I don't need that.

I can’t have that.

When she tells me that she lives near downtown, I tell her that I used to live in West Hollywood.

“I lived on the second floor of a four-plex, in a one bedroom apartment.”

“Did you have any roommates?”

“No,” I say. “The rent was a bit cheaper then.”

“What made you move out here?”

“Look around,” I say, pointing at the enormous blue sky and the boulders rising out of the earth out in the distance. “I love it here. There's so much nature – ravens, eagles, coyotes, rabbits. They all come out when they think that I'm not home.”

“How much land do you own?” she asks.

“Forty acres. I was planning on building a new house, but then this one showed up and I had to have it. It was beautiful and it fit my aesthetic perfectly; midcentury-modern with some inspiration of adobe.”

“And back around the corner?” she asks. “Is that a pool?”

“Yes,” I say. “I love swimming. I had that put in. It's not very warm now, but I also have a hot tub and there are only a few pleasures that are as wonderful as sitting in it in the middle of the night and watching the Milky Way.”

I watch as she makes a quiet mmm-mmm sound, imagining it.

Her hair falls casually to her face and her eyelids grow soft. She props up her head with her hand and looks around my home.

I have transformed the dining room into a library.

I still have a dining room table there. It’s sleek and low-profile with spindly midcentury modern style legs. The walls of the dining room are lined with books.

I read a lot on my iPad and Kindle, alternating between two of my favorite retailers, but there are other books that I also like to have in paperback and hardcover.

Emma points to all the books.

“I'm not much of a consumer, but when it comes to books, I don't tell myself no. As a result, if you go down to the Angel View thrift store in Yucca Valley that’s sandwiched between Ralph's grocery store and a Ross department store, you'll find that they have a very robust book section and most of those books are mine. I don't keep everything I read, otherwise my three-car garage would be overflowing with them.”

“You really give away all your books?”

“What else am I going to do with them? I only keep the ones that I really enjoyed or want to reread in the future. Other ones? I figure that it's best to share.”

“Yeah, I agree. I love going through the collections at thrift stores. They're so different from those in bookstores.”

“You'll see a lot of the popular authors, but you also get those shooting star kind of books,” I say, almost finishing her thought.

She turns around and stares at me.

Our eyes meet.

I take a step forward and look down at her mouth.

She licks her lips and I try to stop myself from leaning over and just kissing her.

She waits, but I hesitate.

Then… The moment passes.

It's for the best. She is engaged to a friend of mine, or at least she was. I have plenty of my own problems, as is.

“Tell me about Alex,” I say, taking a step away from her and making sure that whatever moment that has passed between us disperses for good.

As soon as I say his name, Emma withdraws into herself.

She even puts back the books that she took off the shelf and runs her finger nervously around the picture on the cover.

“What do you want to know?”

“Anything that you want to share with me,” I say.

“He cheated on me and it's over, but, of course, there are lingering…”

“Doubts?” I fill in the blank.

She starts to shake her head vigorously from side to side, while saying, “Absolutely not. There are no doubts, more like sadness.”

She turns her body away from me and I'm not sure what to do. I watch as her shoulders move up and down and then I realize that she's sobbing.

Without hesitating for another moment, I walk over to her and wrap my arms firmly around her.

“Shh,” I whisper into her ear. “It's all going to be okay.”

She shakes her head and her cries become more powerful.

She mumbles something and struggles for breath, but I can't quite make out what she's saying.

“It's going to be okay,” I repeat myself over and over again.

I hold her like that for a long time until she turns around and buries her face in my shoulder.

I haven't held anyone this close since… My throat tightens and I force myself to swallow hard to keep my tears at bay.

I take a few deep breaths.

I breathe through the nose and exhale through the mouth just like the meditation app that I forced myself to install on my phone has instructed me to do.

Slowly, I relax and that feeling that the ground is falling away from me disappears.

“Are you okay?” I ask, clearing my throat after she calms down a bit.

“I'm really sorry,” she says, wiping her eyes with her palms. “I don't know what came over me. That was so… Pathetic.”

“No,” I say, pulling her close to me and looking into her eyes. “You've been through a really traumatic experience and you just haven't dealt with it yet.”

“Alex doesn't deserve my tears.”

“You are not crying for him,” I say.

She looks up at me inquisitively.

“You’re not crying for him,” I repeat myself to make sure that she hears me. “Your tears are for the life that you have lost. You thought that you were engaged to a different man and then you found out that was a lie. That’s okay. We all go through that. It's just really raw right now.”

“Have you ever gone through anything like that?” Emma asks, pulling out one of the brightly colored chairs around the dining table.

She runs her fingers over the lemon yellow fabric, the exact match to the lemons growing in the backyard, and sits down.

29

Liam

“Have you ever been through something like that?” Emma asks again.

“I've been through a lot,” I say quietly.

“Like what?”

I look down at the floor. Skylar runs over and brushes along my leg, no longer seeing Emma as an enemy.

Then I look at my hands, broad and thick and tan, they used to look so different when I lived in the city.

Out here, working with my horses and taking care of the goats, the chickens, and my garden, I was forced to become a different person and my body has changed to match that.

“We don't know each other very well,” I say after a long pause.

She waits for me to add a “but” to that statement, but I don't. I'm not qualifying it, not yet.

“Yes, of course,” she adds when she gets the point, after an excruciatingly long pause.

I hope it doesn't change anything in our relationship, but for now I have to keep my secrets to myself.

Emma gets up and walks around the wall of bookshelves casually glancing at the spines. I sit back in the chair and watch. Most people tend to only display the serious authors on their bookshelves. There's an ego factor to it, like you want others to think that you are a better reader than you are, whatever the hell that means.