“I still can’t believe you own this book,” Jill said as she thumbed gently through the pages.
“I know, isn’t it amazing?” Cat answered. She took the book from Jill’s hands, goose bumps prickling her skin as she did so. Odd. It’s not particularly cold in here.
She, Jill, and Eliza had sat down with a coffee drink in the café in the main entrance area of the library. “We can’t stay long,” she’d said. “But it’s nice to have a few minutes with you.”
She tucked the book carefully in her bag. Jill handed her the color copies she’d printed from the scans.
“Thanks so much for doing that for me, Jill. I know I could have taken it to Kinko’s or something, or done it myself, but I was worried about damaging it.”
Jill nodded. “Not a problem. Sorry it took so long. Since it wasn’t official work business, I had to fit it in around other projects and keep others from noticing it, or everyone would have wanted to see it. Why’d your dad put it in such an ugly modern binding?”
“I don’t know,” Cat said. “He died before he could tell me anything about it.”
Eliza squeezed her hand. “We think he was trying to keep it a secret,” she piped up. “If you saw it on a bookshelf as it is now, you’d pass it right over, right?”
Jill shrugged. “Yeah, probably. Why would it need to be a secret? What does it say? I took a gander at the first page but didn’t get very far. My Latin is far rustier than yours, Cat—I only took those two semesters.”
Cat pulled out the copy of the first page and read it. She didn’t need to look at the Latin. In truth, she’d memorized the translation she’d written down that first morning.
“‘In her hands she holds
The greatest power of them all.
The ability to create
That which all want but few attain.
Helped by God she writes the letters
And the Word becomes Flesh
Bringing Love to all who seek it.’”
“Wow.” Jill’s eyes were round and full. “Heavy duty. But what is it? Sounds Biblical.” She took a drink of her Coke.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought at first, too,” Cat answered. “But the few stories I read before giving it to you all revolve around love in some way—and not in the Christian sense, but more in the Eliza-type-of-book sense.”
“You’re reading medieval smut?” Jill choked down a laugh. “Dang, my soda shot up my nose. Oww!” She reached for a napkin.
Eliza chortled. “Serves her right for all the grief she’s given me about my reading choices that when she finds a centuries-old book, it’s all about romance.”
“What I find intriguing,” Cat said, ignoring her friends’ needling, “is that at the front of every story the illumination shows a woman writing. Isn’t that cool? Many people think only educated men, and mostly men of the Church at that, served as scribes in that time period. Yet here this woman is, writing down these stories.”
“Do you have any sense of the history of the book?” Jill asked. “Wanna leave it here and let us do some research?”
Possessiveness overtook Cat with an intensity that startled her. The book was hers. Hers. “Um, no, thank you,” she said in as nonchalant a manner as she could muster. “I’m going to work with it a little while longer. If I need help, I know where to find you.”
Good Lord, I feel like Gollum from The Hobbit, not wanting to lose my Precious. She needed to get a grip.
“OK, no biggie. I’ve gotta head back to work in a few minute but tell me about these guys Eliza tells me you’ve been seeing. A lonely single girl wants to know all.”
“I’m still a lonely single girl, too,” Cat said. “One date and one, erm, evening does not a lifetime of bliss make.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever. Start talking.”
Cat briefly sketched out the details of Derrick and Grayson, but skirted over much of Poetry Night, and what had come after.
Jill regarded her with a cross of admiration and envy on her face. “You go, girl! What’s your secret?” Jill said.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I just felt ready. I don’t know why.”
“It’s certainly helped that three guys are suddenly chasing you,” Eliza said.
“Three?” Jill echoed, raising her eyebrows.
“There are no three. There is no chasing,” Cat scoffed. “I’m not interested in Derrick, and Grayson isn’t truly interested in me, at least not as much as he’s interested in his work. I was merely a—what do the kids call it these days?—a booty call to him.” Under her breath, she added to Eliza, “And as to the third, we’ve already discussed that.”
Cat fell silent, taking a sip of her coffee as an excuse to avoid further discussion. Why were guys like Derrick and Grayson pursuing her? It didn’t make any sense, given the dearth of male attention in the last six years. Eliza’s undergrad roommate, Joy, whom Cat had met a few times, would probably say Cat was giving off different vibes to the universe, ones sending out a signal that she was available. Joy was into that stuff: Reiki and chakras and auras, and all that.
Cat didn’t know if she believed that, although it did feel like something had changed, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
“I’d take a booty call.” Jill sighed. “I’d take any call. Not exactly a happening social scene here in the bowels of the library.”
“Right there with you,” Eliza said, her thumb tracing the edge of the table. After a moment, her face brightened. “But I know someday, ladies, our princes will come.”
Jill snorted.
Giving Cat a meaningful glance, Eliza added, “Or knights.”
“I ran into Grayson,” Cat confessed as she unlocked the door to the bookstore.
“What? Where?”
“When we were in the library. Right before I came down to you and Jill.”
“And you didn’t tell me? What happened?”
Cat told her of the encounter, and how persistent Grayson was. “I swear, he would have had sex right there in the stacks if he’d had his way.”
Eliza gave her an odd look.
“What? I wouldn’t have done it.”
“No, that’s not what I was thinking.”
“Then what?”
Eliza hung her coat on the hook behind the door then turned back to Cat. “It sounds like the story you wrote. You know, the smutty one.”
“I know which one you mean.” She exhaled loudly. Good God, it did sound like that story. “What’s your point?”
“I don’t know. I ... it’s weird, you know? First Derrick, the popular high school quarterback. Now, this? Being seduced by a grad student in the library? At your carrel? Exactly like in the story you wrote?”
Cat stood rooted to the spot, gaping at her friend.
“Don’t you see?” Eliza gestured toward the papers Cat had tucked in her bag. “What you just read at the library? ‘She writes the letters? And the words become flesh?’”
Cat’s eyes widened and her mouth fell open. “No. That’s impossible.”
Eliza said nothing, her eyes unusually serious.
“You can’t be suggesting...” She waited for Eliza to speak. When she didn’t, the words burst forth from Cat in a tumble. “You think the stories I wrote are ... coming true? That Derrick, that Grayson ... that they’re men I created?” She wanted to scoff, to reject it all outright. But even as she spoke, her mind raced back to Derrick. She’d freaked out on her date with him because of the similarities, hadn’t she? And now Grayson. Still, there had to be a logical explanation. There had to be.
Eliza shrugged.
Cat’s eyes felt as if they might pop out of her head. She grasped her hair with her hands and stared at the ceiling.
“Have you finished reading the manuscript yet?” Eliza asked. “What does it tell you?”
“I only got about halfway through it before handing it over to Jill. She’s had it since then, as you know.”
Eliza crossed her arms and leveled a steady gaze at her friend. “Fine, work on it now. We have time; nobody’s here. What does the end of it say?”
“You want me to skip to the end?”
“Horror of horrors to you, I know,” said Eliza, “but yes, skip to the end! Maybe it reveals something, some sort of key to this situation.”
There is no situation, Cat wanted to protest. But unease spread through her. Eliza wasn’t saying anything she hadn’t wondered, even if she hadn’t admitted it fully to herself.
“Fine,” she said, walking over to the register desk. She pulled Jill’s photocopies of the book out of her bag and sat down, turning to the last page. “Can you grab me a Latin dictionary off of the shelf?”
As Eliza rushed to get the book, Cat pulled a pencil out of the pens and pencils jar. She started to translate.
“‘From her beginning to her end,
The power remains with she who has been chosen.
Use it carefully.
As you sow, so shall you reap.
Give and receive.
Write and believe.
Love has much to teach you. Learn from it.
And open your heart to what may be.’”
The two women sat quietly, both staring at the ornate illustration drawn underneath the final words. It was of a woman with long, wavy brunette hair and gray eyes, seated on a throne-like chair and holding a book in her left hand, a quill in her right. She stared out from the page with a commanding gaze. Cat turned the paper to the left and to the right. I swear her eyes are following mine.
“She looks like you,” Eliza murmured, tracing her finger over the woman’s face.
“Eliza, come on. She does not. This is insane.” Except she did, in a stylized, medieval sort of way.
“Whatever you say. I’m rather fond of my theory, myself.”
“Theory?”
“That you’ve been given the power to create the Perfect Man.” She patted her friend on the shoulder. “Could you please make a Darcy of my very own for me? I don’t ask for much. Just a duke. In England. Who’s wealthy. With his own Pemberley. And who lives at the same time as Jane Austen, because I’ve always wanted to meet her, you know.”
“Eliza ...” A nervous giggle bubbled in Cat’s throat. Her friend was putting her on. Right?
“Okay, yeah.” Eliza exhaled heavily. “It’s much more likely all my fanciful notions are exactly that—fanciful—and that you knew Derrick twenty years ago, and that Grayson is an odd coincidence. A ... very odd coincidence. I mean, come on. Even I know my romance novels are just that—novels.”
She tapped her finger against her lips. “But there’s a side of me that has always believed in ghosts, always wondered about paranormal phenomena, always wondered if time travel was truly possible. And that side of me has tingles up and down my spine.”
Cat set the papers back on the end table. Eliza wasn’t the only one with tingles, but Cat wasn’t about to admit that out loud. “You can have your fantasies. I’m going to stick to reality, which tells me the only logical explanation—the only possible explanation—is exactly what you said; I took something I knew of at the time and wove a stupid story about it. That’s all. And Grayson certainly isn’t the only grad student ever looking to get some tail.”
Eliza giggled.
“What are you laughing at?”
“You, friend. I’m thinking it’s you who can have her fantasies now, not I.”
Eliza ducked before the pencil could hit her.
They both burst out laughing. After a moment, Cat sobered, chewing on a new pencil as she stared down at the photocopies.
“It’s true that I don’t know how to explain it. And that it seems weird to me, too.” Not that some medieval book of love stories had anything to do with it.
“The Law of Attraction,” Eliza said, snapping her fingers. “Maybe you’ve been attracting what you thought you wanted.”
“I wanted a guy stuck in high school, and a guy anxious to score as quickly as possible? I need higher aspirations.” She didn’t dare mention wanting a computer scientist already spoken for. Eliza would have a field day with that.
“Well, you were thinking about them, right? I mean, having just rediscovered your stories and all. It’s not so far-fetched that you put those vibes out into the universe and got an answer back.”
Cat rolled her eyes. “Are you going all new-agey on me?”
“Hey, Joy was always talking about what the universe gives us, and what we give the universe. Who’s to say it isn’t true?”
Cat mulled that over. It was a pretty feeble explanation. Better than believing characters you wrote about years ago have come to life. Because that’s completely insane.
Eliza ran her fingers along the top of one of the nearby bookshelves. “You could always test it, you know.”
“Test what?”
Her friend peeked at her out of lowered eyes. “Whether the book and those stories you wrote are somehow connected to Derrick and Grayson.”
Cat snorted. “Give it up, Eliza.”
“It wouldn’t hurt to try, would it?”
Cat stared at her. She was serious, wasn’t she? Everything in Cat wanted to laugh out loud, to scoff at Eliza’s ridiculous suggestion.
On the other hand, Eliza was right: Cat had nothing to lose. Plus, she’d delight in teasing her friend about this for years to come, suggesting a book was a magic matchmaker. With her mouth tipping up in a smug grin, she shrugged. “You’re right. But how would I test it?”
“Write something into the stories that wasn’t there before and see if reality changes.”
“Brilliant. I’ll do that. If only to prove to you that I, in fact, cannot break all the rules of human reality.” She burst into uncontrollable giggles, at the same time as the door jiggled and a couple of college kids entered.
“But not now.” She nodded toward the customers, attempting to regain her composure. “I know you have your evening seminar tonight, so let’s, um, talk about this again in the morning, okay?”
“Sure thing,” Eliza said as she grabbed her coat back off the hook. “I’ve gotta go talk with Professor Avery about my dissertation chapter, anyway.” She cast a glance at the college students, who were chattering amongst themselves. “But I’m not letting you off the hook. First, the test. And then, my duke.”
“Uh, Eliza? Prepare for disappointment.”
Eliza winked as she opened the door. “We’ll see.”