The Library of Borrowed Hearts

by Lucy Gilmore

He wants the world to be a softer, kinder place, but he’s smart enough to recognize an effort in futility when he sees one.

“I’m saying the world takes you at your word. Make sure the thing you’re telling them is what you want them to hear.”

That Jasper Holmes, a lonely grouch of a man, could have once fallen headfirst into love, and a literary love at that, touched something deep inside me.

“‘If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them,’” he said as if reciting a quote. It only took me a second to realize that a quote was exactly right. “‘The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.’”

In fact, she’d only read this one because someone had told her father it wasn’t appropriate for a young unmarried woman like herself.

“I know you think I come on a little strong, but it’s the nature of the beast,” he said with an apologetic shrug. “I forgot how to pretend a long time ago. When you’ve heard as many life stories as I have—the mistakes and the regrets, the missed connections and wasted opportunities—you learn to just go for it. I like you, and I like your family. I’m interested in seeing more of both. I don’t see any reason to pretend otherwise.”

He looked so scared to see her—and so happy—that she had to choke back her giggle.

But as his mouth moved over hers, she became every clinging miss and shy damsel of romantic nonsense.

The house scares her, but she likes it. She likes the idea of giving herself over to it and letting it possess her. Even if it destroys her in the end, it’s a destruction she wants. Maybe even needs.

His garden gets all the love he’s never been able to give anyone else.”

Jasper loved love. Somewhere underneath those deep frown lines and angry mutterings lay a man whose heart was as fragile and delicate as glass.

Instead of seeing his home as the wide-eyed child who’d grown up next to it, fearing the angry giant atop the beanstalk, I imagined it as the quiet oasis of a man who was clinging desperately to the one thing of beauty remaining in his life.

People had to be more than a number in their bank account. Life had to carry more meaning than that.

For once in his life, however, Jasper wasn’t speaking from a place of judgment. He and Noodle had only been together for few days, but those days had been enough. He saw. He knew.

Books were always trying to teach us that the power of love could overcome any hardship and that money didn’t buy happiness. In many ways, I believed those things to be true—I really did.

It was the same light that had flooded Jasper’s when he’d talked about Catherine—the same light that no amount of time seemed able to erase.

To know that no matter how much the world changed, a memory could carry that much weight.

“I remember their love affair as being very fast, very hot, and very catastrophic. The best ones usually are.”

To know that someone had been able to tear down his walls, to force him to feel the love that every fiber of his being balked at—it meant something to me.

There she’d be. Catherine. His Catherine, her head bent over a book, the wisps of her hair trailing over flushed, softly rounded cheeks.

With any luck, Catherine would see the message and understand: that he was a man who felt things too much, too quickly; that every day was a struggle to find the balance between what the world expected of him and what his heart demanded of himself.

But most important, she longed for a bigger, brighter life than this town had to offer. And

No more of those other two kids, so loud and clamoring and alive that it sometimes hurt to watch them.

there was no way he was getting out of this thing alive. He was in too deep, too fast, so lost in her that he was in danger of drowning forever.

There was no combination of letters in any language that could match the way it felt to have Catherine’s body next to him—her heart beating against his, her mouth open to let him in, her very spirit escaping and wrapping around his insides until he could no longer tell where one of them ended and the other began.

But for a few lines, for a little while, he got to pretend. In his own meager way, he got to write his love story down.

“I wish you’d tell me your favorite,” she said as though it was the most ordinary thing in the world for a man to reveal the inner workings of his heart.

“I was ground down the day I was born. The most I can hope for is to return to the earth exactly as I came into it.”

In many ways, books were more alive than most of the people he knew. They were living, breathing entities that changed each time you picked them up.

“You’re it. You’re everything.

It was the worst possible thing. She was already so much a part of that story that he’d never be able to look at it the same way again.

a future he would make no part of, and a future he wanted so much that it ached.

Of her quoting a passage from Wuthering Heights as though a single stupid book could contain the enormity of his love for her.

When Chloe looks at me, I can see the whole world. When Mom looks at me, all I see is her.

I don’t think Chloe hates our mom, but I know she doesn’t love her anymore. For some reason, that seems worse.

“Life,” he said. “My mother. My brothers and sisters. All my stupid mistakes and useless dreams. Everything I didn’t have and all the things I never would. But mostly I was mad at myself. I’ve been mad at myself for a very long time.”

They never make me feel like I’m being annoying when I need extra help.

Instead of asking me if I have permission to be here or making me feel like I’m bothering him, Zach makes it sound like we planned this whole thing together.

Please let yourself be loved again. Please find love again. The best thing you can give me now is a promise that your life will be as full and rich as you deserve.

Because what happens if you reach the thing and you still aren’t happy? What happens if you try to do better, but no matter how much of yourself you put in, you’ll never be what the teachers and bosses and people in the grocery store want?

“Everyone’s heart breaks at least once in a lifetime,” she said, determined, as ever, to go her own way. “It’s as inevitable as falling in love. The real challenge is deciding what you plan to do about it.”

They lived and loved hard.

That was what time did; it trampled on the dreams and wishes of youth, replaced them with the more substantial, if mundane, realities of life.

Regardless, they were all a part of me now. Good and bad, brave and cowardly, my decisions had been made. The only option now was to live with them.

“You don’t get to decide how other people feel. The things you do matter.

We’re human beings, Chloe. Real live goddamned human beings.

It was the exact sort of thing a young Catherine Martin might have been expected to do. Jasper hated her for it. And, his heart said with a stutter, he loved her for it. Again. Still. Forever.

but because I knew myself to be safe in his hands.

“I’m sorry if that’s not what you want to hear, but you were the whole story as far as I was concerned,” he said. “The beginning, the middle, and the end. I didn’t need to open another romance when I already had the perfect one written down.”

What’s the point of living if all you’re going to do is make everyone around you miserable? What are we put on this earth for if not to make life better for those we leave behind?’”