Smelling Books

In high school there was this girl I really, really liked, but she had a boyfriend, so…we talked…a lot. I would lend her some science fiction and fantasy books to read and one day when she returned a paperback she was embarrassed and apologized because, as she explained, her perfume leaked in her purse and my book was in there and it soaked into the book.

Every day after that I would come home from school and take the book off my shelf, put it to my face and inhale the smell of her perfume. In time, the perfume began to fade as it merged with the odor of the pages. Eventually, all that was left was the smell of paperback. 

Years later, she admitted that she purposefully drenched it with her perfume just before returning it to me because she knew it would drive me crazy.

It did.