“I don’t know why I have to do all the work.”

Blithe let me stay in his guest room and it was different from the Rhiz’s files.

The decor was the same, but I wasn’t.

In the mornings, I meditated with Alice in my guest nook, then stared out at the palm trees brushing against the sky, embarrassed by how narrow-minded I’d become in the other city, dreaming of ruin and degeneration. Blithe would make me a California smoothie. Then we’d go to the gym and he’d drop me off at the university library before he went to see his healer. His father had gone to the U and let me use his alumnus library card to get in. I didn’t want to sit in a café with all the other “creatives” trying to break into television.

One morning, I was reading a crime novel because I longed for every loose end of a story to get tied up, and I saw her. She was sitting two tables over in the large reading room with her back to the cylindrical windows. A newspaper was sprawled out before her. Newspapers used to trigger me—new acts of destruction and violence every single day—but as she turned the pages, she reminded me of the soft eternity of daily habits. Her hair was wavy and fell down her shoulders. She wore a light blue button-up shirt, and I could see rings on her fingers. She wore clothes so well I couldn’t tell if they were new, old, fancy, heat-maintaining. She exceeded them.

A removed observer might have been able to read her, but I couldn’t.

She seemed unaware of the frenzied world outside her gaze.

The gauzy lightness of that moment did not turn to any sharper texture.

Was it her beauty, languor, or discipline that drew me in?

I was stunned. Smitten. I didn’t have any fresh language for the encounter.

I couldn’t envision talking to her, but I returned to the same table every day. I read crime novels or wrote spastic and incomprehensible lines about the skin of plants. She surrounded herself with piles of books, and once she opened one, she did not furtively check her phone like the others.

I sat on the front stairs of the library on an unhurried afternoon, waiting for Blithe to come get me. It was midsummer, but there were few signs of it. I hadn’t seen the reader in the library for a few days; her absence had solidified the crush. I basked in the seasonless sun and watched groups of undergrads without even worrying that they were headed toward a brighter future than mine.

Blithe pulled up. His head was newly shaved. He had taken to wearing a gray linen robe everywhere.

“I like this look,” I told him.

He nodded.

“How’s it going with your healer?”