Checking Out Love (3 page)

The librarian handed his IDs back, then cleared his throat. “There’s a bathroom down the hall. Go wash and dry your hands. I’ll be back with the first diary in a few minutes.”

Jeremy saluted him, not offended though his hands were clean. Old books were delicate, and he had to take extra care. He left his bag there, pushed his glasses up, and went to the door. The librarian crossed the room to another door, this one unmarked. He didn’t write down the call number. He either had a good memory or it was a smaller collection than it was rumored to be.

He also snagged his sweater on the doorknob but didn’t seem to notice, not even when some of the yarn ripped. 

He was like the opposite of the Beast. Jeremy watched him go all the same, before finally taking off to find the bathroom.

He returned before the librarian did, and claimed a seat and opened his laptop. He was tempted to look up the Barrett family, and would have if the librarian hadn’t returned at that moment.

With a book in his hands, the man’s movements were much more graceful and focused. He set the diary down carefully in front of a breathless Jeremy, then stepped back. He recited the rules steadily. “No pictures, especially nothing with a flash. No pens or anything with ink. Pencils are… you could borrow a pencil if you need one.” He seemed to remember Jeremy already knew this the second Jeremy nodded at him, and then—to Jeremy’s surprise and delight—he blushed so fiercely the tips of his ears turned red.

“God, yeah,” Jeremy said, out loud, then made a shocked face the librarian was too distracted to notice. Flustered and shy were not normally his thing, but he could enjoy this. This guy gave the gentlest instructions from any librarian ever with a special collection to guard. “Have you looked at these?” Jeremy wasn’t noted for his social skills, but he thought the simple question might put the guy at ease. He seemed nervous.

“Yes. I--” The librarian didn’t look up for another moment. “A long time ago. They’re very sweet. I never thought about the languages in them as more than a lark, a fantasy, until you said… all that.” It wasn’t just his eyebrows that were intense. His eyes could be intense too. “I hope they help you with your thesis.”

Jeremy put a hand over his heart. “I will be gentle and respectful. I won’t hurt your babies, I swear.” He pulled himself closer to the book—and the librarian—in an effort to keep himself from staring. The cover was brown leather, with cracked paint on it and a few ink swirls. “Oh God, look at that. She doodled all over it!”

He wanted to touch, but restrained himself until he was calmer. “Swirly doodles! Is that an animal? Did she not just make up a language? She made up creatures too? It’s like no time has passed. Smart kids across the generations do the same things to keep their minds busy. I used to name my sister’s dolls after characters from books and create crossovers before I knew what those were.” Jeremy stopped again. He refused to blush. Then they would both be blushing, and that was ridiculous. “Wow. I just told a stranger that. You’re judging me for playing with dolls, but let me tell you--”

“Comics.” The librarian interrupted him, and Jeremy didn’t even care because the guy in the lavender cardigan was twitching as if he had admitted to something horribly lowbrow. “I… read comics. Storm was my favorite.” He coughed. “From
The Uncanny X-men
. The Chris Claremont years. Wolverine and Jubilee too, but Storm was the coolest. I’m going to go.” He followed one thought with the other, then turned away. “I… I’ll be… I’ll be close. If you need help.”

“Yeah, okay,” Jeremy agreed, faintly, since that last comment left him stunned and stupid. He forgot the diary for a few moments while he watched the librarian straighten up Leland’s desk. He wiped at the pencil mark and grimaced in displeasure at the result. Even his grimace was pretty.

No, Jeremy told himself firmly. No. If he was going to do that thing where he imagined relationships with people not interested in him, he should at least do it with someone more his type. Someone likely to actually want him in return.

Which, point of fact had never happened—yet. Probably because obsessive and nerdy and hyper were too much for some people, most people. Factor in the brain, his family, and whatever else it was about him that made guys run away screaming, probably the visible hearts in his eyes when he encountered something he liked, and Jeremy was doomed to the single life.

He allowed himself a sigh as he watched the man go. Holy crap, what an ass. What, did the guy do squats all day behind the circulation desk? Ride a bicycle up and down steep hills for fun? Hiding all
that
under handmade cardigans really wasn’t fair, although it was probably for the best as far as Jeremy was concerned.

Shy really was not Jeremy’s thing. Shy and quiet did not go well with his big mouth and rapid-fire brain. That guy probably read poetry at home with his cat, no, with his wife and/or domestic partner who sold yarn or bred flowers. The cat probably sat on his lap the second he pulled out his volume of Browning. The whole thing was too gentle and sweet for Jeremy.

But he thought of those large hands pushing through soft cat fur and made a satisfied sound before he bent over the diary.

At some point he put his earbuds in, although he had no memory of doing so. He got lost in the music and what he was reading. He’d closed his laptop too, absorbed in the diary but not yet interested in taking notes. He didn’t know what was more fascinating: Rosa’s created world or the real one she had documented with equal care. He wondered what had happened to her, a girl growing up in a world where marriage was supposed to be the height of her ambitions.

He raised his head at one point, his thinking foggy with details he’d analyze later, and remembered feeling surprised to see Leland’s desk still unoccupied. He shouldn’t have been startled to know he’d scared off the librarian in lavender. But it took him a while to fall back into the diary after that.

When he closed it, hours later, the lights in the room gave him no hint about what time it was. He guessed near closing time. He gathered up his things, and was hesitating about the diary when one of the women he saw earlier at the main desk practically burst through the door. She stopped when she saw him, then gave him a quick but thorough examination.

“I’ve been instructed to ask if you found the diary helpful.” Her tone was… hard to read. Jeremy couldn’t tell if she thought something was funny or if she was extremely annoyed. Her word choice was also interesting.

“Yeah. I want to look at it again, but you guys are probably closing and—” his stomach growled, loudly—“I need to eat. Should I make an appointment to come again?”

“What for?” She raised both dark eyebrows in a familiar expression of surprise. “If you come on Saturday, the place might be packed, but we can still get them for you.”

“Oh.” Jeremy felt knocked back a bit and couldn’t say why. “I didn’t want to anger the… I didn’t want to annoy the librarian here. I heard that’s a bad thing to do. To be honest, I’m kind of shocked that no one was in here checking up on me.” And oh, yeah, he was upset the shy one hadn’t returned. That was truly pathetic of him. Jeremy was reaching new depths of dorky loneliness if he missed the chance to ogle an awkward, if hot, man that much.

The woman pointed up, at the corner. “Cameras,” she informed Jeremy easily, as if discreet, state-of-the-art security was usual at all small town libraries. The Barrett family still had money, it seemed. “We had an event downstairs tonight, but rest assured, someone had an eye on you. They’ll be pleased to know everything went fine.”

“Yes.” Jeremy glanced toward the camera, then belatedly remembered there had been a small notice about the camera on Leland’s desk, but he’d forgotten it in the face of the librarian’s blushes and Leland Barrett’s name. They now had hours of footage of Jeremy bobbing his head to his music and smiling in nerdy delight over an old diary. Wonderful. But, nothing he could do about it now. “Well, I’ll be back,” he told her at last, and got up. He carefully handed the diary to her and then looked to the camera one final time. “Hopefully, I’ll get to see your infamous Leland next time.”

“Leland?” The women had a smug smile and a wicked twinkle in her pale eyes. “You are so going to wish you hadn’t said that.” Her reaction was everything Jeremy hoped for. Leland Barrett, IV must be something to see in action.

He beamed at her, shy librarian forgotten. “I can’t wait,” he informed her honestly, and booked an appointment for the following week while she was still trying to hide her surprise.

He made it a whole two days before the library called to him and he came back anyway, appointment be damned. Or rather, two days later he needed some place quiet to think, and his roommates had made his apartment impossible for that. He got to Four Oaks by early evening, at a time when the highschoolers were starting to clear out. Enough of them remained to make him put off exploring the first floor of the building for another day, although he did notice this time that there was a basement for storage and a large room in what had once been an entire wing that was used for meetings and events.

He skipped past the circulation desk, stopping only long enough to wave a greeting to the woman he’d spoken to before. Her surprise this time was just as intriguing, as if she hadn’t expected to see Jeremy again. He’d thought even scared students would brave Leland’s wrath more than once if it meant completing their research.

To prove him right, he found a much larger group on the second floor this time. Older people, likely professors, were at one table farther away, near the special collections reading room. The rest, probably college students, sat in pairs or alone at the other tables.

The quiet librarian was seated at the desk near the wall. He had one foot on a wheeled cart of books waiting to be reshelved, and then other on the floor. He was making notes in something, using one pencil despite the pencil already stuck behind his ear.

Jeremy was in front of the desk before he could talk himself out of it. The second pencil compelled him to, placed behind the guy’s right ear like a flower. “Hey.”

The librarian raised his head, frown in place, then gave a jump when he saw Jeremy. As if he’d been perfectly aware of both pencils the entire time, he reached up without taking his eyes away from him, and pulled the pencil from behind his ear. He wore a knitted, pale blue sweater vest, and a white collared shirt. A bow tie would have completed the look, but he hadn’t bothered. He wouldn’t have fit in downstairs with all the noise and personality, but the outfit worked on the second floor with its care and reserved taste. The pastel color only made it a tiny bit rebellious.

“You don’t have an appointment until next week,” the librarian murmured, and started to turn pink as he finished the sentence.

Jeremy gave a very real sigh. “I couldn’t stay away.” When that got him puzzled silence and a blink, he added, “This place is incredible.” He made sure to whisper this time.

The librarian wrinkled his forehead, then smoothed it, then looked Jeremy over. Once again, Jeremy hadn’t dressed up. There hadn’t been a reason to, he’d thought. Now he felt underdressed, like he’d shown up to a date in blue plaid and jeans. He’d put on fingerless gloves because there was a chill in the air and he got cold on his bike. He sometimes felt a chill when driving. He felt it now too, with the librarian silent.

He’d done it again, somehow he’d done too much and this guy was already tired of him. He pulled off his gloves and stuck them in his pocket to give himself something to do. Before he pulled his sleeves into place his wrist tattoo was clearly visible, and the librarian’s eyes went right to it. Since the guy probably didn’t read Chinese characters—Jeremy didn’t either, really, but he knew some things—Jeremy translated.

“It means ‘trust’.” Jeremy let out a small laugh. “Get it? Because so many white kids get Mandarin characters as tattoos while trusting that they mean what they were told they mean, which I thought was funny. And there’s this idea in linguistics about the formation of language that involves trust. I was really into language and linguistics for a while, though I’ve changed focus since then. Communication is the strangest thing. They still aren’t sure how, or why, speech evolved. Some people pointed out that trust is necessary for creatures to share a spoken or written language.” That got him another startled blink. “You see, because words reference things that aren’t necessarily there at the time, so they could be lies. There’s no reason to trust words, since words can be faked, unlike primal noises.”

Which made him think of primal noises, and if the quiet librarian would make any in bed. Maybe he was all hush in the library and all groans in the bedroom. Now there was a thought. Jeremy wasn’t likely to ever find out, but it was a good thought anyway. He’d never had detailed library sex fantasies before, and didn’t know what was hotter, the idea of getting pastel sweater vest here to blush while he blew him by the almanacs, or the idea of the Beast catching them and showing Jeremy how devastating he could be.

He realized he was staring. They were both staring, actually. Jeremy’s face was decidedly warm. He cleared his throat. “Which is interesting, because you have to wonder, did people develop language to communicate with each other, or to keep other people from communicating with them? It’s a paradox. Kind of part of my thesis. Well, not exactly that. My thesis is about storytelling. We create stories for our own kind, stories of our history or our beliefs. Yet we willingly pass them on to others, who change and adapt them. Look at how many different versions of Cinderella there are. For all that the story undergoes superficial changes, the idea remains the same. The popularity indicates the tales strikes something common in….” He went silent the moment he realized he was probably boring the pants off the poor guy. “Anyway.” He shuffled his feet in awkward apology. “I don’t have time to get lost in the diary today, although I loved every second of it and will be back for it. I needed a quiet place for a few hours. Roommates and everything.” He gestured, vaguely, at ‘everything’ and gave the librarian a smile, as though any of that explained why he’d come over to bug him. “How’s Persephone?”