Neverending

14

We spend the next hour in City Library, pulling books from the towering shelves in the Science section. Juliette stops what she's doing to look at me whenever I spend longer than one minute scanning the content section. I start to do the same. We develop this code. Despite our unspoken agreement, she still checks in every so often. 'Anything?' She'll ask. 'Not yet,' I say.

I can't tell you how much I am enjoying this mission of ours. Being here, with her. It feels almost unreal, given the amount of airtime she'd had in my head for the last couple of days. But here she is.

It's funny, getting to know someone. You usually have this idea in your head – formed really on the basis of some brief conversations, how they speak, maybe where they're from, how they dress. But what you don't get from those initial observations... well, they're usually the things that end up slaying you.

So I'm watching Juliette as she runs her fingers down different book spines. She's concentrating but, unlike most people, she doesn't frown as she does so. Instead, her expression is just incredibly focussed. Now and then, she pushes her hair back from her face. She'll notice I'm looking at her instead of continuing to search my section but she doesn't make me feel weird about it. She stops what she's doing and looks right back at me. It's like there's nothing secret about what's going on here. Juliette knows why I gave her my number. This is her looking back, because she called me. No-one's faking anything.

Unexpected. And a first, at least for me.

Who's got time for playing games when it comes to love? Precisely no-one. But reality laughs, slaps you in the face and shows you otherwise, anyway.

I wonder if I can really do this. Really get to know someone and not pretend to be anyone other than who I am.

I'm so busy overthinking that I almost don't notice my eyes skimming over the very thing we've been looking for.

I look up. Juliette is grinning.

'You've found it?' She asks.

'I have,' I say.

'Read it, then!' She puts everything down, sits of the floor cross-legged and rests her chin on one hand.

'Shoot.'

I hesitate. In that moment, now that she's set aside all distractions just to listen to what I have to say, I'm aware of that nudge. The one that tells you that this is something.

I smile. 'The sun's light appears to be white but it is actually made up of all the colours we see in a rainbow.' I look up from the book that rests in my hands. I feel warmth like smoke in my veins as I watch her watching me. 'As light passes through Earth's atmosphere, tiny air molecules cause it to scatter. This scattering of light increases as the wavelength of light decreases. Because blue light has the shortest wavelengths, it is scattered more than red light which has long wavelengths.'

Juliette is smiling at me. 'What about sunsets?'

I quickly read the next paragraph. 'So those molecules in our atmosphere: when the sun is low during sunset, it and its light are effectively further away from us. So it has to travel further through the atmosphere which means a lot of the blue light is scattered around before it reaches us. So what we end up with is the red stuff. That's me paraphrasing, by the way.'

'I like your paraphrasing,' she laughs.

I laugh, too.