“My books, my lovely books, they’re roont!” she said, as they piled them on the living room carpet.
“They’re fine,” Alan said. “They’ll dry out a little wobbly, but they’ll be fine. We’ll just spread the damp ones out on the rug and shelve the rest.”
And that’s what they did, book after book—old books, hardcover books, board-back kids’ books, new paperbacks, dozens of green- and orange-spined Penguin paperbacks. He fondled them, smelled them. Some smelled of fish and chips, and some smelled of road dust, and some smelled of Marci, and they had dog ears where she’d stopped and cracks in their spines where she’d bent them around. They fell open to pages that had her favorite passages. He felt wobbly and drunk as he touched each one in turn.
“Have you read all of these?” Alan asked as he shifted the John Mortimers down one shelf to make room for the Ed McBains.
“Naw,” she said, punching him in the shoulder. “What’s the point of a bunch of books you’ve already read?”
She caught him in the schoolyard on Monday and dragged him by one ear out to the marshy part. She pinned him down and straddled his chest and tickled him with one hand so that he cried out and used the other hand to drum a finger across his lips, so that his cries came out “bibble.”
Once he’d bucked her off, they kissed for a little while, then she grabbed hold of one of his nipples and twisted.
“All right,” she said. “Enough torture. When do I get to meet your family?”
“You can’t,” he said, writhing on the pine needles, which worked their way up the back of his shirt and pricked him across his lower back, feeling like the bristles of a hairbrush.