie. Poetry is meant to ignite something in each of us. We don’t need the poet’s reason for writing the poem. We need to discover what the poem reveals about ourselves.”
Weston’s eyes flicked up to Crystal as he spoke.
“The love might not be unrequited. Perhaps it’s merely a love so passionate it threatens to burn the writer alive.”
He glanced away from her, but Crystal felt the weight of his words.
When class ended, she packed her backpack slowly, slipping out the door as Weston quickly ended a conversation with a student, promising they’d talk more during his office hours the following day.
She left the building and walked across campus.
The cool April sun turned the puddles of melted snow into thousands of shimmering mirrors.
Crystal heard Weston’s footsteps behind her.
She strode into the library, pausing to glance back at him. He still followed, his leather bag slung over one shoulder. He pretended not to see her, though a little smile played on his lips.
She took the staircase at the back of the building, going to the fourth floor. The rows were mostly empty. The only sounds came from the heat pushing through the metal vents overhead.
Crystal walked into an aisle and pretended to look at a book.
She didn’t turn when he entered the row, stopping beside her and studying the shelves.
Crystal didn’t move. Her shoulder pressed against his. She waited, the seconds stretching out until finally his hand slipped around her waist.
“My nights have been centuries since I last touched you,” he whispered, leaning so close she felt his breath in her ear. “A jumble of endless hours with your face, your breath, your smile violating my every thought.”
He stepped in front of her, sliding his other hand to her back.
“I missed you too,” she murmured.
He kissed her, and some part of her collided with him in a space beyond their physical bodies, as if her soul had stepped out and embraced his.
They were in the annex, a rarely used section of the library that was filled with narrow aisles, between shelves and books that looked like they hadn’t been checked out in decades. The annex had the musty, woody smell of ancient books.
As she tilted her head back and Weston pressed his mouth into the hollow beneath her throat, she saw an ocean of dust sparkling in the single beam of sunlight coming through the tall window at the end of the annex. The dust, more like a thousand sparkles, shifted as if all the tiny particles were on a journey out of the annex and into the daylight.