Belinda McKeon - Tender

“Come on,” James said, and he headed back the way they had come.

Nothing Catherine said to him as they stood at the Irish fiction section, pretending to look at novels but actually watching the every move of the guy — who was further down in the same aisle going through the new releases — could persuade James to be any more subtle. He stared; he frowned; he banged and messed up and dropped the books so that practically everyone else in the shop looked their way, irritated, but still the guy’s focus did not waver; he had obviously come in here looking for something, and he was going to keep searching until he got it.

“He is lovely, ” Catherine offered, hearing how ineffectual the words sounded, how somehow naive and unworldly; it seemed beside the point, suddenly, that the guy was actually cute. James’s reaction had filled the space around them with a much starker, much more forceful energy; beside him, glancing towards the guy, she felt like a kid looking for another glittery sticker to add to her collection.

“Just look at him,” James said. “With his book.”

He said book as though it was something shameful, Catherine thought; as though it was something for which he was mocking the guy, rather than admiring him.

“He’s too fucking lovely altogether,” he said then, more loudly.

“James! He’ll hear you!”

He cut his eyes at her. “He’ll hear me staring?”

“No, but…”

“Well, then,” he said, and as the guy moved down the aisle now, James moved too.

“For fuck’s sake!” Catherine said, exasperated. “This is—”

“This is what, Catherine?” James said, turning back to her. “This is what? Do you need to go? Do you want me to meet you in the café?”

Her mouth dropped open. She felt heat sear her face. “No, but, obviously…”

He frowned. “Obviously what?”

“I don’t know,” she said, stammering now. “I mean, he doesn’t…”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Catherine,” James said through gritted teeth, and she felt again the shock of it — that he seemed really, truly angry. Angry with her. Angry at her. But what had she done? All she was doing was trying to talk to him. Reason with him. He couldn’t just stare at people in this way. He couldn’t just talk at such an obvious volume about them, doing nothing to hide his interest. He just had to be more artful about these things. He had to be more discreet.

“I really need to get back to the library, I think,” she said, and she realized she was holding her breath as she waited for his response.

He looked at her for a moment as though he was about to really explode at her, really scream at her, but in the next moment, all the anger seemed to have gone out of him, seemed just to slide out of his shoulders and out of his eyes, and he nodded. “All right,” he said, tiredly, putting down the novel he had been holding. “Will we go?”

Relieved, Catherine led the way, but as she neared the exit, she glanced back to say something to him, something lighthearted, something on a completely different subject, and she stopped short, because James was no longer behind her. She looked around in confusion, back to where they had been standing, and then to the door, in case he had slipped ahead of her, somehow, but he was in neither place. She looked to the till; could he be buying something? But no, and he was not at any of the tables, either, and not on the stairs; he was nowhere to be seen.

Neither was the guy, she saw now, her heart thumping, her cheeks once more blazing; neither was the guy in the suit standing where he had been standing a few moments ago, looking at the new releases. She moved back into the center of the floor, looking left and right; the other customers seemed to swim around her, the shelves and the stacks of books and the crinkling green carrier bags. She pushed back further, to the section marked TRAVEL, the section hung with posters of beaches and skyscrapers and medieval side streets, with blue-bubbled maps of the world. She swept through it, her heart still clattering, in places the dampness of sweat on her skin, but she saw no trace of them, of James and the boy — the boy she had so stupidly, so cluelessly, pointed out to him. In a question, in a bewildered, injured question, she heard herself say James’s name aloud. A woman looked at her strangely. Mind your own business, you old bitch, Catherine thought, but already she had forgotten about the woman, and was looking again for James; why would he do this to her? Go somewhere without her — go with—

With a single step, she was into the next section, and James was standing right there, leaning against a display table, his thighs pressed against it, in his hands a book with a cover washed in bright, abstracted colors. It was Birthday Letters, Catherine saw; Ted Hughes’s new collection of poems about Plath. It was a book Catherine had been meaning all month to buy, and to read for her essay research; to now find James apparently immersed in it seemed surreal, like a jagged before and after in her life forcing themselves on top of one another as some kind of practical joke.

“Oh,” she said, working to steady her voice. “You found that.”

He blinked, seeming surprised. “What?”

“The Hughes. I wanted to buy that, actually.”

“I’ll buy it for you,” he said brightly, snapping the book shut, tucking it under his arm, but as he gave her a quick, strange smile, something in his eyes snagged her suspicion; something in the way his glance hovered over her shoulder. She turned, and there was the guy, standing maybe ten feet away, also holding a book. He was also leaning against a table, and one arm was slung over a low bookcase; he looked as though he had been precisely arranged for a photograph. Everything about him was studied, perfect. He did not look up as she stared at him — and as James, behind her, presumably stared too — but she felt quite sure that he knew they were watching him, and that he was enjoying it. He reached up, apparently absentmindedly, to run a finger over an eyebrow, and Catherine felt her throat close up — what was that? Did that mean something? Was that some kind of signal? She felt sweat bloom again in her armpits, and on the palms of her hands. The room felt as though it was at once coming towards her and rushing away. She put a hand to the table.

“Come on,” James said, from behind her, and he walked at a brisk clip to the till.

And she could have cried. She felt it like nausea. That something had tilted like this between them; that something between them was off. What had just happened? She could not even begin to put it into words, to try to understand it; what was this anger and distance that had come and unfolded itself in the space where her self touched on his? All afternoon as she tried to work in the library, her mind reeled when she thought of that moment: turning to say something to him and finding that he was not there, and seeing, then, that the guy, the stranger, was not where he had been either. What had she thought? What had she imagined? Body pressed to body, mouth to mouth, crotch pressed to crotch, in the poetry section of Hodges bloody Figgis? Had she honestly believed in any part of herself that that was going to happen? Had she honestly, worse still, feared it? And if she had feared it — for there could be little doubt, from the thumping and sweating and panic of her reaction, from the way that she had bolted through the shop, calling his name, like a mother suddenly finding herself without her toddler, that she had in some way feared it, dreaded it, dreaded even the thought of it, losing him to this guy, seeing him even just walking off to a café with him — then what did that mean? What did that say about her, about what kind of friend she was?