Love At First Night

10.

THE SOUND OF Lisa's voice makes my entire body clench.

We're tucked in a relatively secluded corner of the coffee shop, so Lisa doesn't have to project all that much. Her voice is a soft, rumbling, intimate thing. It reminds me that on the Friday night we met (when I was still in the headspace of The Mafia's Princess and dumbstruck by the tall and brooding stranger who needed a reading recommendation), I briefly imagined Lisa reciting poetry to me. It seemed like a nice fantasy. Now I realize I was Icarus: an absolute fucking idiot, just hauling ass towards the sun, completely unaware that the heights I sought would wreck me.

And oh, it's wrecking me-the way her mouth forms the words. The way her wide palms and long fingers cradle the book. The way a stray piece of her dark hair drapes down over her forehead.

"Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"

Lisa lifts her eyes expectantly. I try to reconcile with the fact that my insides have melted and my underwear is a little bit damp.

"Keep reading," I blurt. "I mean, in your head. If you-if you want, just to speed things up."

Lisa, a woman of no mercy, shrugs. "I don't mind reading it out loud."

So I sit there, a trembling mess of caffeine and desire, as Lisa Manoban reads the poem in its entirety. She trips over a few words and awkward, old-fashioned turns of phrase, but there's something charming about it. Everyone else in this Starbucks probably thinks she's as close to a deity as a college kid can get, but I get to watch her smile in that slightly self-deprecating way when she slips up.

I let my eyelids flutter closed, embracing my newest kink: being read to.

When Lisa reaches the last line, a part of me wants to tell her to read it again. She probably wouldn't fight me on it-I'm the expert here, after all. But, reluctantly, I peel open my eyes and meet Lisa's. A moment passes in perfect silence before she looks back down at the page.

"Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" She repeats from the second to last stanza. "So he's talking about God. He's asking how God could make both of these animals."

I clear my throat. "Exactly. I mean, you have to think about what Blake believed in, and what was going on around him with the industrial revolution. It was a lot to process. You know, he's asking himself how God could make something so innocent, so agricultural and romantic as the lamb, and also make a tiger-this beast from a far-away land that needs to kill the lamb to feed itself."

Lisa stares at the page for a long moment, her dark eyes tracing laps over the lines.

"This is actually kind of fucking cool," she says.

I hope she's not being sarcastic. "You think?"

"Yeah. I think I finally get why you picked your major."

"For all the high-paying job prospects, obviously."

Lisa snorts. "Well, if it means anything coming from me, you could definitely teach at the college level if you wanted to. I think you might be better at this than my tenured professor. I went to his office hours last week. Complete waste of time."

"Let me guess," I say. "Old white guy?"

"His name is Richard Wilson. Think he's in his late sixties."

"Knew it." I lean back in my chair and fold one leg over the other. "I feel like I almost took a class with him my freshman year, but his Rate My Professor score was abysmal. Honestly, though, you could get the same interpretation I just gave you from a few Google searches. Like I said: the trick to most poetry is context. It's like talking to a person. The more you know about where they're coming from, the easier it is to understand them."