Read Afterthought: A Sententia Short Story (The Sententia) for Free Online Page B

him.”
    Probably because I’d sworn off girls for the past year and I didn’t like to think about them. My aunt interrupted my thinking about them by asking, “What came in yesterday’s shipment?” while she turned another page in the newspaper she was skimming.
    “Just books.”
    She made a noncommittal sound and turned another page. I sipped coffee while I scanned a paper of my own. Owning a bookstore was good cover for all the national and international news we consumed like sustenance. Reading them in print like we did was borderline archaic, but it seemed natural in the old-fashioned atmosphere of Penrose Books. Plus both our gifts worked better with a page than a screen. Students didn’t really notice what we were doing—or some of them knew —and our regular customers thought our voracity for the printed page was charming.
    I knew what my aunt’s question, and her ambivalent response, had meant. We weren’t expecting anything but books, but there wasn’t a schedule of Perceptum deliveries either. We hadn’t had one in a while, so it felt like time. The Historian job was a slow adventure. Rarely did we have a project with urgency, but the hunt was constant and unpredictable. I was born to do it. Also, I loved it.
    Not all of us did. My father tolerated it and my aunt fell somewhere in between. It always amused me that Uncle Jeff had been the one to join the military when my aunt was the secret weapon they were missing. She was a natural code breaker. But she was also a Penrose. So she used her gift to uncover secrets of a different kind, searching for patterns in newspapers and beating in record time any game based on a Latin Square contained in their pages.
    We weren’t the only Historians, but we were the first and oldest. The family blood came with pressure. Aunt Melinda and I were the only ones left. Realistically, I was the last. I knew it, and felt it, and was determined to live up to it.
    I should have wanted to leave by now, go to college, get away. Everyone else did, at least as far as Brattleboro or Keene. Not that either was far, but they were different. Bigger. And I did want to go to college, somewhere good that would make Aunt Mel and Uncle Jeff, and Uncle Dan, proud. That would have made my dad proud. There were so many things I wanted to study—physics, history, political science—and no reason I had to choose.
    Because my life was here. I was already living it. The only thing I’d ever wanted to do I was doing. I was good at it. What was wrong with knowing what you wanted at eighteen?
    Nothing. Except my morning routine had done nothing to ease the feeling that something was about to go wrong.
    And my biggest mystery yet was waiting somewhere on campus.
    My biggest temptation , and the biggest pain in my ass, was standing in front of me.
    “Hey, Carter.”
    “Hey, Alex.”
    Alexis Morrow. God, she looked good, leaning over the counter in a thin, low cut sweater the color of pearls. A sip of water in the desert. It took more willpower than I had to focus on her eyes, so I avoided looking at her all together. The year of no dating, no anything but running and work, was wearing on me. Alexis, too, was wearing me down. She was gorgeous, abundantly willing, and it wasn’t that I didn’t like her. I just didn’t like her enough. I didn’t feel it, and anyway, I’d promised myself I wouldn’t. Also, she was sometimes too much a bitch.
    But not right at that moment. Right then, without her friends around or anyone even paying attention to us, she was just Alex. Field hockey practice must have been canceled for the afternoon; it was the quietest time at the store, and not Alex’s usual. Maybe this was the thing that was about to go wrong, because for a fleeting moment, the idea of hooking up with her wasn’t feeling quite as wrong as I knew it was.
    She idly ran a finger over some of the old marks in our ancient counter top. It had been in this exact spot since the store opened and,