Stewart and Jean by J. Boyett

Author:J. Boyett [Boyett, J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Saltimbanque Books
Published: 2015-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

Seven

Jean continued popping into Temple Books as she’d always done. She made a point of going just as often as ever, albeit without the same relaxation as before; not at first, anyway. She didn’t go on any more big sprees—it was wasteful, plus she found piles of books you don’t have time to read depressing. So after that one time she no longer tried to flaunt her greater economic power. To begin with she would pointedly ignore Stewart. But soon she could flip through books again for minutes at a time with hardly a thought of him. He also soon seemed able to go about his work without being excessively preoccupied with her.

She got used to seeing him there. Once she started thinking the whole thing over in the absence of adrenaline, it became a little less egregious, although still kind of nuts. He never threatened her or anything—to be honest, he never had. She could understand why Stewart would be fucked up over his big brother being killed, even though she refused to feel guilty. It wasn’t like Stewart had known his brother was a rapist, or anything. It even would be understandable for him to refuse to believe Kevin had ever tried to rape her.

After all, Kevin hadn’t always been such a bad guy, though it had been hard to remember that ever since the thing had happened. Or rather, it had never occurred to her to remember it till she started seeing Stewart around. He brought those early days back, so that sometimes she was even able to recall them almost without the taint of the intervening trauma. They’d had some laughs, her and Kevin. Early on.

One day, about three weeks after her date with Stewart, she was at Temple, leaning her shoulder against one of the shelves, flipping through a volume of Proust and wondering if it would be worth it to forego the time needed to read ten other books instead, just to banish her sense of failure at not having read Proust. Stewart appeared before her with some books to shelve. He glanced up but seemed hardly to register her. That was how accustomed they’d gotten to seeing each other. It was crazy—she wondered which of them was Jane Goodall and which the chimp.

For no particular reason, she let her eyes stay on Stewart after he’d looked away; she was mulling over this weird connection they had, and reflecting that the most bizarre part was how it had become part of their everyday lives.

Stewart noticed she was looking at him and looked up at her in turn.

Without thinking it over first, Jean smiled faintly and in a soft voice said, “Hi.”

From his face you would have thought she’d told him to go fuck his mother. For a few seconds Jean could pretend she was misreading him, since he seemed unable to find his voice to say anything. Maybe she should have looked away, but it was hard not to keep an eye on someone who was staring at you like that.

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