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fingers warm against cold skin. “Are you okay? You look pale all of a sudden.”
    “Very tired,” she managed. Her lips were numb. “I didn’t sleep last night.”
    “Well, you should sleep. You want a ride home?”
    She did. With dismay, she discovered that what she wanted was for him to drive her home, and then come into the apartment, make love to her, and hold her while she fell asleep. She shook her head, then levered herself to her feet. “I need the exercise.”
    Zee also got to his feet. Taller than she was by a good foot, an intoxicating mix of muscle and gentleness and quiet strength.
    Breathing, that was important. That, and getting away, getting home, before she betrayed any more of herself to a man who was a total stranger, no matter how attractive or how often dreamed of.
    “Let me lend you some books, before you go. I have some good ones on dreams.”
    “I thought this was a store. Where people buy things.”
    He laughed. “Well, it is that. But I have a collection of older books that nobody in Krebston is ever going to buy. There is one, at least, on lucid dreaming.”
    “I couldn’t—”
    “It will give me a reason to see you again. You know—you never even told me your name.”
    Her heart was racing beyond all reason; her knees were weak. She fought back a ridiculous urge to push a stray lock of hair back from his face, to run her hand along the strong line of his jaw, touch the hint of a cleft in his chin.
    “I’m Vivian,” she heard herself say. “And I’d love to see the books—”
    A smile lit up his face, and there was that dimple again. “Maybe we can talk about them when you’ve read them. Hang on a minute; they’re in the back.”
    He vanished through a door into the back of the store, returning a moment later with a small stack of books—a large, slim volume, and three that were smaller and fatter. Pulling out a bag from under the counter, he slid the books into it and handed it to her.
    There was something new in his eyes, a thing she couldn’t read, as she took the bag from him. “I’ll bring them back soon,” she said.
    “I’ll be waiting.”

Three

    Z ee held his breath as he watched her walk away. Night after night, year after year, he had dreamed of this woman and had loved her in those dreams beyond all measure. All of his life, it seemed, he had been waiting for this day. It took the discipline of years not to follow her, to remain standing in the doorway and watch her cross the street with that quick light step. When the cascade of auburn hair vanished around a corner, the world, light-filled an instant ago, seemed to go dark.
    Unwilling to deal with customers now, Zee locked the door and put up the
Closed
sign. He needed time to process this event, to think about what to do next. To wonder how she was going to react to one of the books he had given her and to think that perhaps he shouldn’t have followed the old man’s directions quite so precisely.
    Ten years ago, almost to the day, Zee had been doing time in county jail on a set of assault charges, stuck with a court-appointed attorney who advocated the guilty plea and a deal for every one of his clients. Which meant no way out of doing time. He was coming to terms with this reality when one of the guards came back to his cell and turned the key in the lock.
    “Good news, Arbogast, you made bail.”
    “No shit!” his cellmate said. “What about me, Sarge?”
    The officer snorted. “Come on—who would bail you out, Nelson?”
    “Fuck, man, that’s cold.”
    Nelson probably did have somebody somewhere who might bail him out. But the probability of anybody springing Zee? That was as far off the charts as winning the lottery. Even if his parents had any extra money, which they didn’t, they certainly wouldn’t have wasted it on their wayward son. His grandmother was long dead. There was nobody else.
    Keeping the questions out of his face and off his lips, he followed the officer out of the cell,