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Jo doesn’t go to the station, but she does race through the door to overtake Friedrich on the road, her boots all muddy and her skirt soaked to the knee. Her hair plasters to her cheeks in dripping tendrils. She doesn’t think before she grabs his arm to haul him around, one cold hand closing on his over the handle of the umbrella. He’s startled and then he’s glad, expression shifting so quickly that it warms Jo right down to her bones, damn the rain.
“I’m sorry I lost my temper!” she says, much too loud, as is her way. “Well, except I’m not sorry, because I don’t care what you think I’m meant for, because even if it’s gory and even if it doesn’t sell, I don’t mind a story of a sinner and I never have. But hearing you say so —” It made her feel scraped-out and shaky, like she’d been made hollow because everything about her was too ridiculous to acknowledge. “It wasn’t very kind and I didn’t appreciate it. But I am sorry I said we weren’t friends. I want to be friends.”
At first he blinks and then he listens; he’d already tilted the umbrella so she was encased in its protective dome. The rain pelting down almost drowns out the fretful pounding of her heart. Things rush around so fast inside Jo that sometimes it takes her awful trouble to disentangle one feeling from another — she allows her sudden run from the house to explain her hammering pulse. They’re close, alone. More alone out here than they were in so many small, crowded drawing rooms.
“This was harsh,” he decides, both a question and its answer.
“Yes,” Jo says.
“Then I am sorry, too,” Friedrich tells her. He doesn’t make another excuse. He doesn’t tell her she’s too talented for what she was doing, or that he respects her enough to be honest.
“I’m writing a new book,” she blurts out suddenly. “And it might not be any good, but even if it’s not, it’s still mine.” She looks at him, a hard look or maybe a desperate one, and wants him to know what that means without having to say it.
He seems aware of that, and uncertain. “Do you want me to read it?”
“I —” On the spot, she makes up her mind. “When it’s done. Or —” She lets herself smile, mischievous. “When it’s published.”
He pretends to be taken aback, but isn’t truly offended. “I’ll buy the first copy I see in the shop window. When I’m by the ocean, in all that sunshine, it will make me think of you. And I’ll feel the autumn again.” Humor drops into something softer, his eyes on her face, the hair stuck to her cheeks.
Jo imagines him in the sun, sallow and grumpy. Maybe losing his hat to a California breeze with an exclamation of complaint, mingled English and French.
“About that,” Jo says. “I might have a job for you.”
Outside the classrooms of Plumfield and through its paneled walls, Jo can hear him talking to the students. His French is always somewhat under his breath, so comfortable in his mouth that the words all run together; his English is more carefully pronounced, syllables luxurious as they roll from his tongue. “No, no, no,” he says, a blunt correction, before he starts in on verb conjugations all over again. He does languages and philosophy. In the gap of the half-open door, she can see his wildly expressive hands, his unruly hair, the dip that forms between his shoulder blades when he leans down over a desk. It makes his jacket bulge, ill-fitting.
“Bonjour, Miss March,” he’ll say before he even turns around, and he won’t be smiling except in his eyes. And she’ll be caught, though she knew she would be.
“You have my sympathies,” she tells his students. “Your professor is a tough critic. I wouldn’t want him anywhere near my pronunciation.”
“Try,” he says, a dare. “See where you get.”
“Hm, I won’t take that bait, I know better.” But, her hand lingering against the doorframe, she calls out, “Au revoir!” before she flees.
“Do you think love and marriage are the same?” Jo asks Amy.
She thinks Meg would say yes, and Marmee would say it ought to be.
“No,” Amy says. “I love Laurie, but I married him anyway.”
They take coffee out on the lawn, Jo’s legs straight out in front of her and Friedrich with one knee bent so his elbow can rest on it. They share sandwiches and small pieces of bitter chocolate. “What I can’t understand is giving myself away,” she says. “Down to my name. Because you don’t get to keep any parts. You have to sign away all of it and then pray the man you picked isn’t going to stomp all over you, or starve you for affection, or worse. Even if they love you —”
She pulls up handfuls of grass that feel reedy and artificial against her palms.
“Even if they love you?” he prompts, after a moment.
“You just end up cleaning their house or looking after their children. Castigating yourself for spending fifty dollars wrong. I couldn’t stand it if someone were around who thought they could tell me what to do.”
“Ah, yes.” His head tilts with that thin, fond smile. “This I know.”
Jo gives him a wry sideways glance. Then, “I love my father. I don’t think John is a bad man. And I know Laurie is the best there is. But —” She heaves a sigh and waits for him to interrupt, but he doesn’t say anything; he only listens. “I don’t want to stretch myself thin. I don’t want to wear myself out. I don’t want to put myself up for sale.”
He shifts over so he’s sitting beside her, arms wrapped around both knees now in an oddly boyish posture. The weight of his shoulder sinks into hers as he leans towards her and she thinks of the rain, the space created between them that was dry and safe. “You are a wealthy woman with a big house, Jo. I think it is all yours to keep.”
There’s grass on her knuckles. He smells like coffee and paper. “Yes,” she says. “But it should be even if I weren’t.”
“What is it you like best about marriage?” Jo asks Amy.
She has never asked Meg or her mother, perhaps wary of what the answer would be.
With a quirk of her brow and a little smirk, Amy tells her, “It’s not polite to say.”
Jo spent many years huddled in armchairs at Plumfield, reading dusty tomes with ravenous eyes as soon as Aunt March had dropped into a doze. Now, when the day students are gone and the boarders asleep, she loops her legs over the arm of the chair closest the fire and reads books she bought herself. Friedrich sits close by, but more often than not she can see him looking at her over the edge of his own evening’s entertainment. His straight brows appear furrowed even when they aren’t, lending an ominous air to a face that has always seemed especially friendly to her.
“Stop that.” She flings her bookmark — a lilac hair ribbon, well aged — at him, but it merely flutters to the rug between them. He bends to pick it up and return it to her, half-kneeling beside her chair. It doesn’t bother her that he looks, though it makes her neck red and she ends up reading the same paragraph three times in a row. It only bothers her that when she tries to engage in her own study, their eyes will meet awkwardly and then neither can look at all.
“I like to watch you read. It’s almost —” He gestures at his own face, searching for the right way to phrase what he means. “Like at the theater. You experience every part of it. And every part of it you show.”
Jo reclines in her chair until she can look at him with her cheek comfortably snug against a throw pillow. Her book falls closed around her finger, resting heavy in her lap. “I have a theatrical background. I used to be quite the actor. I had to give myself the best soliloquies because I remembered them best, next to Meg — Amy was always making things up — and I always played the villain. I had a rapier and a thin moustache. I never kept prisoners, either; I was merciless.”
“This, too, I know.”
“How could you? I don’t remember you at any performances. It was a very exclusive show.”
Friedrich smiles. The fire makes his skin warm, gives him a healthy flush that perpetual exhaustion robs him of most days. It makes Jo warm too, skin prickling under her shirt and where her skirt pulls at the waist. “I can see it very easily. If you had told me you were the maiden in the tower with the long, long hair, this, I would doubt.”
She wants to unpin her hair and let it fall lush around her face like she might have in younger years. Her favorite little vanity. He could see how it would redden in this light like Beth’s hair, Beth whom he never got to meet. That’s his only fault, and not a fault at all.
“I was not an especially versatile performer, it’s true. But at what I did, there was no parallel.” She pushes up slightly, then feels uncharacteristically self-conscious and sinks back down. She doesn’t know how these things go. “Let me guess: you know that too.”
His gaze is so intent that Jo is prepared for the gentle tilt forward and the kiss that might follow — but instead, she finds she’s still talking. She asks him the thing she’d been afraid to ask him, all those many months ago. “Why didn’t you think they were good?”
She hates the nervous sound of it, the echo of that scraped-out sensation.
Friedrich sits back on his heels; the distance between them widens. But he doesn’t dither or mince words. “They were glib. There was no depth of feeling in them. And I know there is deep feeling in you.”
“Is there something wrong with excitement if it’s a little shallow?”
He shrugs. “You tell me. Do you want to be known for that?”
She hadn’t wanted to be known for them at all. “And the book?”
Jo gave him the book after it was published and accepted his compliments, but never believed them to be anything other than an attempt to make up for the past.
“It made me wish for such love,” he says. “And such innocence. So protected on your page from what might come to it in the world.”
Something splinters in her chest: a crackling warmth that spreads through her like fire racing along wood. This time, she believes him.
“Did you marry because you wanted to or because you knew you had to?”
Amy’s brush slows in its gentle rasp against the canvas. She’s painting Orchard House so Jo can hang it in the entry of Plumfield. (Take a turn over that, Aunt March.) “Both,” she says finally, and shrugs. “I’m married now, and that’s the end of it.”
At night they accidentally cross paths in the kitchen and sit together on the table sharing scraps of this and that: a hearty slice of leftover roast, a nibble of cheese, pie the cook will surely chastise them for tasting. Jo is embarrassed at first to be caught in a skirt and shawl tied hastily over her chemise, hair tumbling from its ribbon. But she’s quickly put at ease, for it’s only Friedrich. He’s in some dishabille himself without jacket or tie, shirtsleeves rolled up and collar open. She wants to lay her hand below his folded sleeve and run her palm down the length of his forearm. Instead she clears her throat.
“I put no name to them because I did not want to own them.” Their conversation never quite ends, but only pauses, to be resumed the next time they find themselves alone. “But not because I was ashamed, not really — because I thought others would be ashamed of me.”
“Your mother,” he supplies.
Jo dips her head in a nod, crumbs tumbling from her fingers to her skirt. It occurs to her then, late in the quiet of the school, that her mother was an easy excuse.
“Will you return to that style now?”
She shrugs a shoulder. “I don’t know what I’ll do. The publisher wants more of the same. A sequel.” She gives him a curious, sidelong look. “Do you find this kind of talk boring?”
“No,” he says simply. “Not when it’s had with you.”
Jo feels acutely conscious of the line of his neck and her strange compulsion to put her mouth on it. “Can I ask you something? It’s very personal.”
He gives his assent, though he leans towards her a little to say, “Should I be nervous?”
“You can be if you like,” Jo answers tartly. “It’s the kind of thing that makes people nervous.” She chews and swallows a mouthful, washes it down with a gulp of room temperature tea, and asks, “Do you think love and marriage are the same? Can you have one without the other?”
He releases a thoughtful hum that’s more exhalation than sentiment. “The salons of Paris would agree with you, I think.”
“Yes, but that isn’t an answer.”
The corner of his mouth curls. “They’ve never been the same. All artists know this.”
“Isn’t it odd,” she says, “that marriage without love is perfectly respectable, but love without marriage isn’t?”
“Is that what you’d like? Love without marriage?”
His bluntness makes her shiver. “I don’t want marriage. I know that.”
“Then I suppose the real question is —” The table creaks under them and he is so close, close enough for such whispered conspiracies. “Would you like love, or no?”
Jo has pressed her love into a hundred printed pages. She has felt the caress of a book’s leather spine. But sometimes she would like to be kissed.
“I don’t suppose it’s wholly up to me. Or at least that’s what I’ve been led to understand.”
“Mm.” Just that — a brief, inscrutable syllable. Then, “With a will such as yours?”
This is all it takes. Jo kisses him with clumsy force that has them sliding off the edge of the table, Friedrich catching himself with a hand partially in the pie dish and the other around her waist. Utterly careless, she knots her fingers in his hair and nearly bites his lip with her ferocity, then feels again that spark of uncharacteristic restraint that makes her jump back two steps. I’m sorry, she almost says, except she’s not sorry.
He takes his lower lip into his mouth and smiles, the same one he gave her the day they met, bashful on the front steps of the boarding house. Each of them stumbling over their greetings. He doesn’t stumble when he says, “And what of passion?”
“Yes,” Jo says faintly. “I had been wondering about that.”
Jo tells Amy, “I want to talk about things that are not polite,” and Amy’s resultant smile is positively evil.
There was always a library at Plumfield, an imposing room on the second floor with dark bookcases filled from floor to ceiling, but Jo was rarely allowed to linger in it. She would hesitate wistfully at its threshold before Aunt March’s sharp voice called her on, wanting so badly to vanish inside it and take the shelves book by book. The volume of books in this house is truly staggering, and sometimes makes Jo wonder if she underestimated old Aunt March a little. For a woman of such sour disposition, she was inordinately fond of reading.
Some of the books have gone to classrooms; some have been replaced with ones closer to Jo’s own taste. But any free moment will find her ascending the sliding ladder to free another dusty tome from where it’s been long forgotten — taking them shelf by shelf as she always dreamed. Today she hands one after another down to Friedrich: big, heavy books about philosophy and botany, illustrated by someone’s careful hand. The dust is thick enough to trace an initial in, so Friedrich sneezes — and Jo catches it almost immediately, a sneeze of her own causing her to overbalance on the thin wooden slats, both hands busy with books. The sudden weightless feeling of an impending fall is upon her, but she doesn’t dare drop them to steady herself. It’s quite the dilemma.
But not for Friedrich. His own books hit the ground with a frightening thunder so he can grab Jo by the waist before she tips over backwards. It’s nothing — not even a fall, merely a perilous swaying in place — but her heart is racing. All she can think is that he touched her waist once before. When she kissed him.
Which she does again, one breath away from laughing at the silliness of falling off a ladder because of a sneeze. She’s high enough up that she must lean down to do it, her palms laid along his jaw and arms tucked in close. His panicked grip gentles into something calmer but just as steady. Jo leans into him until she is swept, without quite realizing how, to the ground.
“Between fireplaces and bookcases, I think you and I might be in some trouble,” he says.
He’s never asked her to explain or quantify a kiss. “Yes,” Jo says impatiently, fingers on his tie now, pulling him back down. “Some trouble indeed.”
One or the other of them must wake before the sun comes up and the staff starts bustling so they can button themselves back into their clothes and slink off to their respective rooms. It’s difficult to keep a secret in a crowded house, especially one Jo isn’t especially interested in keeping. It’s only because of the students and the scandal and the things other people might say. An awful lot of bother to go through for the simplicity of opening her eyes to see the curve of Friedrich’s shoulder beside her in bed. She runs her fingers down the long line of his spine to wake him, but he is always very difficult to wake.
Jo hadn’t intended this — Jo would argue that she had no intentions on him at all — but hunger outweighed sense. She’s had that feeling before. On the hill with Teddy, all she could taste was her own want for writing and she knows she had been right then, so she must be right now, too.
“It’s morning.” Her voice has a quiet rasp; she puts her mouth to his shoulder and smiles when he grumbles. “Yes, it is.”
Jo has taken over Aunt March’s room, which she’d thought much too big at first. Now she’s found it has space for a sizeable writing desk and a little sofa to sprawl on, enough empty floor for piles of papers and books. And space for Friedrich’s jacket thrown over the chair, his watch next to her inkwell. All these things must be collected before he goes, for rumors without evidence is fire without kindling to feed it.
Aunt March must have envisioned many uses for this house, and this room, with Jo as its mistress, but likely not this one. The rotation may have become a proper spin by now.
Soon someone will be coming down the hall to light the fireplaces and pour water into Jo’s basin. But instead of hurrying Friedrich away, she rests her cheek on his arm and puts hers around his waist. He makes another unintelligible sound and holds her hand in place with his own.
“I’m terribly sorry, but it is,” she murmurs. “It’s morning, nothing to be done.”
His throat clears with a cough. “Would you marry me so that I could sleep in once in a while?”
He says it like asking her to pour him another cup of coffee, or hand him that stack of papers. Jo smiles. “No,” she says. “You can doze in your own room whenever you like, no one’s stopping you.”
“Very cruel,” Friedrich sighs. “Intolerable.” The word comes out somewhere between languages, with too many syllables somehow.
Jo ruffles his hair. “Buck up, professor. Inconvenience is a small price to pay for one’s independence.”