Chapter 2: The Morning After the Rhyme

The morning sun streamed through the tall windows of The Last Page with an unforgiving brightness that made everything look harsh and overexposed. Elara stood behind the counter of the coffee shop next door, mechanically steaming milk and pulling espresso shots while her mind replayed every moment from the night before in vivid, mortifying detail.

What had she been thinking?

The silver ring on her finger caught the light as she twisted it nervously, watching through the café's window as the first customers of the day began filtering into Julian's bookstore. She'd been working since six AM, grateful for the distraction of the morning rush, but now that things had slowed down, there was nothing to keep her thoughts from spiraling.

She was nineteen. He was forty-two. She worked at a coffee shop and lived in a studio apartment above the hardware store. He owned property and had a doctorate and probably thought she was just some silly girl who'd thrown herself at him in a moment of literary-induced madness.

The bell above the café door chimed, and Elara looked up to see Mrs. Henderson, the town librarian and unofficial keeper of all local gossip, approaching the counter with her usual knowing smile.

"Good morning, dear," Mrs. Henderson said, her eyes twinkling with barely contained curiosity. "You look positively glowing today. Must have been quite an inspiring poetry reading last night."

Elara's hand stilled on the espresso machine. Did she know? Could people somehow tell when you'd had earth-shattering sex with the local bookstore owner on his Persian rug?

"It was... educational," Elara managed, forcing a smile. "The usual? Large coffee, two sugars?"

"You know me so well." Mrs. Henderson leaned against the counter conspiratorially. "I heard Julian Blackwood was there last night. He rarely makes appearances at those artsy gatherings. Must have been quite the performance to draw him out."

Heat flooded Elara's cheeks. "I wouldn't know. I left early."

It wasn't technically a lie, though "early" was relative when you considered she'd spent two hours in his back room being thoroughly ravaged by a man who quoted Yeats between kisses.

Mrs. Henderson collected her coffee with a knowing hum, leaving Elara alone with her churning thoughts once again. Through the window, she could see Julian moving around inside his store, straightening shelves and helping customers with the same calm professionalism he'd always displayed. From this distance, there was no sign that anything had changed, no indication that he'd spent the previous evening making her come apart in his hands while whispering her name like a prayer.

Maybe that's all it had been to him—a moment of weakness, quickly regretted.

The morning dragged on with excruciating slowness. Every time the café door opened, Elara's heart jumped, hoping and dreading that it might be Julian. But he never came. Not for his usual afternoon coffee, not even to glance in her direction when he walked past the window.

By three o'clock, when her shift finally ended, Elara felt like she might crawl out of her skin. She needed air, space, somewhere to think that wasn't directly across from the scene of her spectacular lapse in judgment.

She was halfway home when she remembered the notebook.

Her stomach dropped as the realization hit her. In all the heated passion and hasty dressing that had followed, she'd left her journal—her most precious possession, filled with months of her most intimate thoughts and feelings—on the floor of Julian's back room.

The thought of facing him made her want to hide under her covers for the rest of the week, but she couldn't leave her writing behind. Those pages contained pieces of her soul, poems she'd never shared with anyone, fragments of thoughts and dreams she couldn't afford to lose.

The bell above The Last Page's door seemed to ring with unusual loudness when she pushed inside. The store was quiet in the late afternoon lull, golden dust motes dancing in the slanted sunbeams. Julian stood behind the main counter, his dark head bent over what looked like inventory sheets, and for a moment, Elara allowed herself to simply look at him.

He'd changed into a crisp white button-down that made his graying hair look distinguished rather than aged, and when he glanced up at the sound of the bell, those intense dark eyes that had seen straight through her the night before were carefully neutral.

"Elara." Her name sounded different in the daylight—polite, distant. Professional.

"Hi." She cleared her throat, suddenly feeling every one of her nineteen years. "I think I left something here last night. My notebook."

Something flickered across his expression, too quick to interpret. "Of course. I'll get it for you."

He disappeared into the back room, leaving her standing alone among the shelves of poetry and philosophy. When he returned, he held her worn journal with the same careful reverence he might show a rare first edition.

"Here you are," he said, extending it toward her without quite meeting her eyes.

Their fingers brushed as she took it, and Elara felt that same electric shock that had started everything the night before. But Julian pulled his hand back quickly, as if he'd been burned.

"Thank you," she said quietly. Then, because she couldn't help herself: "Julian, about last night—"

"Last night was..." He ran a hand through his hair, that unconscious gesture that made him look younger and more vulnerable. "It was a mistake. I should never have put you in that position."

The words hit her like a physical blow. "A mistake?"

"You're nineteen, Elara. You have your whole life ahead of you, and I'm..." He gestured vaguely at himself, at the bookstore, at the weight of whatever past had brought him to this small town. "I'm not someone you should be getting involved with."

Anger flared in her chest, hot and unexpected. "Don't I get a say in what I should or shouldn't do?"

"This isn't about what you want," he said, his voice carefully controlled. "It's about what's appropriate. What's right."

"Right?" She laughed, but there was no humor in it. "You didn't seem too concerned about what was right when you had your hands—"

"Elara." His voice was sharp enough to cut glass. "Don't."

The silence that followed was deafening. Elara clutched her notebook against her chest, feeling stupid and naive and absolutely furious. She'd known this would happen, had predicted this exact conversation, but somehow his rejection still felt like a knife between her ribs.

"Fine," she said finally. "Message received."

She turned to go, pride keeping her spine straight even as her heart crumbled, but Julian's voice stopped her at the door.

"Elara, wait."

She looked back over her shoulder, hope flickering dangerously in her chest.

"I'm sorry," he said, and the regret in his voice was almost worse than the rejection had been. "You deserve better than this. Better than me."

Without another word, she pushed through the door and out into the afternoon sunlight, her cheeks burning with humiliation and unshed tears. She made it three blocks before she had to stop and lean against a lamppost, her hands shaking as she tried to process what had just happened.

He thought it was a mistake. Thought she was just some foolish girl who'd gotten carried away by the romance of poetry and dim lighting. Maybe he was right. Maybe she had built last night up into something it wasn't, let her romantic nature run away with reality once again.

That evening, she sat in her small apartment with her notebook open on her lap, trying to write about disappointment and the way hope could turn to ash in your mouth. But the words wouldn't come. Every time she tried to capture the feeling, she kept remembering the way Julian had whispered her name in the darkness, the reverence in his touch, the look in his eyes when she'd fallen apart in his arms.

Those moments had been real. She was sure of it.

The next morning brought another shift at the café and another day of carefully not looking toward the bookstore. But when she arrived to open up, she found something that made her heart stop.

Tucked under the café's door was a slim volume of poetry—Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. The book fell open naturally to a page marked with a piece of paper, and written in Julian's careful handwriting was a single line:

"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where."

Below it, in the same elegant script: "Some mistakes are worth making twice. —J"

Elara pressed the book to her chest, her pulse racing as she looked across the street toward The Last Page. Through the window, she could see Julian arranging a display, and when he glanced up and caught her watching, he didn't look away.

Instead, he smiled—small and tentative and full of the same dangerous possibility that had started everything.

Maybe they were both about to make a mistake. Maybe the twenty-three years between them and the small-town gossip mill and all the rational arguments against this were too much to overcome.

But as Elara unlocked the café door and tucked the book safely in her apron pocket, she found herself smiling back.

Some mistakes, after all, were worth making twice.