He found me in the travel section, and I let him, because lonely women do stupid things on Saturdays.

I'd been holding the Iceland book for six minutes. Not reading it. Using it as a prop so I could stand in the back of the bookshop on Claremont where the cracked skylight turns the wall gold around three o'clock and the air tastes like dust and paper and someone else's coffee. I came here most Saturdays. Not for the books. For the hour where the quiet felt chosen instead of inherited.

"That one's incredible," he said from behind me. "The glacier section will ruin you."

I turned too fast. The book slipped. I grabbed it, fumbled it, caught it against my stomach with both hands like a volleyball save. A woman in the poetry section looked over.

"Smooth," I said to no one. To myself. To the universe.

He was tall. Dark hair pushed back. Brown skin warm under the skylight. He was trying not to laugh, which was worse than laughing, because the trying made his mouth do something complicated that I didn't want to be noticing.

"Ruin me how?"

"Make you quit your job and move to Reykjavik." He smiled, but it arrived a beat late. Like the parts of it had to find each other first. "I'm exaggerating. You'll only think about quitting."

"I'm freelance. I already quit."

"Then you're halfway to Iceland."

I laughed. Too loud. The sound bounced off the shelves and the poetry woman looked over again and I wanted to dissolve into the floor. But his smile loosened. Like my graceless, too-big laugh had knocked something off-kilter in him.

"Sorry," I said. "I haven't... I'm out of practice. Talking to people."

"How out of practice?"

"Six weeks in this city. You're the longest conversation I've had that wasn't about a design deadline."

I hadn't meant to say that. The honesty was too much, too fast, the kind of thing you hear yourself say and then want to reach into the air and push back into your mouth. The heat climbed my neck.

"Three months for me," he said. "And I counted the guy at the dry cleaner's."

Something in my chest loosened and I didn't want it to. Loosening was how you let people in and I'd stopped doing that, specifically, on purpose, fourteen months ago.

We talked. Forty minutes between the shelves and the coffee cart. He bought me a drip because I said I was caffeine-dependent and he said, "Then I'd be negligent not to." I took a sip and it was terrible and I said so and he tasted it and agreed and we stood there drinking bad coffee neither of us wanted because putting the cups down would mean the conversation was over.

His name was Rhen. No last name. Consulting, he said. Vague. I should have pushed. I opened my mouth to push and then he asked about Portland and I forgot the question I'd been forming.

My fingers went to the gold chain at my throat. The silence where the reason should have been sat between us. He didn't push.

Instead he said, "What do you miss that you didn't expect to miss?"

"The rain. Which is insane."

He nodded. Then he started saying something about his sister's kitchen, a window over a sink, and stopped. Started a different sentence. Stopped that too. His hands went to his pockets.

"The light," he said finally. "I was going to say something about light but it sounded pretentious in my head."

"Say it anyway."

"There's an hour where the light in my sister's kitchen turns everything gold. Like this." He gestured at the skylight. "I come to bookshops for that. For the feeling of it."

"That's not pretentious."

"You're being kind."

"I'm being honest. Those are different things."

He looked at me. The looking landed on my skin before my brain registered it. The specific weight of being watched by someone who'd decided to watch.

Then his hand reached past me for a book on the top shelf. His forearm brushed my shoulder. Brief. He could have avoided it. He didn't.

His ears went red. The color crept up from his collar, obvious, uncontrollable. He pulled back holding a book he clearly didn't want, and the redness was what got me. Because that wasn't smooth. That was a man startled by his own body.

"Good book," he said, not looking at it.

"You're holding it upside down."

He looked. He was. He closed it and put it back and stood there with empty hands and burning ears and for one perfect moment he was not charming at all.

"I should go," I said.

"Can I have your number?"

Direct. No preamble. But his voice had a rough edge, like the asking cost him something.

I typed my number into his phone. He angled the screen away. I filed it nowhere. I should have filed it somewhere.

He left. The door chimed. And I was standing alone with a cold cup and my skin still holding the exact shape of where his arm had touched me.

I walked home. Twelve blocks. Replaying his red ears. The fumbled book. His attention, which had been warm and total and then suddenly clumsy, like a man who'd been balancing something delicate and almost dropped it.

My phone buzzed.

Forgot to mention. The glacier section starts on page 47. Don't say I didn't warn you.

I stared at the screen until it went dark. Then I stared at the dark screen.

Then I typed four different responses, deleted all of them, and put the phone face-down on the counter.

The gold chain was warm against my collarbone. The apartment was quiet. The refrigerator hummed.

I picked the phone up again.