Chapter 2: The Confession at the Bookstore
The bell above the bookstore door chimed at 9:47, a thin, tinny sound that Joan had been meaning to replace for three years. She didn't look up from the cart of returns she was wheeling toward the poetry section. Her fingers were still tacky from the dust rag, and there was a smear of something—coffee, probably, or maybe just age—on the cuff of her cardigan.
"We're closed," she called out, not unkindly.
"I know."
That voice. Joan stopped the cart.
Lauren stood in the doorway, backlit by the streetlamp outside, wearing a charcoal blazer over a black t-shirt and jeans that fit like they'd been tailored. No drag-king makeup tonight—just a clean face, a hint of something at the eyes that might have been liner or might have been exhaustion, and the binder doing its quiet work under the shirt, flattening the curve of her chest into something straighter, squarer. His chest, Joan corrected herself silently. His.
"You look—" Joan started, and then stopped, because every word she could think of was either too small or too much.
"Handsome?" Lauren offered. He stepped inside and let the door swing shut behind him, cutting off the cool night air. "I was going for handsome."
"You got there."
"Good. It took forty-five minutes and I almost bailed twice."
Joan set the dust rag down on the edge of the cart. "You texted me twenty minutes ago that you were 'probably not coming.'"
"I was probably not coming. And then I was coming. And then I was probably not coming again. It was a whole thing." He shoved his hands into his pockets. "I'm here now."
"You're here now."
The bookstore was small enough that two people could feel crowded by each other and large enough that they could circle for hours without actually getting close. Joan had owned it for four years, inherited from a woman named Marguerite who had smoked cigarettes in the back office and left the smell in the walls and the books and the faded armchairs. The chandelier was from Marguerite too—a monstrous brass thing with too many arms and bulbs that were never all lit at once. Tonight, three of them were out.
Lauren walked the aisles slowly, dragging his fingers along the spines. He stopped at a shelf near the register, tilted his head, and pulled out a paperback with a cracked spine and a cover that had faded to a soft, apologetic pink.
"Queer theory?" he asked.
"Marguerite had opinions."
"Marguerite sounds like my kind of woman."
"She was a terror. I adored her." Joan pushed the cart toward the poetry section. "You can help me if you want. Or you can stand there looking handsome. Either's fine."
Lauren followed her. He took a stack of returns from the cart without being asked, and Joan watched him find the right shelf—E through H—and start slotting them in with a care that surprised her. His hands were big. His hands were always big, but she noticed it differently now, in the quiet of the store, with nobody else around.
"You've been texting me a lot," Joan said.
"You've been texting back."
"I have." She slid a Neruda into its place. "I've been texting Mel and Jon too."
"Same." Lauren found another book—Adrienne Rich, worn soft at the corners—and held it for a second before shelving it. "It's weird. I've never talked to three people this much. I keep waiting for someone to get sick of me."
"Has anyone?"
"No."
"Then maybe they're not going to."
Lauren laughed, short and surprised. "You're very direct for a librarian."
"I'm very direct because I'm a librarian. I spend all day surrounded by books that say exactly what they mean. It's refreshing."
They worked through the cart in silence for a while. The chandelier hummed. Somewhere in the back of the store, the old radiator clicked on with a groan and started doing its slow, inadequate work. The whole place smelled like paper and lavender—Joan kept a bowl of dried buds on the counter because Marguerite had done it and it felt wrong to stop—and underneath that, faintly, the cold night air that clung to Lauren's jacket.
"You want to sit?" Joan asked, when the cart was empty.
"Where?"
"The back room. It's not fancy."
"I've seen the armchairs through the window. They look like they've absorbed a lot of secrets."
"They have. I've been keeping them company."
She led him through the narrow door behind the register, the one with the hand-painted sign that said PRIVATE in letters that had chipped down to the wood. The back room was smaller than the front, but warmer, cozy in the way that only rooms with no windows could be. Two armchairs faced each other across a low bookshelf that Joan had built herself one summer, back when she still believed she could fix things with a hammer. Fairy lights were strung along the ceiling beams, and someone—Mel, actually, three weeks ago—had left an unopened bottle of wine on the shelf.
Joan picked it up and looked at the label. "Mel brought this."
"Mel brings wine everywhere. It's her love language."
"I think her love language is actually snacks, but the wine is a close second." Joan set the bottle down. "I don't have a corkscrew."
Lauren reached into his jacket pocket and produced one, small and silver, the kind you'd steal from a hotel bar. "I do."
Joan stared at him.
"You carry a corkscrew."
"I carry a corkscrew, a lighter I don't use, and a tiny bottle of Tabasco. I contain multitudes."
Joan took the corkscrew. Her fingers brushed his, and neither of them moved for a second. Then she turned away and opened the bottle with a practiced twist, and poured wine into two coffee mugs because she didn't have glasses back here. One mug said WORLD'S OKAYEST LIBRARIAN. The other had a cartoon cat on it.
"Classy," Lauren said, taking the cat mug.
"Only the best."
They sat in the armchairs, facing each other across the low shelf, and Joan tucked her feet up under her and watched Lauren do the same—or try to, because he was broader through the shoulders than her and the chair didn't want to accommodate him the way it accommodated her. He ended up with his knees sticking out at angles, which should have looked ridiculous and somehow didn't.
"So," Joan said.
"So."
"You came here."
"I came here." Lauren took a sip from the cat mug. "I've been trying to figure out how to do this for two days. The whole 'being alone with you' thing. It's different, you know? When it's all four of us, I can hide behind the group. Someone else will talk. Someone else will make the joke. But one-on-one, I have to—" he gestured vaguely at himself "—be a person."
"You're doing fine."
"I've been here twelve minutes and I've already told you about the Tabasco."
"That was charming."
"That was a cry for help."
Joan smiled into her mug. The wine was cheap and a little too sweet, but it was warm going down, and the room was warm, and Lauren was looking at her like he was trying to memorize the shape of her face.
"Can I ask you something?" Joan said.
"You can ask me anything. That's kind of the deal, right?"
"I want to be careful. I don't want to say the wrong thing."
"You won't."
"You don't know that."
"Joan." Lauren leaned forward, elbows on his knees, the cat mug balanced between his hands. "I've spent the last three weeks terrified of saying the wrong thing to you. To all of you. And then I did say the wrong thing, over and over, and nobody left. So just—say the thing. Whatever it is."
Joan took a breath. She set her mug down on the little shelf between them and folded her hands in her lap, and she looked at Lauren—really looked, the way she looked at a book when she was deciding whether to buy it for the store, catalogue it, keep it for herself.
"When you're a man," she said, "like tonight. Is it different for you? The way you feel about me?"
Lauren went still. Not tense. Still, the way water went still before it reflected something.
"Yeah," he said. "And no."
"That's a very clear answer."
"It's the only honest one I have." He set his mug down next to hers. "When I'm Lauren the woman, I want you in one way. When I'm Lauren the man, I want you in another. It's not better or worse. It's just—different angles on the same thing. I still want to hold your hand. I still want to make you laugh. I still want to know what you look like when you wake up."
Joan's throat tightened. "That's a lot to want."
"It is."
"Does it scare you?"
"Terrifying," Lauren said, and he smiled, and the smile was crooked and a little sad. "I spent a long time thinking I had to pick one. Like, okay, I'm a man today, so the way I feel has to be man-shaped. Or I'm a woman, so it has to be woman-shaped. But it doesn't work like that. It's all just—me. Wanting you. Wanting Jon. Wanting Mel. The shape doesn't change. The wrapping does."
Joan picked up the Neruda she'd brought back with her, the one she'd been meaning to shelve and hadn't, and turned it over in her hands. It was an old edition, the pages yellowed, the spine cracked exactly in the middle where some previous reader had left it open too long.
"I've been learning to be patient my whole life," she said quietly. "I was the kid who waited for everyone else to finish talking. I was the teenager who waited for the right moment to tell her parents she liked girls. I was the adult who waited for the right person, and then the right people, and then—" she looked up at Lauren "—the right person again, except this time he's wearing a blazer and carrying a corkscrew."
"Are you calling me the right person?"
"I'm calling you worth the wait."
Lauren didn't move. His eyes were bright and steady and a little wet at the edges, and Joan watched him decide something behind them—watch the decision land—and then he stood up out of the armchair, and the cat mug wobbled on the shelf, and he crossed the tiny room in two steps and knelt down in front of her chair so that he was looking up at her instead of down.
"You've been waiting," he said.
"I've been waiting."
"I'm sorry. I didn't know."
"You weren't supposed to know. That was the point of the waiting." Joan reached out and touched his jaw, light, careful, the way she'd touched his chin in Mel's bathroom two nights ago when she'd told him to wash off the beard. "But I'm done waiting now. If you are."
Lauren turned his face into her palm. His skin was warm. His breath was warm. "I'm done," he said, and it came out ragged, like he'd been holding it in for longer than either of them knew.
Joan leaned down out of the chair. Lauren leaned up. They met in the middle, awkward and slow and not quite right at first—noses bumping, the angle off—and then Lauren tilted his head and Joan adjusted hers and the second try was right.
It was a small kiss. Tender. Terrifying. The kind of kiss that felt like a question and an answer at the same time, and Joan felt it in her chest and her throat and the tips of her fingers, which had found the back of Lauren's neck and stayed there, holding on, holding him steady.
When they pulled apart, neither of them went far. Lauren's forehead rested against hers, his breath warm against her mouth, and Joan could feel his heart going—fast, faster than hers, or maybe not, maybe hers was racing too, maybe they were both doing the same ridiculous thing.
"Okay," she whispered.
"Okay," he whispered back.
"I told Jon and Mel."
Lauren pulled back just enough to look at her. "Told them what?"
"That I wanted this. That I wanted you." Joan's voice was steady, which surprised her. "I told them two days ago. The morning after the rain. We were all at Mel's, and you went to get coffee, and I just—said it. Out loud. To both of them."
Lauren stared at her. "And they said what?"
"Jon said 'yeah, obviously.' Mel said 'finally.' They said they'd been waiting for you to catch up."
"To catch up?"
"They've been waiting too. All three of us. We just didn't want to push you. You set the pace." Joan smiled, small and dry. "You take a long time to make a move, Lauren."
"I'm worth the wait," Lauren said, echoing her words, and his voice cracked on the end of it, and they both laughed, quiet and close in the little room.
Joan kissed him again, quicker this time, sure of the angle, and she felt him smile against her mouth.
Outside, the bookstore was dark except for the chandelier's stubborn three bulbs and the moon coming through the front windows in silver strips. The night settled around the little room, and the fairy lights hummed, and somewhere in the front of the store the radiator ticked its slow, patient tick.
Lauren shifted, sitting back on his heels, and looked at her with wide, wet, brilliant eyes.
"So what happens now?" he asked.
Joan picked up her mug again. The wine was almost gone. The cat on the ceramic looked unimpressed.
"Now you finish your wine," she said, "and you tell me what it's like being a man, and I'll tell you what it's like being patient, and then we'll walk out of here together and I'll text Jon and Mel that you finally made a move."
"That's the plan?"
"That's the plan."
Lauren grinned—wide, unguarded, the kind of grin that made the freckles on his face look like constellations.
"Okay," he said. "But you should know I'm going to want to do this again. The kissing part. Not just the wine part."
"You'd better."
"I mean it. I'm going to want to do it a lot."
Joan set the mug down and leaned forward and kissed him one more time, just to prove the point, just to hear the little surprised sound he made against her lips, just to feel his hand come up and cup her elbow like he was steadying himself.
"I'm counting on it," she said.
And the chandelier above them flickered, one of its three bulbs finally giving up, and the room got a shade dimmer and a shade warmer, and neither of them moved to fix it.
They stayed like that until the wine was gone and the radiator had ticked itself into silence. Joan's mug sat empty on the shelf between them, the cartoon cat still unimpressed. Lauren had kicked off his shoes at some point. His socks didn't match—one black, one gray—and Joan found herself staring at them like they were the most interesting thing in the room.
"You're looking at my feet," Lauren said.
"I'm looking at your socks."
"They're a statement."
"About what?"
"Mortality. Obviously. Same as the beard." He stretched, arms over his head, the blazer pulling tight across his shoulders. "What time is it?"
Joan checked her phone. "Eleven-twenty."
"Shit." Lauren stood up, found his shoes, didn't put them on. "I told Mel I'd text her when I was done here. She's probably been staring at her phone for an hour."
"She texted me twice."
"What'd she say?"
Joan turned her phone around. The screen glowed: is he still there? and then, twenty minutes later, okay so he's still there.
Joan turned the phone around so Lauren could read it.
"Okay so he's still there," Lauren read aloud, and his mouth pulled sideways. "That's the most Mel text I've ever seen."
"She's been pacing her apartment for an hour."
"I should go." He said it without moving.
"You should go," Joan agreed, and reached for her cardigan anyway, and didn't stand up. "Give me five minutes to lock up."
She killed the lights in the back room and left the chandelier on its stubborn three bulbs. Lauren carried both mugs to the tiny sink behind the counter while she counted the till and wrote the day's numbers in a spiral notebook with a pen that barely worked. The pen skipped. She kept writing anyway, letters dragging like they were as tired as she was.
Outside, the street had gone quiet. The rain from two nights ago was a memory in the curb puddles, and the air had that sharp late-September bite that made you walk faster. Joan locked the door behind them and turned the key twice, because Marguerite had always turned it twice, and Marguerite's habits had a way of sticking.
"How are you getting home?" she asked.
"Bus. The twenty-two stops two blocks from my place."
"I'll walk you to the stop."
"You don't have to."
"I want to."
They walked. The city at this hour belonged to the service industry and the insomniacs and the occasional taxi driver who took corners too fast. A man was hosing down the sidewalk in front of a closed deli. A woman in scrubs was eating a gyro out of foil on the library steps. Lauren walked with his hands in his pockets and his shoulder occasionally brushing Joan's, and neither of them said anything about it.
At the bus stop, the digital sign said the twenty-two was nine minutes out.
"Nine minutes," Joan said.
"Nine minutes."
She turned to face him. The streetlight made a halo out of his hair and caught the freckles on his cheekbones, and Joan had the sudden, absurd thought that she was going to miss him the way you missed a place you'd loved, even before you'd left it.
"I meant what I said," she told him. "In the store. About being done waiting."
"I know you did."
"I'm not going to make it a thing. I'm not going to text you tonight with a hundred messages. But I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen either, and you shouldn't either. When you get home, I want you to think about whether this is what you want, and if it is, I want you to say so. To my face. Not over text."
Lauren nodded slowly. "And if I say it isn't?"
"Then I'll be sad and we'll all have dinner and we'll figure it out. I'm a librarian. I've got a system for sad." She smiled. "But I don't think you're going to say it isn't."
The bus came around the corner, headlights washing the sidewalk white, and Lauren stepped forward and hugged her. Quick and full and solid, the way he hugged people, all of his broadness wrapped around her like he was trying to keep her warm in the cold.
"Friday," he said into her hair. "Come to my place. All three of you. Seven o'clock."
"Friday," Joan said.
Lauren got on the bus. The doors folded shut. He raised one hand through the window as it pulled away, and Joan stood on the sidewalk under the streetlight and watched the taillights shrink into the traffic until they were gone.
Friday arrived three days later, quick as a page turn.
Jon got to Lauren's street first, a bottle of Malbec swinging from one hand in a paper bag, his jacket thrown over his arm because it had been crisp at six and warm by seven. He walked up the steps to Lauren's front door and stopped.
Mel was sitting on the stoop. Joan was sitting next to her. They both had paper bags too.
"You're here," Jon said.
"We're here," Mel said.
"I thought—" Jon looked at the door, then back at them. "You texted me at five saying to bring wine."
"She texted all of us," Joan said. "I got the same message."
Jon stared at the door. "She's been planning something."
"She has," Mel said. "She's been weird all day. Capital-W weird. She asked me what my ring size was and then said 'no reason.'"
"What does that mean?"
"I don't know. I've been trying not to think about it."
Jon cracked up. He climbed the steps and set his bag down and pulled both of them into a hug without warning, one arm around each, his chin over the top of their heads. Mel grumbled into his collarbone. Joan laughed against his chest. They held on for a long moment, all three of them, the way people do when they've been trying to act casual and have given up.
Then they knocked on the door together. Three sets of knuckles, uneven, goofy, loud enough that a neighbor's porch light flicked on.
The door opened.
Lauren stood there in a denim-brown dress. Sleeveless. The neckline plunging just enough. The fabric fell from her waist into a soft, loose skirt, and the color matched her eyeshadow in a way that suggested she'd spent an hour at it—bronze, gold, a shimmer at the inner corner. Her hair was down. Her arms were bare, and muscled, and freckled at the shoulders exactly like Jon's.
She'd done something with the lighting. It came from behind her, low and warm, and it made her look like something being unveiled.
"Hi," she said, and her voice came out her voice, pitched and warm, the she that meant she.
"Hi," Jon said, hoarse.
"You look—" Mel started and then stopped because she didn't have the word.
"Good," Joan supplied. "She looks good."
"It's the dress," Lauren said. "I borrowed it from the back of my closet and negotiated with it for an hour. Come in. You can't just stand on the porch."
They came in. Jon handed her the Malbec. Mel handed her her bag. Joan handed her her bottle of something clear and homemade that a library patron had given her and that Joan had never had the courage to open alone.
Then Jon stopped dead in the hallway.
The living room had been rearranged. The couch was shoved against the wall. The coffee table was stacked neatly in a corner. In the center of the room, where the floor should have been, was a bed. A big bed. A mattress low to the ground and covered in mismatched sheets and pillows and a quilt that definitely had to have come from a thrift store. Fairy lights were strung along the bookshelf and around the window. Candles flickered on the sill, and the whole room smelled like cinnamon and clean cotton and something green.
"What," Jon said.
"I got a deal on the frame," Lauren said, and her cheeks went pink. "I've been planning this for a week. Well. I've been planning this since the rain, if I'm honest, and then I made a list, and then I bought a mattress. And you're all here and it's happening and I have no idea if it's what any of you actually want."
"It's what I want," Joan said.
"Same," Mel said.
Jon still hadn't moved. Lauren stepped up beside him and touched his elbow, light, and Jon turned and looked at her, and there was a moment in which nobody said anything and everything was understood.
"Okay," he said. "Okay."
She poured the wine into four mismatched glasses—she'd clearly raided the kitchen, the glasses didn't match at all—and they settled onto the bed because the bed was the only place to sit. Jon ended up against the headboard, and Mel sprawled on her stomach in the middle, and Joan sat cross-legged near the pillows, and Lauren sat nearest to the edge with her feet tucked.
"So this is what the weird texts were about," Mel said.
"This is what the weird texts were about."
"Capital-W weird."
"I warned you."
"You told me my ring size was no reason to worry and then asked what I thought about side tables."
"Do you have thoughts about side tables?"
"I have a lot of thoughts about side tables."
They drank. The wine was warm and dry and it made Mel's cheeks go pink and Jon's shoulders drop from where they'd been hugging his ears. Lauren poured a second round and told a story about a client at the physical therapy clinic who'd tried to do dead lifts while holding a chihuahua. Joan laughed until she had to press a hand to her mouth. Mel almost choked on her wine.
The evening lost its edges. The candles burned lower. The fairy lights blurred at the corners of everyone's vision. Jon stretched his arm out along the headboard and Joan leaned into it, and Mel propped her chin on her hand and looked at all of them with her eyes half-lidded and fond.
"Can I say something?" Lauren said, later, when the bottle was nearly gone.
"You always can," Jon said.
"I've been wanting to do something all night. It's weird. It might be weird. Stop me if it's weird."
"I'm listening," Mel said.
Lauren reached out and set her glass on the sill. "I want to try something. I want you all to close your eyes."
Joan looked at her. The candlelight moved across Lauren's face, bronze and gold, and Joan understood, all at once, exactly what was being asked.
She closed her eyes.
"Mel," Lauren said. "I need you to close yours too."
"I'm already closed."
"Jon."
"Closed."
The room went quiet. Joan felt the mattress shift as Lauren moved. She felt the air change—someone close, someone warm—and she kept her eyes shut and her heart doing something fast and foolish in her chest.
Lauren's mouth touched Mel's first. Joan could hear it—the small sound of it, Mel's indrawn breath, the way the mattress moved. Then it was gone and the air changed again and Lauren was in front of Joan, and Lauren's hand found her jaw, and then her mouth was on Joan's, soft and sure, the way it had been in the bookstore on Monday, and Joan thought: yes, this, this is what she meant.
Then it was gone and there was a rustle and a pause, and Jon made a low, surprised sound. Joan nearly opened her eyes then. She kept them shut, but she heard it—the kiss, drawn-out, the way Jon's breath caught and then released, the hum of it. It went on longer than the others.
Then Joan heard Lauren whisper something to Jon. She couldn't make out the words. Then the mattress moved and Mel's hand found Joan's wrist, and Joan felt Mel's breath against her ear.
"Open," Mel said.
Joan opened her eyes. Lauren was kissing Jon, and Mel's hand was pulling Joan toward them, and Lauren's free hand found Joan's shoulder and pulled her in. Joan went. She went into it and pressed her mouth to the corner of Mel's jaw at the same time Mel pressed hers to Joan's, and everything broke open at once.
They didn't choose. They didn't talk about it. Mel kissed Joan properly and Joan kissed her back, and Jon pulled Mel away by her hip, and Lauren caught Joan's face and kissed her with all of that long-held patience gone, and Jon's mouth found Lauren's neck, and the quilt got pushed into a heap on the floor.
Somewhere in it, Jon's hand found Lauren's wrist and squeezed, and the two of them stilled for a second while Mel and Joan tangled together beside them. Jon looked at her. The fairy lights caught his eyes and made them blue and gold all at once.
"I have to ask you something," he said, and his voice was rough, and he was smiling.
"Now?"
"It can't wait. If I don't ask now I'll be wondering the whole—" he gestured vaguely at everything.
Lauren laughed, breathless. "Ask."
"What do we do about—" another vague gesture "—who goes where. I usually—I mean, I've usually—"
"Top," Lauren said, and laughed. "Yeah. Me too."
They looked at each other. Jon's face went through a series of complicated expressions and settled on something soft and a little stunned.
"I don't care," he said. "I mean, I care. But I don't. Whatever you want."
"You first," Lauren said. "I'll go first. It'd be an honor."
Jon made a sound that was almost a laugh and almost not. Mel called over, muffled, "What are you two whispering about over there," and Joan said, "They're negotiating," and Mel said, "Oh, good, let me know when they've landed the deal," and Lauren reached over and pulled Mel back into the tangle because she was not going to be left out of anything.
The fairy lights flickered. The candles on the sill gave up one by one. And the four of them stopped talking, for a little while, because words had done all the work they could do tonight.
Later—much later, when the quilt had been dragged back onto the bed and the room had gone blue with early morning, and somebody's elbow was in somebody's ribs, and all four of them were tangled together and none of them wanted to be the one to move—Jon said into the dark, "You had a whole list."
"I had a whole list," Lauren said.
"Was the bed on the list?"
"The bed was number one."
"The side tables were number four," Mel said. "I asked. She wouldn't tell me numbers two and three."
"Number two was candles," Lauren said. "Number three was the dress."
"Good list," Joan said.
"Good list," Jon agreed.
The radiator in the hallway ticked. The fairy lights had burned down to a faint, sleepy amber. Outside the window, the first birds were doing their stupid early-morning thing, and the sky was going pearly at the edges, and the night was over in that way nights are—slowly and then all at once.
Mel snored softly. Joan's breathing evened out. Lauren lay on her side facing Jon across the rumpled dark, and Jon looked back at her, and neither of them spoke because there wasn't anything left to say. She reached across and touched the freckles on the back of his hand, one by one, the way you count something you're afraid to lose, and Jon turned his hand over and laced his fingers through hers.
The list was done.