“Jim, babe. We’ve got to talk.”
Well, shit. Bones only called him Babe in the wee hours of the morning when neither of them want to get up, his voice as gravelly as the stubble on his cheek, both of them flung together in bed like they were interlocked puzzle pieces. Bones also only called him Babe when he was vaguely pre-occupied with matters of great peril for Jim and Bones’ marriage and well-being--like the time Bones announced he could possibly be dying of Xenopolycythemia.
“What’s up, babe?” Jim asked, as lightly as possible from where he sat cross-legged on the floor in their Victorian--the one they moved into three days ago and signed the papers on Via a sketchy Comm signal as they made their way back to a shore-leave that was possibly indefinite.
“We gotta talk about the books.”
“What books?” Jim bit his lip, glad he was hidden in his new fortress of books in the middle of their new living room. Well, Bones wanted it to be a living room, Jim wanted it to be a library. So Jim moved his books in from storage. All 852 of them.
“We’re drowning in books.”
“We are not drowning in books.” Jim scoffed, setting another hardbound copy on the wall to his left. He had started this fortress as a means to organize them but it soon became a five hour lay in, involving reading multiple passages of a book he hadn’t touched in ten years.
“There’s currently no room to walk in the living room.”
“Library.” Jim corrected.
“Whatever the hell you want to call it, we can’t walk in it. We’ll have to dig you out of there before your legs get numb.”
“I’ll have food delivered and do my paperwork on my new desk.” Jim turned back and grinned, patting the growing wall in front of him.
Bones scoffed.
“And I can always stretch out with a bit maneuvering.” Jim pushed a stack a little and it wobbled before steadying. “Toss me a blanket, would you?” At Bones’s look, Jim grinned wider. “Or you could snuggle in here with me?”
“And die a crushing death when the books topple over on us? I don’t think so.” Bones lowered himself onto the floor on the other side of the book fortress. Jim found himself staring at Bones’ barefeet, a small reminder that they lived somewhere worth comfortably walking around barefoot in, and then at the slice of skin that showed above his dark sweatpants as his Starfleet Academy tee-shirt rode up his back.
Bones picking up a worn copy of Le Petit Prince and Jim found himself drawn to Bones’ fingers, skimming the pages of one of his favorite titles.
“Have you read all of these?”
“Nope.” Jim said, snapping out of it.
“Why keep ‘em? You can save a hell of a lotta space by downloading them onto a PADD. Or putting them back in storage until you’re ready to read them.”
Jim skimmed his hand across the stack nearest him, a stack that started with Leif Enger’s Peace Like A River, the 100th anniversary addition and ended with a book on the ethics of trading in the Neutral Zone.
“You see this one?” Jim pointed at an N.K. Jemison book, so thick and in near pristine condition from the storage facility’s careful storage guidelines. “I took this off the free shelf of the first coffee shop I stumbled upon in San Francisco. We had spent the night picking courses in that shit dorm room they assigned us that barely fit the two twin beds due to overflow.”
Bones smile slowly splits his face as he remembers. “You spilled the coffee down my shirt when you fell over..oh what was that again? A stack of books?”
“There was a donation pile in the library after orientation, Bones! Neither of us could have afforded them new so I took ‘em.”
“You pick up books like some people pick up strays.”
Jim flipped the book open and leafed through the pages. “It reminds me of you. I read it that night.”
“We drank ourselves to bed that night.”
“You drank yourself to bed. I was sober and in a binge reading mood.”
Bones rolled his eyes, nudged a pile away to the side and then another. A small space was opening between them where Bones inched his way closer.
“So all these books remind you of something?”
“Mostly you. And the ones I haven’t read yet, I’m hoping to do so slowly. So that every book is attached to a better memory.”
“That’s romantic but I still think you’re a book hoarder.”
“All because of you, babe.” Jim grinned, reaching forward to grab Bones’ shirt front and pull him in for a kiss.
“You’re ridiculous, babe.” Bones said before answering his kiss and pulling him down onto a new bed of paperbacks behind them.
