Reading Online Novel

Attach ments(104)



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 justnext 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?