“Hi, Blair,” Drake said, his chin resting on his folded hands. I sat up and stretched my neck, my face turning red from being caught dozing by a patron. Even if that patron was only three.
“Hi, Drake,” I said, glancing around to see where Ada was. I found her over in a corner on her phone. She tossed me an irritated look and went back to her conversation. Boy, she was the worst nanny I’d ever seen outside of a movie. I wondered how in the hell she’d even gotten the job. Maybe she was Mary Fucking Poppins when other people weren’t around. Declan didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would hire someone that hated kids to watch his son.
Single dad. I’d torn the dossier off my door early this morning and read the rest. He had full custody of Drake, since his ex-wife Vanessa (what a cliché name) had taken off to Vegas with one of his best friends. They were married now and he owned one of the many clubs on the strip.
“Can I have a book?” Drake said, interrupting my pondering about his mother.
“Sure, why don’t we pick one out together?” Ada was still on the phone. Great. Just great. Some child-snatching psycho could wander in here and grab sweet Drake, shove him in an unmarked white van and sell him to the highest bidder before she finished her damn phone call.
Yes, I have a vivid imagination. It’s an occupational hazard.
This time, I led him to the shelves that were for his age group and steered him toward one of my favorite books. He grabbed it off the shelf and plopped down on one of the beanbags.
“Will you read to me?” he said, pouting up at me. I couldn’t imagine ever saying no to this kid. I also couldn’t imagine ever leaving him and running off to Vegas, but that was something else entirely.
I sat next to Drake and read the story. It was a quick read, and I didn’t feel bad for giving him so much individual attention, since Ada was so distracted.
When I finished the story, he wasn’t staring at the book, he was looking at my arm. I’d worn a short-sleeved shirt that exposed my left arm, and full sleeve of tattoos.
“Why are there pictures on your skin?” he said, running his finger up and down my arm.
“You see that picture on the wall?” I pointed up to a lovely watercolor print of Peter Rabbit that had been donated to the library a few years ago from a collector of Beatrix Potter art.
“Uh huh,” Drake nodded.
“Well, some people like to put pictures and words on the wall. I like to put them on my skin so I don’t forget them, and I can look at them all the time.” I’d explained my tattoos to curious children before, and some parents had definitely complained about them. Madeline had told them that if they had a problem with it, they could buy their books on Amazon, because I was a damn good librarian and my tattoos had nothing to do with my ability to do my job. Or rather, she’d said it in a more professional and diplomatic way. The kind of people who had a problem with my tattoos were the same kind of people who wanted to ban In the Night Kitchen for having an illustration of a little boy’s butt. Prudes, the lot of them.
“They pretty,” Drake said, tracing the section of my tattoo that had an illustration from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Nearly all of my tattoos were literary inspired. Some were quotes, some illustrations, some symbols, including The Deathly Hallows on the back of my neck, and quote marks on my shoulder blades. I’d lost count of how many tattoos I had, but I still had some skin left here and there.
“Thank you, Drake.” I thought about asking him if his daddy had any tattoos, but that would be inappropriate. Right? That information hadn’t been part of the dossier.
Eventually I had to go tend to other patrons, but Drake followed me like a little duckling in a suit. For the next half-hour, he was my helper, carrying a few books as I showed him how to re-shelve them and talked about how all the books’ titles were stored in the computer. He listened with rapt attention, his eyes wide as if I was telling him the most fascinating story ever. Ada finally stopped messing with her phone and started doing her damn job and watched Drake, admonishing him for every little thing.
It wasn’t my job to raise other people’s children, or to tell their nannies that they were being bitches, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to. So much that I had to grit my teeth and choke back a lot of words I wanted to say, some of which were of the four-letter variety.
“Drake, time to go,” Ada snapped, glancing down at her phone yet again to check the time.
Drake pouted and I could feel a meltdown coming on.
“It’s okay, Drake, you can come back and see me anytime. I’m not going anywhere,” I said, holding out my arms. “Okay?” His lower lip quivered and I held my breath. But then he nodded and threw himself at me and gave me a big hug.
“Good boy.” I let him go and my heart sank a tiny bit, because a part of me hoped I’d get to see his father again, but it didn’t seem like it was meant to be today.
“Drake, come,” Ada said, holding her hand out. Drake made a face at me and then took her hand as she dragged him out the door. Poor kid.
I spent my afternoon alternately trying to stay awake, trying stop thinking about Drake (and by extension, Declan), and trying to figure out a way to fix our story. I managed to stay awake, but couldn’t fix the story, or keep the Bennet men out of my mind.
The phone at the desk rang about five minutes before closing, and I dashed all the way across the room to answer it.
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s me. So I think I figured it out. We need to go back to the scene when they’re at the restaurant. They should totally get it on in the bathroom. Or something. Except we’ve already done the bathroom sex. Where else in a restaurant could they have sex . . .?” Raine trailed off. She’d had a half-day at the bank, so she’d been in writing mode for most of the afternoon.
“Raine. I’ll be home in less than an hour. We can talk about it then.”
She’d still been muttering to herself, but she finally stopped.
“Oh, yeah. Right. I was just on a roll. My bad. Anyway. Oh, I ordered out already. Peanut chicken with snow peas and rice. Oh, and I got a dozen donuts from the bakery as well.” I never really wondered why I wasn’t a smaller size. Being big-boned and eating whatever I wanted, along with a sedentary job pretty much explained it.
“Okie doke, I’ll be home soon,” I said and hung up before she could launch into something else.
But then my cell phone rang.
“Did you see Declan today?” she said by way of a greeting.
“No, I did not,” I said, gathering up my things as I walked toward the back door.
“What? That’s strange.” I could picture her furrowing her brow.
“Why is that strange?” I fiddled with my keys to lock the back door and headed toward my car. The night was steamy, and I my hair instantly started curling again after being inside in the dry air of the library all day.
“Because I could have sworn they told me he was picking up his son at the library when I called his office today.”
“You did WHAT?!”
I couldn’t get home fast enough to strangle Raine.
“What have I told you about meddling?” I said as I slammed the door. She just blinked up at me from her computer, as if coming out of a trance.
“That I should stop doing it. But I never listen to you. Sometimes you need me to meddle or else you would never do certain things that you need to do. Whose idea was it to write in the first place?”
I dropped my bag by the door with a thud.
“Mine. It was my idea.”
Raine shook her head, but then thought about it.
“Oh, right. Never mind. But still. My meddling is good for you.”
I was too tired to do this right now, so I went to my room to change into my writing attire. I needed some caffeine, stat.
I was finally so hopped up on caffeine, I was practically vibrating, and my hands kept jumping on the computer keys.
“Why in the hell did you call his office, Raine?” T
he dossier had outlined his entire employment and educational history. Right now Declan was a financial advisor at a huge firm in the city, and he was also getting his MBA from an Ivy League college. Granted, he had family connections (his father was one of the directors of the investment firm), but his grades were impeccable and he’d accomplished a lot on his own, especially with having a child and the divorce and everything.
Declan was impressive and intimidating and even more attractive now that I knew all this inside information. Raine had found so much that I still hadn’t absorbed it all.
“I called because I wanted to chat with his subordinates and see what kind of a guy he is to work with. I can look up all the information I want, but until I actually talk to people who know him, I can’t prove anything about his character. Oh, and his background check came up clean. Except for a few speeding tickets in his younger days. Boys will be boys and all that.” I looked up from the blinking cursor on my screen.
“I hate that phrase. It’s just an excuse for boys to be dicks and explain their way out of it,” I said.
“Whatever,” her hands went back to picking at the keys. I knew her well enough to know she wasn’t actually writing. Just pretending to.
“Look, I love you. You know that. And I love that you care, but sometimes, you take things too far. Can you at least admit that?”
She narrowed her eyes over the screen of her laptop.
“Maybe.”
“Raine.”
“Okay, fine. Sometimes I go too far. But it’s because I care, Walt. I care.” I knew she did. Raine would never do anything with malicious intent.
“Plus, if you do decide to go out with him, now we know he’s not a bad guy. And I saved you from having to do all that getting-to-know-you crap you have to get through on the first date. Because you already know how much he makes, and about his ex-wife and everything. No surprises.” I really shouldn’t have read that dossier and let myself get swept up in Raine’s crazy. It was hard not to when we lived and worked in such close quarters.
I just shook my head and dipped into the container of peanut chicken.
“If we kill ourselves, we won’t have to finish this book,” Raine said a few hours later. I was still staring at the blinking cursor and had written and then deleted more words than I could count. None of them felt right. We’d gone back and deleted more words, so we were basically back where we started a few days ago.
“Maybe we need to take a break. Want to go for a walk?” We had all sorts of ways to get rid of writer’s block. Driving, watching a movie, reading something, taking a walk, cooking and taking a bath (not at the same time, obviously). It was the middle of the night, but we both had pepper spray and had taken self-defense classes.
“Sounds good.” After stumbling around a little bit to get the circulation going in our extremities, we put our flip flops on and trudged down the stairs. My legs protested at the exercise.
The air outside was so warm, it was like walking through dragon breath. Sweat instantly coated my skin and I knew I was going to need a shower when we got back.
“Jeebus, it’s hot out here,” Raine said, pulling her shirt away from her skin. “We should have stayed inside with the air conditioning.” That had been another one of our purchases with book money. Raine hated being hot, so even though we lived in New England and it rarely got unbearably hot, we had an air conditioning system.
We started down the sidewalk, both of us lost in our own thoughts.
“You should really go out with this guy, Walt. It would solve so many of our problems. Plus, you’d get laid!” Okay, so that was definitely an incentive. It had been a little while. No, a lot of a while. It also had for Raine.
“If you’re so eager, why don’t you date him?”
“Because I’m not his type.” What the hell was she talking about? Included in the dossier had been a picture of the ex-wife. She had a tiny waist, and light blonde hair, just like Raine. Vanessa had a lot more in common (looks wise) with Raine than she did with me. And, from what I could tell, Vanessa was tattoo-free.
A car passed by, slowing down and giving us the once over. Maybe they thought we were hookers, but on closer inspection, saw that we were wearing yoga pants and no makeup, so they sped away.
Besides, this was a pretty nice neighborhood and any activity like that would take place in the seedier parts of the city, miles away.
“I hate to be the one to say this, but you and his ex-wife are the same height and you both have blonde ombre hair. And you’re much prettier, obviously,” I hastily added at the end, because she was glaring daggers at me.
“Yes. And she is no longer his wife. Do you really think he’s going to go for a girl who looks like the woman who abandoned their child and broke his heart? Yeah, I don’t think so. No, he’s going to go for something new, and sexy, and studies have shown that men prefer curvy women.”
I scoffed at that.
This late at night the streets were quiet and most of the light came from the yellow glow of streetlamps overhead.
“Then why are magazines full of skinny bitches?”
Raine rolled her eyes and pivoted around and started walking back the way we’d come. I paused before I followed her.
“That’s something else entirely. And it’s changing. But you’re trying to change the subject. This could work, Blair. I saw how you looked when you talked about him. You had that glow.” I didn’t have a glow. There was no glow. I was glow-less.
“No, Raine. I’m not doing it. If it happens organically, then it happens. But I’m not going to get into some crazy fake relationship with this guy. It wouldn’t be fair to him.”
“But he’d never have to know! That’s the beauty of having a pen name.” I shook my head again and we kept walking. Raine sensed my reluctance to talk about the subject further, so she told me about a funny customer at the bank. In addition to providing amusing anecdotes, her job provided us an endless database of names.
We walked until we couldn’t stand the heat anymore, and then retreated to the comfort of our air-conditioned apartment.
I checked my phone for messages during lunch a few days after our middle-of-the-night walk and saw Marilyn was getting antsy via a forwarded message from our agent.
I called Raine right away. We both took our lunch breaks at the same time, so we could contact each other about ideas, or writing, etc. She worked in the city, so it was too far to drive to come and eat with me, which would have been ideal.
“Have you seen that email from Hugh?” I said. She sighed and the sound echoed.
“Wait, are you in the bathroom?” I asked.
“Uh, no. No, I’m not.” She definitely was. Granted, the bathroom at her branch was lovely, and even had fresh flowers in it. But still.
“Whatever. Not important. Hugh is getting restless. We have got to do something, Raine. At the rate we’re going, we’re going to have to write, like, ten thousand words a day to get this thing done. I’m starting to freak out a little.” Normally Raine was the one that liked to freak out, and I kept a cool head, but I was tired, and I was out of ideas and I didn’t have any solutions. Other than Raine’s insane idea.
“Well, I can’t help you right now. We’re dealing with some stuff here.” She sighed and I could tell she wasn’t happy.
“What kind of stuff?”
“You know I can’t tell you because I’d have to kill you,” she said, but I just rolled my eyes.
“Raine.”
“Okay, fine. One of the employees was caught setting up fake loans and using the money to buy drugs. The cops just arrested him, so we’re doing damage control here and I sense a lot of meetings coming up. We’ve got one this afternoon. And once it goes public, we’re going to have to deal with all the customers. Just freaking kill me.”
“No, I like you. I don’t want to kill you. Even though I could. And make it look like an accident.” She laughed.
“True. We both could. One of these days our search
history is going to tip off the NSA and then we’re going to be in trouble.” It was a valid worry for a writer. Often, we had to research things like hiding a body, or which poisons were tasteless, or how to make a fake ID. We’d looked up all of those things at one time or another.
“Listen, I have to get back to work. We’ll talk tonight. Don’t forget, we’ve written a lot of books and haven’t failed yet. Just tell Hugh that we’re working on it and we’ll have pages for him soon. And throw in a smiley face. And you might want to send him one of those Edible Arrangements. You know how much he loves those,” Raine said. She was right, he did love those. But we had a tendency to send them when we were getting behind and wanted him to extend our deadline. We might have to think of a different tactic.
I spent the rest of the day in a bad mood, and it wasn’t helped any when a kid ended up puking in the reading corner, all over a stack of brand new books.
Madeline saw that I was frazzled, so she helped me clean up the area and dispose of the books.
“Do we have it in the budget to replace them?” I asked as we tried to air the puke smell out of the room.
She nodded.
“Sure, we’ve got a little bit in the emergency fund and I think this qualifies. Plus, the capitol campaign is starting in another month, so we should be able to squeak by until then.” The upside of a library was that you could borrow the books for free. Downside was that books still cost money, and we didn’t charge anyone for them. So we had to rely on donations and fundraisers and dwindling money from the government. Plus, with the advent of ebooks, fewer people seemed to want to deal with physical books. Some heralded it as the death knell for libraries, but those people just made me want to laugh. Libraries weren’t going anywhere.
“Good,” I said, writing down the titles so I could replace them before rubbing the bridge of my nose. I could feel another tension headache coming on. One of the many joys of deadline time.
“You still tired, Blair? Are you sure you’re not getting sick? I’m a little worried about you.” She leaned against the desk and fixed me with her stare. Lesser mortals had withered under her scrutiny, but I was used to it.
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