Free Safe Harbor by Judith Arnold

he
completed.
    “A girl having a nervous breakdown,” Shelley
corrected him, then grinned. “Which is probably the same
thing.”
    Kip shared her smile. Then he touched his hand
to her elbow and directed her down the aisle. “Come on--I want to
choose a book for you.”
    He had never taken her arm like that before. It
was a curiously chivalrous gesture, not exactly romantic but not
quite friendly, either. It was... protective. Possessive. She liked
it.
    He stopped in
the H’s. “Here,” he said, pulling The Sun
Also Rises from a shelf. “There’s a good,
manly book for you.”
    “I’ve read it already,” she told
him.
    “Okay. How
about...” He scanned the shelves and pulled out Hesse’s Steppenwolf .
    “I’ve read it.”
    “Robert
Heinlein— Stranger in a Strange
Land .”
    “I’ve read it,” she said.
    He scowled. “Is there anything you haven’t
read?”
    “Not in the H’s.”
    He glared at her, then dissolved in quiet
laughter. “I bet you’re going to be an English teacher when you
grow up.”
    “I’d love to be an English teacher,” she
admitted. “Or better yet, a professor of literature at some
college. I’d love to get paid to read novels and talk about
them.”
    “I can just imagine the reading lists you’d
come up with,” Kip muttered, although his smile didn’t flag. “All
books by women, right? All books about girls coming of
age.”
    “Why not?” She skimmed the shelves in search of
another book for Kip.
    “No more books for me,” he halted her. “These
things have to be returned in two weeks—I’ll be lucky if I can
finish three by then. Here.” He pulled a slender volume from a
shelf and presented it to her. “Kafka. If you want to become a
literature professor, you’ve got to get into his stuff.”
    She tilted her
head to read the spine. “ Metamorphosis .”
    “It’s about a man who turns into a
cockroach.”
    “Yuck!”
    “Real macho stuff,” he joked.
    “All right,” she said, “I’ll read it.” She
didn’t know whether he was pulling her leg about the book’s subject
matter. She wasn’t going to let Kip think he could gross her out,
though.
    They carried their books to the check-out desk,
where they both presented their cards to the librarian. She smiled
and took Kip’s pile first. “Samuel,” she said, reading the name on
Kip’s card before she inserted it into the dating
machine.
    Kip wrinkled his nose. His legal name was
Samuel Brockett Stroud III, but nobody ever called him Samuel—or
even Sam—except for when he was in trouble and his mother would
intone, “Sam-you-well, I’d like to talk to you,” in a foreboding
voice. His grandfather had been called Samuel and his
father--Samuel Brockett Stroud II--was called Brock. According to
Kip, credit for his nickname went to Diana. When he was born people
had referred to him as a “chip off the old block,” but
three-year-old Diana had misunderstood half of it and mispronounced
the rest and called him a “Kip off the old Brock.”
    Once their books had been checked out, Shelley
and Kip left the library. The rain had lightened to a drizzle, but
they both rode their bikes one-handed so they could use their left
hands to hold their books under the flaps of their raincoats. They
steered straight for Kip’s house.
    As soon as they’d shed their wet outerwear and
shoes, they ascended to the cupola. Kip adjusted the windows so no
rain would come in, and there, in the cramped, gloomily lit room,
they read. They occupied diagonal corners, their legs stretched out
between them. Whenever one of them shifted, their knees
touched.
    The first time
Kip’s knee bumped Shelley’s she flinched and glanced up. Kip was
immersed in the opening chapter of To Kill
a Mockingbird , intently perusing the page,
his brow furrowed in concentration. He appeared unaware that their
legs had brushed.
    It took Shelley only a second to recover from
the contact. This wasn’t last night; they weren’t kissing,