He shook his jacket onto the floor and put his arms around her.
All he could think was Beth. All he could do was let this dream come true.
HE DIDN’T HEAR the movie end. Didn’t hear anything for two hours above the thunder of his heartbeat and the occasional click of her teeth against his. But Beth jumped when the lights came up. She jumped, sat up, pulled away from him. It felt like getting up from the warmest bed on the coldest morning. Lincoln pushed forward, not wanting to lose the nearness of her. Afraid that something horrible was happening, that somewhere a clock was striking midnight.
“I’m on deadline,” Beth said. She touched her mouth and then her hair, her falling-down ponytail. “I …have to go, I have to …” She turned to the empty screen as if there might be something up there still that she could use. The curtains were sliding closed.
She crouched on the floor, looking for something. “My glasses,” she said, “was I wearing glasses?” They were shoved back into her hair. Lincoln carefully pulled them free.
“Thank you,” she said. He helped her stand, and tried to hold her for a moment, but she broke away as soon as she was upright and started hurrying out of the aisle. “I’ve never done this before,” she said. She didn’t mean him. She was looking at the screen. “Did you watch any of it? There was dancing, right? I’m sure there was dancing.” Then she looked around, afraid someone had heard her. She touched her mouth again, with her palm and all four fingers, like she was checking to make sure it was still there.
And then she ran—almost ran—toward the exit, walking backward at first to watch him, then eventually turning away.
LINCOLN COULDN’T REMEMBER walking home to his apartment, and when he got there, he didn’t want to go in. He didn’t want to break the spell. So he sat on his front steps and kept reliving the last two hours. Bearing witness to himself—yes and Beth and that just happened.
“What could you possibly be thinking?” she’d asked herself.
What could she possibly have been thinking? She didn’t even know Lincoln. Not like he knew her. He knew why he wanted to kiss her. Because she was beautiful. And before that, because she was kind. And before that, because she was smart and funny. Because she was exactly the right kind of smart and funny. Because he could imagine taking a long road trip with her without ever getting bored. Because whenever he saw something new and interesting, or new and ridiculous, he always wondered what she’d have to say about it—how many stars she’d give it and why.
He knew why he’d wanted to kiss her. Why he still did. He could still feel her on his lips, on his lap. In his head like fog, like honey that buzzed. Is this what it had felt like to kiss Sam? (He couldn’t remember just now, he didn’t want to.) If it had been like this, maybe nine years wasn’t such a long time to get over Sam, after all.
In all the time Lincoln was working at The Courier, reading Beth’s mail, thinking about her, he’d never really believed that there was a course of events, a path ahead of him or a route through the space-time continuum that would lead to this.
Yes. Beth. That just happened.
And maybe …maybe it was still happening.
Lincoln jerked to his feet and checked his pocket for his car keys. How long had it been since she’d left? Thirty minutes? Forty-five? Beth would still be at The Courier. And Lincoln didn’t have to keep a respectable distance anymore. He didn’t have to wish and pine and feel guilty. He didn’t have to do the honorable thing. Or maybe it was that the honorable thing had changed the moment Beth sat down next to him. Everything had changed.
Lincoln parked behind The Courier, by the loading dock. Half a dozen trucks were already waiting there, idling, while crews packed them with stacks of first editions. He ran in through a garage door, bypassing the employee turnstile—the guard on duty recognized him and waved—then bolted up the stairs to the newsroom like he was running for his life, like he was on deadline. Like if he stopped, he might settle into his old self, get trapped in his old loop.
Chuck looked up when Lincoln rushed past the copy desk. Lincoln nodded and kept rushing. He looked over at the city desk—no Beth. The back of the newsroom, the Entertainment section, was dark, but Lincoln kept going, trying not to think about all the nights he’d walked this path after he was sure she was gone.
She was there, on the phone. Sitting in her dark cubicle, the monitor lighting her face like a candle.
“No, I know,” she said into the phone. Her hair was all-the-way down, she wasn’t wearing her glasses. She still looked half dazed and overkissed. “I know,” she said, rubbing her forehead. “Look, this won’t ever …”
Lincoln stopped at the cubicle next to hers and tried not to breathe like a quarter horse. Beth glanced up, saw him, and lost the rest of her sentence.
He didn’t know what to do then, so he smiled, hopefully, biting his lip.
“Thank you,” she said into the phone. “I know. Thank you …Okay.” She hung up and gaped at him.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I can leave,” he said, taking a step back.
“No,” she said, standing. “No. I …”
“I thought we should talk,” he said.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay.” Lincoln nodded.
There were maybe two feet and a cubicle wall between them.
“Or maybe we shouldn’t,” Beth said, folding her arms.
“What?”
“I just feel like, if we talk about this, it could go horribly wrong. But if we leave it like it is, maybe it can go on feeling, I don’t know, somehow horribly right.”
“Like it is?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, talking too fast. “We can meet in dark theaters …and if I need to tell you something, I’ll send it to someone else in an e-mail.”
Lincoln stepped away from her, like she’d hit him.
She scrunched up her face and closed her eyes. “Sorry,” she said. “Sorry. I warned you. I’m no good at talking. I’m better on paper.”
She knows, was all Lincoln could think. That I’m the creep. Not the cute guy. She knows …And she still sat next to me.
“Are you done?” he asked.
“Embarrassing myself? Probably not.”
“With your review.”
“Such as it is.”
“Then come with me.”
Lincoln held out his hand to her and felt like he’d won something when, after another dazed moment, she took it. He started walking out of the newsroom, wishing he knew where to take her. It’s not like The Courier had a romantic courtyard hidden away. Or a balcony. Or a corner booth.
They ended up at the break room.
“Wait,” Beth said, as he pushed open the door. The room was dark. The tables were gone. The vending machines were still there, still lit and humming, but they were empty.
“It’s closed,” Beth said quietly. “There’s a new one downstairs. This is going to be office space, I think, for the Web people.”
She looked down the hall, nervously, and drew back her hand.
“Perfect,” Lincoln said. He stepped into the break room and held the door open for her. She looked up at him, surprised, and followed. The door swished shut behind them, and Lincoln stopped for a moment to let his eyes adjust to the Pepsi machine light. There was a clear space against the wall, next to the Coffee-Mat. Beth followed him there—he kept expecting her not to—and they sank to the floor, facing each other.
He wanted to touch her, to take her hand again, but she pulled her skirt down over her knees and pressed her fists into her lap. He hadn’t noticed what she was wearing before. A knee-length denim skirt, a rose-colored cardigan, periwinkle tights, and tall blue leather boots. She looked like a sunset, he thought.
“So now we talk?” she asked.
“I think so,” Lincoln said.
Beth looked at her fists. “I can’t think of anything to say to you that you don’t already know.”
“Don’t say that,” he said,
“It’s not like that.”
“It isn’t?” She looked angry.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t apologize,” she said, her voice breaking. “Please. I really, really don’t want you to be sorry.”
“You don’t?”
“No,” she said.
“What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to say something, I don’t know what, but something that will make it perfectly explicable for me to be here.” She was talking quickly, quavering, he thought she might even be starting to cry. “I mean, Jennifer’s already going to go into labor when I tell her about this. She still thinks we should turn you in—but turn you in for what? And to who? She’s accused me of being swayed by your vast cuteness …your cute vastness …”
“Jennifer’s pregnant?” Lincoln asked, smiling out of context.
Beth wiped her eyes with her sweater and looked up at him.
“Yeah.”
“That’s great,” he said genuinely. “That’s really great.”
“Yeah … ,” she said, still staring at him, then hid her face her hands. “Oh my God, this is so weird.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Stop.”
“Right, sorry, look, would it help if I told you that I never meant to start reading your messages? Or Jennifer’s or anybody’s? I was just checking the filter, and you’d get flagged, you know, for breaking the rules, and those are the only messages I ever read, only the flagged messages, and only yours. I mean, maybe this makes it worse, but I wasn’t regularly reading anybody else’s mail. I didn’t have to leave notes on anyone else’s desk when I quit.”
“Why did you have to leave a note on mine? I swear that note’s the weirdest part.”
“I wanted to apologize,” he said, resisting the urge to look away.
“But why apologize? Why did it matter?”
“Because you mattered,” he said. “I wanted to come clean with you.”
“Anonymously?”
Lincoln didn’t want to say he was sorry again, so he didn’t say anything at all.
“I kept thinking about you,” Beth said. “I kept thinking about how this would work in a book or the movies. If this were a Jane Austen novel, it wouldn’t be so bad—if you were intercepting my letters, and I was peeking over your garden hedge …Computers make everything worse.”
“I made everything worse,” he said. “I shouldn’t have written you that note. I mean, on top of everything else. I’m sorry it upset you.”
“That’s the thing … ,” she said, “I’m not even sure that it did upset me. Maybe at first, thinking about some strange guy reading my e-mail. But it didn’t take me long to figure out it was you. I wasn’t seeing you around the building anymore. And I mentioned it to Derek one day—you know Derek, who sits next to me—‘Whatever happened to that big guy with the brown hair who used to eat dinner with Doris?’ And he was like, ‘The IT guy? He quit.’ And then it all came together. That you were …you.”
Beth had stopped crying and relaxed against the wall. Her skirt had crept back up over purple-stockinged knees. Lincoln wanted to fall into her lap. They were still sitting sideways, facing each other, and she set her hand just next to his on the floor, so that their fingertips were almost touching.
“How would this work in a movie?” she asked, looking at their hands, looking softer by the syllable. “How would Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks make this situation less strange?”
“You mean, like in Sleepless in Seattle?” he asked.
“Right,” she said, “or You’ve Got Mail. I mean, first of all, we’d have this conversation off camera. It’s too messy.”
“If this were a Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks movie,” Lincoln said, “I’d just kiss you, probably in the middle of a sentence. That would fix everything.”
She smiled. Had he ever seen her smile like that? With her whole freckled face?
“Cue Louis Armstrong,” she said.
“But I’m not going to kiss you,” he said. He had to force the words out.
“You’re not?”
“No. Because you’re right. This should be explicable. We should be. I want you to be able to look back on tonight, and believe that this is plausible, that this is how two people could find each other.”
“Ah,” Beth said. “When Harry Met Sally.” If she smiled any wider, she’d break him.
“Joe Versus the Volcano,” he said.
“Jerry Maguire,” she said.
“The Empire Strikes Back.”
She laughed. It was better than he could have imagined. Like a giggle falling off its chair. “I wouldn’t have done what I did in the theater, if …Well, I asked Doris about you.”
“Yeah?”
“And she said you were one of the nicest guys she’d ever met, maybe even nicer than her husband, Pete …”
“Paul.”
“Paul,” Beth said. “And that you shared your dinner with her and helped her move. She also told me that you were single—that the girls on the copy desk flirted with you, but that you were a perfect gentleman. She said you quit your job because reading people’s e-mail made you feel like a Peeping Tom, and that working nights made you feel like Count Chocula.”
“She told you all that?”
“Right here. Over three nights of pinochle.”
“You should’ve stayed in reporting.”
“See?” she whispered, closing her eyes, for just a moment. “There. What can I say for myself that you don’t already know? What can I say, knowing what you know?”
“It isn’t like that,” he said again.
“Everything I wrote about you, what I called you …”
“I knew you weren’t serious,” he said, “I knew you had a boyfriend.”
“Is that why you read my e-mail? Because I had a crush on you?”
“No, by the time you wrote that, I already felt …everything.”
“I was serious,” she said. “More than I ever would have admitted to Jennifer. I followed you whenever I could. I tried to follow you home once.”
“I know,” he said faintly.
She looked down. Pulled down her skirt.
“I just had this feeling about you,” she said. “Is that foolish?”
“I hope not.”
They were quiet.
“So, okay,” Beth said, picking her face up and leaning forward, sharply, like she’d decided something. “When I was in the eighth grade, I saw part of a music video by the Sundays, this song—‘Here’s Where the Story Ends.’ Do you know that song?”
He nodded. She pushed her hair behind her ears.
“I almost never got to watch MTV, only when I was at my friend Nickie’s house and only when her parents weren’t home. But I saw this video, not even the whole thing, and I just knew that it was going to be my favorite song for …for the rest of my life. And it still is. It’s still my favorite song …
“Lincoln, I said you were cute because I didn’t know how to say—because I didn’t think I was allowed to say—anything else. But every time I saw you, I felt like I did the first time I heard that song.”
She was throwing stars at him. It was hard to listen. It was hard to look at her. He still felt like he was stealing something.
“Lincoln?” she asked.
“Yes?”
“Do you believe in love at first sight?”
He made himself look at her face, at her wide-open eyes and earnest forehead. At her unbearably sweet mouth.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Do you believe in love before that?”
Her breath caught in her throat like a sore hiccup.
And then it was too much to keep trying not to kiss her.
She came readily into his arms. Lincoln leaned against the coffee machine and pulled her onto him completely. There it was again, that impossible-to-describe kiss. This is how 2001 should have ended, he thought. This is infinity.
The first time Beth pulled away, he pulled her back
.
The second time, he bit her lip.
Then her neck.
Then the collar of her shirt.
“I don’t know … ,” she said, sitting up in his lap, laying her cheek on the top his head. “I don’t know what you meant by love before love at first sight.”
Lincoln pushed his face into her shoulder and tried to think of a good way to answer.
“Just that …I knew how I felt about you before I ever saw you,” he said, “when I still thought I might never see you …”
She held his head in her hands and tilted it back, so she could see his face.
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. Which made him laugh.
“Absolutely,” he said.
“No, I mean it,” Beth said. “Men fall in love with their eyes.” He closed his. “That’s practically science,” she said.
“Maybe,” Lincoln said. Her fingers felt so good in his hair. “But I couldn’t see you, so …”
“So, what did you see?”
“Just …the sort of girl who would write the sort of things that you wrote.”
“What things?”
Lincoln opened his eyes. Beth was studying his face. She looked skeptical—maybe about more than just the last thing he said. This was important, he realized.
“Everything,” he said, sitting straighter, keeping hold of her waist. “Everything you wrote about your work, about your boyfriend …The way you comforted Jennifer and made her laugh, through the baby and after. I pictured a girl who could be that kind, and that kind of funny. I pictured a girl who was that alive …”
She looked guarded. Lincoln couldn’t tell from her eyes whether he was pushing her away or winning her over.
“A girl who never got tired of her favorite movies,” he said softly. “Who saved dresses like ticket stubs. Who could get high on the weather …
“I pictured a girl who made every moment, everything she touched, and everyone around her feel lighter and sweeter.
“I pictured you,” he said. “I just didn’t know what you looked like.
“And then, when I did know what you looked like, you looked like the girl who was all those things. You looked like the girl I loved.”
Beth’s fingers trembled in his hair, and her forehead dropped against his. A heavy, wet tear fell onto Lincoln’s lips, and he licked it. He pulled her close, as close as he could. Like he didn’t care for the moment whether she could breathe. Like there were two of them and only one parachute.