The Colour of Waiting

Eleanor met James the spring the almond trees blossomed all over the old quarter, so that the streets looked dressed for a wedding no one had announced. She was nineteen, studying botany at the university, always carrying some leaf or petal pressed between the pages of her notebook. He was a year older, worked at his uncle's bookshop near the old clock tower, and had a habit of reading the last page of a novel first, "so I know if it's worth loving," he told her once.

They met because of a mistake. She had gone into the shop looking for a book on wildflowers of the northern valleys and asked for it by the wrong title. James, instead of correcting her outright, spent twenty minutes pulling down book after book, letting her discover the error herself, just so he could keep talking to her. When she finally found the real book, she looked up and caught him smiling like he'd been waiting for exactly this.

"You knew the whole time," she said.

"I did," he admitted. "But you looked like someone who enjoys finding things out on her own."

She came back three days later. Then the next week. Then it stopped being about books at all, though they always brought one as an excuse - an unspoken rule between them, a small dishonesty that let them keep meeting without either of them having to say the truer, more frightening word.

Their courtship, if it could be called that, unfolded mostly in margins. A note slipped into a returned novel. A pressed almond blossom left between pages, where a particular poem about longing happened to sit. He began recommending books he knew she'd never like, just to hear her argue about them over tea at the stall outside. She began visiting on days she didn't need a book at all.

Neither of their families would have called it proper. She was expected to marry someone chosen with care a family friend, or the son of her father's business partner, someone with land and a good name. James had nothing but a bookshop that belonged to his uncle and a habit of reading too much for a man who was supposed to be thinking about his future. So they did not speak of it, not for two years. They only kept meeting, kept talking, kept leaving small things for each other between pages, as though patience itself might eventually be mistaken for permission.

It was Eleanor's grandmother, of all people, who first said it plainly. The old woman had cataracts thick as fog and rarely left her chair by the window, but she missed very little.

"You go to that bookshop too often for someone who claims to hate reading," she said one evening, not looking up from the wool she was spinning.

Eleanor froze. "I don't hate reading, Grandma."

"No," the old woman agreed. "You hate lying to me. It doesn't suit your face." She set down her spindle. "Bring the boy for tea. Let me look at him before I die of curiosity, if nothing else."

It was not approval. It was an opening  thin as a hair, but enough.

What followed was not simple. Eleanor's father was a proud man who had already begun making inquiries about the business partner's son. When he learned of the bookshop owner's nephew, his first instinct was refusal, flat and immediate. But Eleanor's grandmother, who had buried a husband and outlived two of her own children, had a way of getting what she wanted through patience rather than argument. She did not fight her son. She simply invited James to tea, once a month, for a year, and let him prove himself in small increments  the way he stood when her son entered a room, the way he spoke of his uncle with respect rather than ambition, the books he brought her though she could no longer read them, describing their contents instead in a low, careful voice so she could still feel the shape of a story in her hands.

"He reads to blind old women," she told her son eventually. "A man who does that without being asked is not wasting his life."

It took another year of these teas, these slow accumulations of trust, before Eleanor's father relented  not with warmth, not at first, but with the particular exhaustion of a man who has run out of good reasons to say no.

They married in autumn, when the town had gone the colour of wheat and the almond trees were bare. It was, by any measure, an ordinary wedding  modest, a little cramped, the caterer late with the lamb stew. But Eleanor wore, pinned inside the sleeve of her wedding dress where no one else would see it, a single pressed almond blossom, five years old and gone the colour of old paper, kept from the very first afternoon in the bookshop.

James found out about it decades later, long after they'd raised two children and buried Eleanor's grandmother and grown old enough that his hair had gone the same white as the pages of his oldest books. He found the flower by accident, tucked into a novel Eleanor had asked him to look through for her — her eyes weren't what they used to be, and she liked him to read to her now, the way she once described books to a blind old woman who was patient enough to wait for love to arrive properly.

"You kept this," he said, holding the flower up to the light, marveling that something so fragile had survived so many house moves, so many years.

Eleanor didn't look up from her knitting. "I kept a great many things," she said. "You were simply the one that lasted."

He laughed, and set the flower carefully back between the pages, in the exact place he'd found it  because some things, once placed correctly, are better left undisturbed. And that evening, as he had done for nearly forty years, he read to her until she fell asleep, her hand resting lightly on his, the story unfinished, the ending  as it had always been between them  something they were, unhurriedly, still writing together.

© Rehan Azam,'The Colour of Waiting' An Short story by Rehan Azam , All Rights Reserved.