Koi No Yokan
Koi no yokan (Japanese) — the feeling of knowing that you will soon fall in love with the person you have just met.
Therese brushed her fingers against the tabletop as she walked, casting dust up from where it had settled just moments ago. These rows of yellowing paperbacks had become remarkably familiar to her, each worn spine settling as a memory into the archives of her mind. Her phone buzzed once in her pocket, a notification undoubtedly from Dannie wondering where she could be this late in the evening. It was a rarity that she ever came across another soul in the quietude of the bookshop other than the owner himself — especially at this hour — but Therese often caught herself choosing to bask in the joys of solitude rather than reminisce on past memories of the extrovert she had once been. A sliver of moonlight split the darkened store ahead of her, coming to pool on an aged copy of The Book Thief; a novel she’d been meaning to get around to for months now but had failed to ever quite find the time.
A smile ghosted at the corners of her mouth as she tugged it from its place between two other titles she’d most likely end up reading, too; deft fingers slipping the hardback from its sleeve and running themselves over the coarse buckram of the exterior. Behind her, the shop’s suspended bell tinkled once, almost timid in its mellifluence as Therese glanced over her shoulder to regard the newcomer. The door closed with something of a quiet click as two eyes met from across the room, a pair of understated green irises pierced suddenly by their glacial blue counterparts. The strangers each allowed themselves three bold seconds of observance before gazes averted and for a threateningly bleak moment, Therese thought that would be the termination of this whimsical encounter. She drew her eyes back to the volume in her slender hands, tracing each shadowed letter with a tired nail. Her phone vibrated again and this time she took the liberty of pulling it from her pocket; as predicted, Dannie’s name lit up the lock screen.
You okay?
Five minutes ago, and then another message which had come through just seconds before.
Therese?
The regret was there, of course — she sensed his worry and had to fight the guilt which threatened to rear its head, sliding her thumb across the keyboard in a haphazard reply.
All good, just at the bookstore.
“Isn’t it ironic?”
Therese flinched, jolted out of her reverie by another voice. Peering up from the blue-tinged illumination of her phone screen, she blinked a few times in gradual adjustment to the near-stygian lighting of the store. The same pair of intimidatingly icy eyes met her inter viam, creased this time in the beginnings of a cautious smile.
“A phone in a bookshop, I mean.”
Did she mean because phones were modern in a way that books weren't? Some wise joke about e-books she couldn't quite grasp? Either way, a nod from Therese. The silent castigation of her gormlessness echoed from somewhere inside her head. Blinking, the younger woman tried to work a coherent sentence out from her dry throat, tapping her left index finger on the copy she held now with a vice-like grip.
“Very.”
Very? Therese shut her eyes briefly, summoning the courage to try and speak again without making an absolute fool of herself in front of this woman who was the very picture of adult sophistication. She allowed herself a quick sweep of the blonde, praying that in the caliginous lambency of the room, the manner in which her eyes slipped downwards wouldn’t be noticed. Instantly, there was that stifling attraction; this time, directed at the way the stranger dressed. A navy pantsuit clad her figure, flaring out past her knees in such a fashion that one could imagine the entire outfit billowing in non-existent wind. It stretched up to her hips, parting then just above her abdomen in a narrow ‘v’ which laid way to a white blouse. Clocking suddenly the conspicuous number of seconds she had spent unabashedly checking this woman out, Therese drew her gaze back up from her intricately defined collar bones, swallowing once and then twice as she was given a sharp taste of how dry her mouth had suddenly become. The younger woman felt childishly underdressed in her loose denim jacket and a dark dress that must have guarded the confines of her closet for years, now, but it was far better than the sweatpants and Friends shirt she’d been sporting yesterday. Therese didn’t even watch Friends.
The blonde’s mouth was curled slightly up at its right edge, a smirk playing at her otherwise stoic expression — she had noticed, but Therese was grateful for the lack of reaction it seemed to incite. Instead, she extended a gloved hand, lifting her chin slightly as appeared to be the required posture of a handshake from such a suave woman as this. For a moment, Therese worried about the imminent clamminess of her slightly trembling hands, registering after a beat that the velvet gloves should provide a sufficient barrier between their two palms. She lifted her own arm up to meet the stranger’s, her face forming what she could only hope resembled a smile.
“Carol. Carol Aird.”
Carol. The name carried so much irreclaimable weight and yet simultaneously, seemed to roll from Carol’s lips with the insouciance of a dandelion seed in February air, splitting the frost between them with its threatening hopefulness. Therese watched the way Carol’s tongue darted momentarily between her lips at the pronunciation of that final letter, the ‘l’ which she dragged out as if to slip a double-entendre where there was barely even a locatable single-entendre in the first place. Therese exhaled, relieved to finally be able to place a name to that unforgettable face, chiseled as it may have been by Michelangelo himself.
“Therese Belivet.”
Immediately, there was a quiet spark of intrigue that lit itself between Carol’s eyes, her head cocking almost imperceptibly to the left — a move which Therese wouldn’t have caught at all had it not been for the faint shift of the shadows cast across the taller woman’s face. She glanced down at their interlocked hands, noting silently how neither participant in the handshake had opted yet to pull away. With fingers still resting obstinately between them, Carol spoke again.
“Terez, not Thereese?”
The inquiry was one that Therese had heard dozens of times prior to this conversation — never like this, though, with the silky over-articulation of that notorious second syllable, the way that Carol seemed to exhale the words that she was speaking, as if talking and breathing were not such different things for her at all. Therese nodded her head curtly, making the move to pull her hand back down to rest at her own side and taking cautious observations of both the disappointed shift in Carol’s demeanour and the immediate rush of deprivation that came with their parting. Carol’s name still echoed around Therese’s head, engraving itself into memories and winding its alluring figure down into her thought processes as inconspicuously as any other word might have done.
“Is Carol an abbreviation for anything? Is it short for any other name?”
Chastising herself at the irrelevant second question, Therese was quickly reminded of the awkwardness she seemed to carry around like a sword, wielding it only in conversations where she actually needed to present herself as something other than a socially inept twenty-three year old. Ignoring the faux pas, Carol allowed herself a smile at last, the warmth spreading like a sunrise across the slopes and valleys of her face.
“I think there was a time where I was destined to be a Carolyn,”
She paused, musing over the idea before discarding it with a bemused quirk of her eyebrows.
“But no, I’m afraid. Carol seems to be all I have to go on.”
Therese relished the sound of her voice, once again letting it flood the stilled air around the two women and feeling its reverberations throughout her own head.
“I think it’s a beautiful name.”
The only coherent string of words she’d uttered for the duration of this entire encounter, and the most sincere, too. Perhaps, if the day had been longer and the sky lighter, Therese would have been able to see the faint blush which coloured Carol’s cheeks — the day, however, was long, the sky dark, and neither could see the sheepish expressions which clouded the other’s face. Carol made a vague gesture at the book Therese was holding, her slender fingers almost skimming against its spine but pulling sharply away when the proximity between two almost-strangers became too close to be anything but intoxicating.
“Have you ever read it before?”
Therese glanced down at the pages, flicking them anxiously between her thumb.
“No, not yet. I don’t usually read books more than once.”
A page, slightly torn by what must have been a previous reader (this was, after all, a second-hand bookshop) caught between Therese’s slightly bitten nail and the motion she had been using to distract them both ceased, giving way instead to a quiet gulp that the younger woman had assumed would be masked by the sound of paper on paper. Carol smiled again, her hand twitching reflexively in what would otherwise have been a move to cup Therese’s cheek in her palm, stilling the obvious discomfort writhing inside her head.
“That’s a lie.”
Carol started slightly, reasonably heedless of such an unexplainable sentence to break such an unexplainable silence. A plucked eyebrow was delicately raised on her behalf, awaiting the rest of Therese’s statement. Clearly fumbling for words in front of Carol, Therese opened her mouth once before closing it again with a small huff, her face a picture of fluster and frustration.
“I do read books more than once, usually, if I enjoy them enough. I don’t really know why I said I didn’t. But I haven’t read The Book Thief. That part wasn’t a lie. Have you?”
With a burning passion, Therese hated the way that words were deciding to form in her head tonight, senseless and rambling, as opposed to ordinary days in which she’d at least be able to hold a civilised conversation with another woman. Carol smiled again, her lips curved in what could have been described as a smirk but for the fact that her expression connoted no smugness at all. In fact, Therese noted, she looked considerably earnest for such an elegant woman listening to such a bumbling mess.
“Not yet, no. It’s been recommended a few times, but I prefer to have a reliable approval of any book before I waste my time on a bad novel.”
For a brief moment, Therese paused to wonder what someone with little time to waste was doing in an ailing second-hand bookshop on a Tuesday night at eleven, but that train of thought was quick to vanish as soon as it had made an appearance in her head as Carol leaned conspicuously towards her. Forgetting momentarily what actions one was supposed to carry out in the way of breathing, Therese begged her body not to subconsciously slip from Carol’s berth as the blonde placed a manicured left hand on the counter behind the younger woman. She smells like thunder, Therese remarked, silently, willing herself to stare ahead at a wilted copy of Never Let Me Go rather than at the curved lips of another woman she had known for the best part of five minutes.
“May I?”
Carol breathed the words into the air by Therese’s ear, eliciting a barely-concealable shiver from Therese. With a sharp inhale of realisation, Therese discerned that Carol was talking about the book, rather than any of the other possibilities that she had inadvertently let her mind explore. Nodding stoically, she handed over the tired novel, realising a second too late that four small cavities had been etched into the cover where her nails had been gripping on for dear life. Leaning innocently back, Carol ran her own fingers over the miniature canyons, her smirk this time full of the suggestive smugness she had been reigning in before.
“I suppose you’ll have to buy this now.”
Therese was the one to smile this time, her dimples shadowed in the pale moonlight as Carol watched wordlessly on. Smile again, she wanted to say, as Therese’s expression slipped back into one of amused intrigue. You’re beautiful.
“I suppose I will.”
Therese turned away from Carol, fishing in her pocket for the spare change she’d rescued from her flat. At the sound of coins rattling against each other, the shop assistant glanced up, his face the perfect summary of such ridiculous hours as these. Sleep clung still to his eyelids, running down his face and pooling above his cheekbones in bags so dark that only the ones Therese had seen under her own eyes put up any competition. He gave a weak smile as the jarring beep of the barcode scanner echoed through the shop, startling Carol out of the trance she’d been in, watching the way Therese moved. Her eyes flickered down first to the coins that Therese was tugging out of her purse, then up to the forlorn expression that she didn’t even bother to hide as she regarded the exhausted boy. He brushed an unkempt few strands of hair out of his eyes, only for it to flop back down again, and again after the second fix-up attempt.
Therese watched on, all too familiar with this agonising routine, of late nights that ended up turning into mornings whether you wanted sleep or not. With a flinch, she reached back into her wallet, sliding two crumpled twenties across the counter as she went to retrieve her two dollar book. The boy looked first at the money and then up at her, his smile broadening into something more genuine as his profits for the night more than doubled in one payment. You don’t have that money to give. Therese brushed off the thought for fear of the clawing guilt that would ensue, wrapping its inescapable tendrils around her legs and rooting her to the ground for days. She refused to slip back into that routine, nodding once in a brief you’re welcome at the incredulous assistant before she turned and strode briskly out of the shop.
After a beat, footsteps found their way into the night behind her, pacing themselves faster than Therese hoped perhaps would be Carol’s normal walking speed.
“Forty dollars,” Carol remarked, an unwanted reminder of the money Therese had thrown away. Not thrown, given. Thrown.
Therese twisted around, coming face-to-face with Carol, slightly breathless now with the walk-jogging, simultaneously taken aback by the sudden stop. There was almost a collision before Therese stepped carefully back, leaving the two women close enough still for each to feel the strain of that wanton desire.
“Could you…”
Carol trailed off, visibly unsure about what it was exactly that she would follow with. Therese sensed that this was perhaps the first time Carol had been even remotely flustered in a long while, and an emotion not dissimilar to pride crossed her features briefly before she regained her composure to let Carol continue.
“Could you tell me how The Book Thief goes?”
A quiet triumph filled Therese as she was reminded that Carol only took recommendations from ‘reliable’ peers, tailed rather solemnly by the question of how exactly Therese was going to pull off asking for Carol’s number without sounding as hopelessly infatuated as she worried she might well become. Cutting off Therese’s meek sentence before she could even begin to utter the words, Carol slipped two fingers into the air between them, a pale blue card held deftly in the space where her fingers met.
“Call me.”
Therese gawped.
"If you want to."
And with a wink, Carol Aird turned and sauntered into the thinning crowds of 4th Avenue, as Therese Belivet stood and watched her go.