Jacob ran his hand over the box of chocolates—all his favorites—the flowers, the manuscript heading. “Backlit flowers, chocolates, and the first look at my favorite author’s manuscript. Are you flirting with me, Rasul Youssef?”
“God yes.”
There were customers in the shop, but Jacob didn’t care about them, not now. His whole world was the box in front of him. “I wish I could start reading right away.”
“You can.” Rasul jerked his head toward the door where Gina stood waiting. “I called Gina, and she’s going to come help me close up. I’ll work the register. You go upstairs and start reading. I’ll get things to make dinner.”
“Are you sure?” Jacob couldn’t look away from the manuscript.
“Completely and utterly. I’m barely going to be able to breathe until you finish. Please start reading right now.”
Jacob would, gladly. But first….
He went around the counter, kissed Rasul softly on the cheek, and drew him into his arms. “I’m so proud of you.”
Rasul clutched at his back. “You haven’t read it yet. It might suck. You might be completely disappointed in me.”
“Impossible. But even if I were, that doesn’t matter. You finished it. You worked so hard. You did a good job.”
“Thank you.” Rasul shivered as Jacob kissed, then licked his neck. “Go read.”
Jacob all but ran to the door leading to the apartment, pressing the box to his chest as he fumbled with the key. He took the stairs two at a time, or as best he could manage, sailing over the waiting Moriarty. He trembled as he put water on for tea, as he arranged a reading nest for himself on the couch. Once his tea was ready, he tucked himself in, drew a breath, and pulled aside the cover page.
The sheet of paper beneath it had two lines.
For Jacob
who showed me what lay beyond the veil
Beneath that was Rasul’s scrawled signature, complete with a rough and endearing heart.
Jacob put a hand over his mouth and stared at the paper for several seconds, his eyes filling with tears. Then, with a sigh, he wiped them away with a tissue, the box of which he’d strategically placed on the tea tray beside him.
“Making me cry even before page one,” he murmured and flipped the page again.
He started reading.
When he’d first picked up Rasul’s book in the hospital gift shop, Jacob had been taken aback by the power of Rasul’s narrative style, the way it pulled the reader hard and fast into the fictional world, the way it made everything around the reader bloom in a rich, breathless fashion. Critics praised him for this skill too, and it was considered his signature. In those first two books, he’d written in an engaging but omnipotent third-person past.
Veil of Stars was written in stark, immediate first-person present.
He still drew Jacob in like he’d been sucked through a black hole into another world, but the point of view he’d chosen made Jacob feel as if these were his hands, as if these nervous gulps for air came from his own lungs.
I walk through the gauntlet of a thousand friends, smiling as I receive their greetings and praise, knowing I’m utterly alone.
The surrealist bent Rasul was known for began right away, as the hero, Adam Hasan, described what had first been a metaphorical but had become a physical veil between him and the world around him. The more Adam pushed himself to pretend it wasn’t there, the thicker it became. Adam spoke of the invisible barrier between him and the world cavalierly, but at the same time, it was clear the veil bothered him. His panic and despair bled through his dismissals.
But then Milo Bloom appeared.
Jacob knew instantly Adam had a crush on Milo, but for the entire first few chapters, Adam made a point of denying it, taking intense pains to insist he focused on him only because he stood out among the crowd, that somehow he seemed to pierce the veil. A shame, Adam lamented, because Milo wasn’t his friend, just someone he knew. Yet of course he knew so much more about this boy than anyone else at his school.
As he turned page after page, stacking the read pieces of paper beside him on the tray, Jacob descended further and further into the imaginary world. As Adam’s reality shifted and swirled around him, Jacob quickly lost his sense of time and place, real and imagined, along with the protagonist. The only constant was that no matter how the universe shifted around him, Milo was always there somewhere, was always a focal point, and Adam couldn’t shake the feeling that if he only made contact with Milo, the universe would right again. The two traveled back in time, into alternate dimensions, into the future. Sometimes their schoolmates and families came along and sometimes didn’t, but always, Milo was there.
When Jacob got to the part where Adam began to suspect Milo was aware he was traveling through space and time, a touch on his shoulder made him surface from the story. Blinking, struggling to focus, he looked up to see Rasul standing beside him with a tray of food.
“It’s past seven. Time to eat.” Rasul set the tray on the ottoman, shifted the pile of read manuscript pages to the floor, and moved the tray closer to Jacob.
Jacob glanced worriedly at the papers that had been set aside. “Don’t step on them.”
Rasul looked amused. “I can print you three hundred more just like them.”
“No, you can’t. This is the one you printed for me and surrounded with lights and flowers and weighed down with chocolate.”
Rasul nudged the box, the ribbon still around it. “You haven’t even eaten the chocolate.”
Jacob lifted his chin. “I didn’t want to get the pages dirty.”
Rasul put his hands on his hips. “You’re not even halfway through. You’re going to have to stop and eat.”
Though Jacob would have protested more, he smelled the fragrant stew and fresh bread from the tray beside him. “Fine. I’ll eat while I read.”
Rasul bit his lip. “Is it okay?”
Jacob gave him a long look. “I’m unwilling to put it down long enough to put food in my body, and you dare ask that question?”
Rasul sighed and turned away. “Read faster, then.”
“You can’t bully me into rushing this. I’ve waited forever for this book.”
Rasul made yeah, yeah motions with his hand and retreated to the kitchen.
For a few moments Jacob was aware of the tick of the clock, the clink of dishes and water in the sink, Rasul humming softly to himself as he worked, and then the world fell away as Jacob melted back into the story. He cradled the bowl of stew against his body, warming his hands as he ate the food and ingested each page.
It was an unconventional, drawn-out courtship, Jacob realized as Adam and Milo started working together, neither of them confirming they were from a different dimension but both, it seemed, highly suspecting it. Adam admitted, at least to himself, that he was in love with Milo, and he sometimes dared to dream Milo might feel the same way. He worried a lot, though, that he was projecting onto him, that perhaps Milo wasn’t even there with him.
At ten, with half the box of chocolates gone and several pots of tea having sent him to the bathroom multiple times (he took manuscript pages with him), Jacob hit the middle of the book, where Adam’s longing for Milo sent them both into a tiny pocket universe, a craggy and ethereal lighthouse surrounded by a veil of stars. On the deck of that space, Adam spoke to Milo, admitting that he was aware of everything happening, that he remembered every jump, and that he was sure he’d somehow been accidentally been manipulating the universe and its dimensions. He also learned that Milo thought he was the one manipulating everything.