Page 32 of The Lion in the Library

LEO

We had been talking for an hour, maybe more, when the conversation went quiet in a different way than it had been quiet before.

Not the comfortable quiet of two people who have run out of things to say and are content in that. The other kind — the kind with a question in it.

Estrella was turned slightly toward me on the couch, her legs tucked underneath her, her champagne glass set on the table. The lamp cast everything in warm amber. Outside, the city was doing its late-evening thing, traffic thinning, the particular hush that came after midnight when Los Angeles briefly remembered it was possible to be still.

I had been watching her talk — about the new scenes, about something Luz had said at dinner, about a letter from her mother that had arrived that week — and thinking, with the particular clarity that comes when you have stopped pretending to yourself, that I was in love with this woman in a way I had not been in love with anyone before. Not the easy, photogenic kind of love that looked correct in tabloid photographs. Something more difficult than that. Something that required more of me.

“You’ve gone quiet,” she said.

“I’m listening,” I said. “I like listening to you.”

She smiled, a little self-conscious, and looked down at her hands. “You’re staring.”

“Also yes,” I agreed.

The smile widened. She looked up. Something passed between us in the look — the same thing that had been building all evening, probably all week, probably since the night at the library when she had taken her daughter’s lion from my hand and her fingers had brushed mine and I had stood in the street afterward grinning like an idiot.

I reached over and brushed a strand of hair from her face. My fingers stayed against her cheek a moment longer than the gesture required.

“Estrella,” I said. “I’ve never felt this way about anyone before.” I paused, because the next part was harder to say and I wanted to say it correctly. “I wasn’t sure I was capable of it. Not like this. I thought — for a long time — that the part of me that was supposed to feel this way had gone quiet from disuse.”

She was very still, watching me.

“It hadn’t,” I said. “It was just waiting for the right person.”

She reached up and took my hand from her cheek, holding it. “Nor I,” she said softly. “Despite considerable evidence that I had tried.” A brief, wry smile. “Twice.”

I laughed, which was perhaps not the expected response, but she laughed too, and then the laughter faded and we were looking at each other in the lamplight, and I leaned forward and kissed her.

Not the first time we had kissed. But different. Gone was the carefulness that had been in every kiss before this one — the awareness of sleeping children, of how far was too far, of all the good reasons to move slowly. This was something else. Her hand came up to my jaw, drawing me closer, and I felt the shift in her, the decision made.

When we finally broke apart, both of us were breathing differently.

“The children?” I managed.

“Sound sleepers,” she said. “Especially after a night with toasts and constitutional arguments.”

I pulled back slightly, wanting to be sure. “Estrella, we don’t have to⁠—“

“I know.” She put her finger against my lips, briefly, the gesture more intimate than it had any right to be. “I’ve spent a great deal of my life rushing toward the wrong things.” She took her finger away, met my eyes. “This doesn’t feel like rushing. It feels like finally getting somewhere I’ve been trying to reach for a long time.”

She stood and took my hand.

Her bedroom was modest — a secondhand dresser, a carved wooden bed that she had clearly chosen with care, a single lamp on the nightstand that she switched on low. I had not been in this room before. I took it in the way I took in new things that mattered: thoroughly, quietly, trying to understand what it told me about the person who lived here.

It told me she valued her own comfort over appearances. That she had made a real home in this small space, not a temporary one. That the book on the nightstand had a cracked spine from being read multiple times.

She turned to face me, and I saw it then — a flicker of self-consciousness she was trying to master. Her chin lifted slightly, which I had come to recognize as the thing she did when she was about to face something head-on.

“It’s been a while,” she said. “And I’m not—“ She gestured, briefly, at herself. The gesture encompassed something larger than she said out loud — the body she had, fuller than the impossible standard her industry demanded, marked by the evidence of two children and a full life lived in it.

I crossed the distance between us.

“Estrella.” I put my hands at her waist and waited until she looked at me. “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Not because you conform to some narrow idea of what beautiful means. Because when you laugh, your whole body commits to it. Because your eyes flash when you’re angry. Because you carry yourself like a queen even when life has treated you like anything but.” I paused. “Because you are real, and you’re here, and you’re you.”

Something moved across her face — not quite tears, but close. “I’ve been told I was beautiful many times,” she said quietly. “By men who wanted something from me. It never sounded like that.”