Beautiful Disaster

Beautiful Disaster Chapter 12

Chapter 12

The library has two levels. Its lower is filled with newer more modern daybooks alphabetically organized in genres. All are neatly packed into the cherry oak bookshelves with a golden plate on the side to designate that section. There are comfortable sofas and chairs around the room. The second level, are books from past centuries. Some are cased in glass to keep their body from falling apart. Others are shelved sectioned by year. In addition, there are aged maps hanging on walls and other antiques placed about.

After getting kicked out of the kitchen by Troy, I went and wandered about the house’s corridors and endless supply of bedrooms. It had taken me a minute, but eventually I found the doors that lead into the library. Luckily I hadn’t run into anyone—hopefully no one knows where I am.    

I’m sitting on the spiral staircase head resting against the railings. Recently I had just found a book—or rather a journal wrote in the year of the sixteenth century. The writings are written in beautiful calligraphy with the dates absent and spoken in a foreign language I’ve never seen and probably never heard of. After minutes of sifting through the aged warn parchment the only thing I could read and understand is a single name. The elaborate structured handwriting made it a challenge but eventually I managed to configure it.

Whom Troy had written about must’ve been vastly important since every entry I’ve went through has the name. Not once but multiply of times in areas that are sometimes rushed or have been smudged by ink. My fingers peel away the thin pages carefully preventing any rips or tare. I’ve already been through it a few times now investigating any some sort of pattern with the smudges or rushed handwriting. My guess is whenever the name is mentioned more than just a few times.

But I can be wrong.

This is the only journal I found. It had been carelessly left in the open on top of a few books in the sixteenth century section. Its leather bound wrapped carelessly in a leather thong. Someone left in a hurry and then forgetting to return and replace it back wherever its original place may be. Again something I don’t know but I’ll certainly find. There must be more of these somewhere. A journal just doesn’t end with a dot, dot, dot.

The doors across the room echo a chime casting by the metal door handles. The reverberation of the large wooden door shuts to a close. Shutting the journal and placing it behind me, I look up to view the visitor; while secretly pleading it’s not Izzy here to come and start up something that’s not even worth it. Which, in any case, all of her arguments are pretty much pointless.         

She, on the other, doesn’t see it that way.

The footsteps are silent but what he says next is not. “I thought I would find you in here.” Cole emerges from behind a bookcase with a cool look of ease that isn’t suppressing the lines of anxiety creasing underneath his eyes. 

I let out a sigh. I’ve been caught. “How did you know to find me here?”

He shrugs as if it’s no big mystery or it even took no deep thought on his part. “You love books.”

“Yes,” I say tucking back against the railings feeling for the journal underneath my butt. “But that doesn’t mean I’ll always go to the library.”

“It does whenever you get kicked out by Troy.”

My face falls and my eyes narrow. “Am I really that much of an open book?”

It’s a soft chuckle following by a slight shake of his head. “That analogy defiantly suits you.”   

I can’t really deny that. “Alright well since you’re here,” pausing for a moment I give him a hard look. “Why are you here? It doesn’t strike me you being the hard-core reader type.”