Attach ments(105)

“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.