Overdue - 6

February was the shortest month. Cory and I had both forgotten that. This particular February contained twenty-eight days, and although that was only three fewer than in January, I still felt the shortage like a too-tight belt. The weather was growing unseasonably warm. The compact yellow buds of the daffodils and forsythia were a breath away from bursting into an early, global warming–fueled bloom. There was no time to waste.

The morning after the diner, Alyssa and Elijah were surprised to learn that Cory hadn’t come home. Judging by the glance they exchanged, Sue and Macon weren’t. No doubt they had been discussing me in private. If either of them were acting similarly out of character, I’d be gossiping behind their backs, too.

Sue asked about rent. Last month, while paying double, Cory and I hadn’t needed to touch our savings accounts, but we’d been unable to contribute anything to them either. This felt almost as bad. Thankfully, our expenses would be back to normal this month. Before meeting at the diner, he’d already vacated the Airbnb and packed his car, but—anticipating where our conversation might lead us—he had also already asked his closest work friend if he could crash in her spare room. While I was grateful that he’d had the foresight to ask Robin, I was equally grateful that he hadn’t actually moved in with her until we’d discussed it.

As for Robin, I liked her. And she dated women exclusively, so there was nothing to worry about there. The way Cory had gotten agitated about Macon made me wonder if he’d hooked up with one of his coworkers. It suddenly seemed possible, if not probable. This shouldn’t have bothered me, but it did. I didn’t want Cory sleeping with people we knew. Even as I thought this, I understood that it was hypocritical. Perhaps I even sensed that it meant something about my feelings toward Macon, although I was unwilling to explore the notion any deeper. He remained as closed off as a cinder-block wall, enough to make me reconsider quitting. Because it would have to be me who walked, not him. But it still wasn’t the right time. I had only one short month left, and I needed every minute.

That evening I temporarily brightened out of my gloom when a familiar patron walked through the double doors. “Hey,” I said, “it’s been a few weeks since we’ve seen you.”

Gareth Murphy was one of our movie patrons and a regular on Thursday nights. He worked in construction, and even though his clothing and skin were always speckled with paint and drywall mud, he wasn’t a gruff and burly stereotype. He was good-natured and average-sized, and his taste in film was broad and comprehensive.

He smiled back at me. “Yeah, I was doing a job out in Fairfax, so I took the opportunity to dip into their collection.”

“Did they have anything good?”

He laughed as he handed me his returns. “No. They had the same collection you guys had last.” Our Blu-rays rotated between branches every six months to keep the selections fresh.

“Oh no.”

“At least it gave me the opportunity to watch the rest of the Up series.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “I’m always so worried about how Neil is doing.”

“Yes!”

We talked excitedly for a few minutes in the way that people do whenever they discover they’ve seen the same gripping documentary, and then he headed off toward our spinning racks.

“Ask him out,” Elijah said in a low voice as soon as Gareth was out of earshot. He was behind the desk, filling his cart with cookbooks, one of the worst subjects to shelve. They all began with the same Dewey Decimal number, which made the numbers after the decimals so long that they wrapped around the spines and onto the front covers. To shelve a single heavy cookbook, tons of others had to be pulled out just to check those last few digits.

A wave of heat rushed through me. “What?”

“Ask him out,” Elijah said again. “Dude is into you.”

I became so flustered that I didn’t know how to respond. “I’m not asking out a patron,” I finally said.

“Why not? Is it against the rules?”

“No.”

“He seems cool. He always chats you up. What’s the problem?”

I turned toward Macon for a second opinion, forgetting for a moment that he was Macon. He scowled and shook his head. This could have meant either don’t ask me or don’t do it .

Elijah shrugged as he pushed his cart away. “Doesn’t hurt to ask.”

I strongly disagreed. Gareth would be standing before me in person, not on my phone. I’d never asked anybody out in person before, and it could hurt a lot. Besides, I wasn’t about to ask him out with Macon sitting right there. I’d never even considered dating Gareth before, and I wasn’t sure what I thought about him—or what he might think about me. I did like him. And I was aware that he usually came to my station, not Macon’s. But I had also always assumed it was because I was the friendly one. Gareth had been coming in for years. If he’d wanted to ask me out, he’d had plenty of time. Unless I’d mentioned Cory at some point?

I was still stumbling through these new thoughts when he returned to the desk. Macon’s posture straightened, an invitation for Gareth to check out at his station.

Gareth set down his stack in front of me. As always, he had selected five movies, the maximum we allowed patrons to check out at one time. “So many Criterion titles, I hardly knew where to begin.”

Macon’s chair squeaked as he slumped back against it. Dark energy radiated off of him.

Gareth held up a box. “Have you done Tarkovsky yet?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve always been intimidated.”

“Me too. But I’m doing it. I’m diving in.”

“I’ll expect an update—are the long takes meditative or punishing?”

After promising a full report, he continued to chat lightheartedly about his other selections. Gareth appeared to be close to my age, and he was attractive in an approachable way. He had sleepy blue eyes and a short scruffy beard, light brown flecked with golden red. As I realized his coloring was similar to Cory’s, the knowledge unexpectedly slammed into me: Yes . I could sleep with this man.

I glanced at his left hand, which was freckled with gray paint and ringless. Perhaps he took it off to work, though. It seemed like something that people in construction might do for safety reasons. And his friendliness might be only that. I’d been in the opposite position often enough, patrons mistaking my professional affability for something more. I would notice them checking for a ring and then brace myself, knowing the absence of one would make them ask me out or slip me their number.

Gareth said something I didn’t catch, and I stumbled my way back into the conversation. He gave me a funny look. Had he clocked me checking for a ring? My cheeks warmed as I handed him the receipt.

The instant he was gone, Elijah’s head popped around the corner. “Did you do it?”

I glowered at him.

He clucked his tongue, disappointed in me, and suddenly I was disappointed in me, too. The thought of asking out Gareth was terrifying, but this experiment was about gaining new experiences. Asking somebody out, no matter the outcome, counted as a new experience. And sure, I didn’t know Gareth well, but at least he wasn’t a stranger. He wouldn’t show up to our date and be an unpleasant surprise. If he even agreed to a date, that is.

A low-frequency anxiety hummed in the pit of my stomach. He’d be back when the movies were due. That gave me a week to figure out how to ask him.

In the meantime, I lost my second virginity to a man in high-top Converse All Stars. I hadn’t been expecting it. We’d swiped right, we’d chatted, and we’d arranged the perfunctory meeting after work. I wasn’t excited. He didn’t have a library card, and I’d been on another uninspiring date over the weekend—a guy whose dream was to open a gym called Live Laugh Swole. My full attention was on the Gareth issue. I was tired. I wanted to go home and fret and stress and figure out a plan for the following day when Gareth would return.

One more , Kat had texted. She was doing her long-distance best to help me get laid.

You said that last time.

Just one more before Gareth. For practice.

One more , I agreed.

Before leaving work, I didn’t make any effort with my appearance beyond blotting the oil from my nose and reapplying my lipstick. Sue and Alyssa didn’t even see enough of a change in my appearance to crack a knowing joke, and Macon didn’t get weird. But from the moment Justin and I spotted each other across the crowded cider house, this date was different: Justin was hot. And he seemed to think that I was, too.

A grin broke out across his face.

A smile spread across mine.

Justin seemed both older and younger than me. Technically he was two years older than Macon, and he had the prematurely silver hair to prove it, but it was cut in a youthful style, and his clothing was as playful as his sneakers. He was energetic and funny, and he laughed a lot—a silver fox, although there was nothing distinguished about him. He was a kit who still ran and chased and pounced.

Our conversation was easy. He was born in a rural county and still had a rural accent. He asked good questions and told good stories. His age gave him the maturity and respectfulness toward women that I craved, but his disposition was waggish and fun. We joked and laughed, and his eyes sparkled behind his horn-rimmed glasses. I’ve always been a sucker for men with glasses.

We downed our drinks and ordered a second round. He’d been married before. He had a kid. I lied and said I’d recently gotten out of a long-term relationship. I told the truth and said I didn’t want to talk about it. He managed a local outfitters and was on the volunteer crew that rescued missing and stranded hikers. He was passionate about climbing and downhill mountain biking. He wasn’t a reader. I would never be able to keep up with or marry a guy like him.

He was perfect.

Everything was so much easier with a man who was genuinely into me and not just looking toward a goal, even though a goal, mutual and unspoken, was clearly on the table. We ordered another round. We excused ourselves to go to the bathroom at the same time, which cracked us up again, and then we made out in the poorly lit hallway outside the restrooms. He was tall with long, strong limbs. His five-o’clock shadow rubbed against my cheeks and chin. I felt ravenous, and for the first time since this whole thing had begun, I didn’t overthink it.

We went to his place, which was my choice. I texted his address to Kat and Brittany as well as a photo that he happily posed for. I was self-conscious when he removed my clothes, but I gasped when he touched me. When he entered me. When I came.

I awoke around dawn to another new experience: somebody else’s home. As the first light of day slipped in through the windows, Justin’s bedroom began to reveal itself. A chair over there piled with clothing, a sconce with a swing arm beside my head, a dramatic black-and-white photograph of a cliff above a sturdy dresser that didn’t look like he’d had to assemble it himself. It was reassuring that the room aligned with how I’d seen him the night before—as an adult responsible enough to own a house and keep his laundry clean but whose priorities did not involve putting the laundered clothes away. I felt safe and happy. I sneaked out of bed to use his bathroom, which was unremarkable except for the fact that it was bigger than my own, and then gathered my things to leave. He woke up as I was putting on my shoes.

“That was fun,” he said in a voice thick with slumber.

“It was,” I agreed. “Keep sleeping. I’ll see myself out. I’ve gotta get ready for work.”

“Have a nice day,” he said, and sounded like he meant it.

We didn’t discuss seeing each other again because we’d both gotten the experience we’d wanted. As I crept toward his front door, I lingered to inspect each room that I passed: a bedroom with a BB-8 bedspread and shelves of completed Lego sets that must belong to his son, a living room with a banana tree and more black-and-white mountain photography, a kitchen with heavy oak cabinets that were more dated that the rest of the house, an entryway with a rack for climbing gear and a console table with a pile of mail. Few things interested me more than the books a person owned, but I saw none apart from some chapter books in his son’s room and a few guidebooks in his living room. A whole life, briefly visited and departed.

“Not only did I have sex,” I bragged to Kat over FaceTime in Justin’s driveway, “but I had a one-night stand.”

I floated through work that day. My pelvic floor felt pleasantly warm, like a good secret. I was chatty and even a little flirty with the patrons, and the atmosphere inside the library lifted to meet my mood. Macon was the only one who seemed suspicious. That evening, as Gareth and I had our usual animated discussion about his rentals—Tarkovsky verdict: meditative and punishing—Macon vibrated beside me like a storm cloud ready to burst.

“You decided not to ask him out?” he asked the second Gareth left.

I was taken aback. This was the first time he’d addressed my situation directly.

“I’m not asking anybody out,” I said, cool and poised. As if that hadn’t been my plan all week.

Macon hmph ed but became a fraction less disagreeable. It was a confusing reaction from somebody who didn’t want to kiss me, and I wasn’t sure how to interpret it. At least what I’d said was true. I didn’t need to ask anybody out, because I finally felt fulfilled.

The hunger returned that night, more insatiable than ever. I dug out my vibrator and then ordered a new one. I scrolled through the app and rejected everybody. I regretted not asking out Gareth. I would ask the next time I saw him.

Justin messaged me through the app on Saturday. I gave him my actual number, we texted, and then my one-night stand became a two-night stand.

I packed my first overnight bag, which was just my regular tote with a few additional items tucked inside. It didn’t include a number of the practical items I normally required, like pajamas or my night guard, but surely everybody’s overnight bags were a lie. Maybe that was how people even knew when a relationship had advanced from a fling into something more: the night guards and orthopedic pillows and CPAP machines came out. But Justin and I were not there, nor would we ever be there. That wasn’t the point of Justin.

I felt shy about disrobing in front of him again, but although this self-consciousness had yet to abate, the stimulating, shuddering, overwhelming sensations of something familiar yet completely brand-new hadn’t either. I was a spring bud exploding into exquisite blossom. These experiences were important to me personally, but they didn’t feel important to me specifically. I understood that these early blooms wouldn’t—couldn’t—last the entire season. Did the flowers outside sense the killing frost, too? By design, they were temporary pleasures. Ecstatic in one moment, withered the next.

Sue brought us all hot chocolate with pink marshmallows for Valentine’s Day. She and Russell were going salsa dancing that night. Alyssa said Tim had made reservations at the fancy steak restaurant inside the Tamsett Park Inn, and several of her storytime kids dropped by to give her cards and drawings. And while Macon seemed like the type who would rail against ugly baby Cupids and the environmental impact of out-of-season roses, he didn’t join in when I griped. He was content to let other people enjoy it. Macon was above Valentine’s Day.

Cory and I were in agreement that the holiday was stupid—yet another by-product of being undatable teenagers—but we always made cards for each other and baked a heart-shaped pizza for dinner. Did he have plans that night, or would he also be eating a frozen pizza for one? He’d probably go out with his coworkers. Alyssa and Tim might even see them at a bar at the inn. I didn’t like the idea of them seeing Cory flirting with other women. It made me angry with Cory and angry with Phoebe (the coworker I suspected he was most likely to sleep with) and angry with Kayla (the coworker I suspected he was second most likely to sleep with) and angry with Tim for making the reservation in the first place. Of course fucking Tim wanted a fucking steak. Meanwhile I’d be stuck at home, forced to listen to the downstairs neighbors, well, fucking.

I didn’t expect to hear from Justin, but a text arrived in the late afternoon: This holiday sucks. Wanna come over?

I did.

A couple of days later was another Gareth night. Upon his arrival, I grew hot and stumbled over my greeting. I could feel Macon’s side-eye. Was I still going to ask out Gareth? I tried to decide while he made his selections, but my mind was a buzzing void of unintelligibility, and soon he was back at my station. No, I wasn’t ready. Or maybe I didn’t need to ask him out anymore, now that I was sleeping with Justin. I wasn’t sure how I felt, so the risk didn’t seem worth it.

When he left, the tension left the building, too. Macon settled back into an article he’d been reading about the United States shooting down four objects in eight days: a spy balloon from China and three UFOs. The events were strange, but even stranger was seeing the word UFO in the headlines. Even though it was only meant in its most literal sense—three of the objects had yet to be identified—a lot of people were suddenly interested in the aerial phenomena. All of our books on the subject had been quietly checked out.

And I do mean quietly. They had arrived at our circulation desk sandwiched between other books on less stigmatized topics, barcodes arranged for quick scanning so that we wouldn’t notice or judge or ask questions. We always noticed, but we never judged or asked questions. We were professionals, after all.

Experts were reporting that these new UFOs were most likely errant sky junk, possibly civilian, possibly military—balloons or drones or some other type of science or surveillance crafts. Non-human intelligence was low on the list of suspects.

“What do you think they are?” I asked.

“Hm?” Macon glanced over and saw that I was staring at his computer. I missed our conversations and sensed that he did, too. Work was dull without them.

“Probably something boring,” he said. “Not like they’d tell us the truth, anyway.” Although he wasn’t a conspiracy theorist, he was deeply mistrustful of the government. I didn’t trust it either—what American did these days?—but he had mistrusted it for longer. Also, I didn’t dwell on my mistrust the way he did.

I wasn’t sure what prompted my next question. It wasn’t something I’d asked anybody, apart from Cory, since childhood. The topic was too culturally shameful, especially for those who prided themselves on being well educated. Perhaps I just wanted to keep him talking. “Do you believe in them? UFOs?”

“Sure,” he said.

I was startled by his answer, but also by how casually he said it. Over the years, I’d read a few of our books and watched a number of documentaries. I’d gone from not believing in the phenomenon at all to believing that something , who knew what, was there. It was an open loop inside my mind that I returned to and picked at but never grew nearer to closing.

“In the sense that there are things up there that we, the public, and maybe even the government and military, can’t explain, yes. That’s straightforward enough,” he said.

I nodded, a little disappointed.

“And most of the answers are surely mundane. But it seems like some of them aren’t. And the implications and possibilities are all … pretty extraordinary.”

I felt so close to him in that moment, over this silly thing that wasn’t actually a silly thing. Macon was smarter than me. He’d had a full decade longer to read and research and think and observe the world. What he said carried weight with me. I had assumed he would dismiss the subject out of hand, but his curiosity and open-mindedness made me feel better about my own. I had expected to be ridiculed. Instead, I felt comforted.

“I think so, too,” I said.

And his eyes lit up, just a bit, just enough for me to notice.

It was the first time I wondered if maybe he didn’t feel as confident about his opinions as he appeared. Maybe he worried about what I thought of him, too. The energy between us realigned, and for the rest of that shift we couldn’t stop talking, wondering, puzzling, and marveling at all the possibilities that existed in the universe.

It didn’t take long for our tenuous friendship to disintegrate again. We’d had a good Friday and an even better Saturday morning, and that afternoon I was in the back room helping a polite man who’d just been released from a long prison sentence sign up for an email account. So much of my job was tech support, guiding people through filling out tedious forms online. Mr. Brember was shooting the man dirty looks, and I was shooting them back. Be kind , I mouthed. Mr. Brember’s face soured even further, but he returned to his funeral plans. Thankfully, the man didn’t notice the exchange. He was too absorbed in the overwhelming work of reintegration.

A question cut through the building’s din. “Is Ingrid working today?” The voice was loud and assured with a strong rural North Carolinian accent.

My heart jolted. I spun around in my seat to find Justin at the circulation desk.

Macon affirmed in his low, respectable library voice that I was. Although I couldn’t hear much, I detected a touch of surprise and wariness in his tone, perhaps because Justin wasn’t a regular. Macon must have mentioned the computers, though, because Justin looked in my direction. Our eyes caught, and he grinned. I gave him a small wave. He gave me a huge one back and gestured that he’d wait up front until I was done.

“How do they expect anybody to memorize a password this complicated?” the man beside me mumbled.

It took ten minutes to guide him through the rest of the process, and the whole time I was flushed and distracted by overheard snippets: Justin inquiring about the stained glass, and Macon giving unusually abridged answers. Justin joking about the dangers of having a lit fire around all these books, and Macon not bothering to pretend we didn’t hear this same joke several times a week. Why was Justin here? Our relationship so far had been purely carnal. His presence was embarrassing—I wished he’d stop trying to engage Macon in conversation—but also flattering. It was another warm winter day, and he was wearing a light jacket over a T-shirt. His posture was as assured as his voice, and it was clear, even with the jacket on, that he had a nice body. A climber’s body. I felt a stir that was indecent for work.

Still, as I approached the desk, my plan was to slip behind it to avoid the awkwardness of making physical contact with him in front of Macon. This plan was thwarted when Justin reached me first, swooped me into his arms, and pecked my cheek. Though the greeting felt natural, I quickly pulled away and placed the barrier between us. “What are you doing here?” I asked. I didn’t look at Macon, but I was conscious that we were being observed.

Justin’s hips leaned seductively against my station. “I was picking up a new sump pump at the hardware store over there, and I thought, I wonder if Ingrid is working today?”

I spread out my arms. “I am.”

“And then I wondered if you’d want to go out tonight. Maybe to an actual restaurant this time. Or a movie. Or, I don’t know, this might be really out there, but: dinner and a movie.”

“Oh, um.” I couldn’t help but beam. “Yes.”

“Good,” he said.

“Good,” I said.

“Okay, then. I’ll text you the details.” His eyes twinkled as he gave the desk a little tap of triumph.

The second he was out the door, Sue and Alyssa appeared from the annex.

“Who was that ?” Alyssa asked.

Sue raised an eyebrow. “‘Maybe to an actual restaurant this time’?”

“We’ve met up a few times for drinks,” I said. We’d had drinks once. The other times, I’d driven straight to his house. I was as surprised as they were by this turn of events; Justin showing up and publicly asking me out went against everything movies and television (and even most novels) had taught me about relationships built on sex. But we had been hanging out a bit more, before and after. I had no idea if any of this was normal or unusual.

Alyssa hooted. “Look at your face.”

I blushed harder. I wasn’t even sure how much I liked him, only that I did and that it had been exciting to see him again. “His name is Justin.”

“How old is he?” Sue asked. The silver hair.

“Forty-one.”

“It suits him,” Alyssa said.

Macon’s jaw was clenched as he grabbed an armful of new fiction and stalked away to shelve it. I’d been trying my best to keep all of this away from him, but it had been difficult with the others teasing me and requesting stories about the dates that had gone awry. They couldn’t get enough of those. But this was even worse. Our workspace had been invaded by the man I was sleeping with. My coworkers were too polite to ask, but none of them needed to ask. Macon didn’t need to ask. Justin and I had the body language of two people who had fucked.

What did Macon think about me sleeping with somebody older than he was? Sometimes I wondered if this was why he had rejected me, if the decade between us made me seem young and immature. But I had always been attracted to guys who were older than me, Macon obviously included. However, I did realize that this was an odd thing to admit, considering my longtime relationship with a man who was exactly my same age.

Justin told me to pick the movie, and we met at the indie theater downtown. There was a new one about Emily Brontë, but I knew better than to do that to him, so I went with my second choice, a film that had made the Oscars shortlist for Best International Feature. The poster made it look dangerous and edgy, but I should have read the reviews, because it turned out to be somber and introspective. Long pensive shots of the protagonist forced us to sit with her sadness and self-destruction. I was into it, but the entire two-hour running time was tinged with the discomfort of being aware that Justin wasn’t. He fidgeted in his seat, not having the patience for such a slow pace. The long takes brought to mind Tarkovsky and Gareth, and how I could have relaxed beside Gareth. Even if he didn’t like the movie, he would have been interested in it. A dangerous step further: I wouldn’t have taken Gareth to the Brontë film either, since he wasn’t a reader. But Macon was. I could have taken Macon to either film.

“I could wipe you from my life with a snap of my fingers,” the protagonist said to her boyfriend in a devastating scene.

Justin wasn’t my boyfriend, but I heard the snap all the same.

When the movie finally ended in an ambiguous manner, Justin whispered, “That’s it?”

Although he’d promised “an actual restaurant this time,” he drove me to the cider house where we’d first met up. “You like this place, right?” he said. But I could tell it was more for his comfort than mine. We shared an appetizer sampler platter, and it wasn’t like our first date at all. We had reached our conversational limit. He was telling me about a trail he wanted to hike, and I felt him sussing me out, trying to see if it was something I’d be game for doing. Hiking was okay, but this particular trail sounded long and strenuous, the outdoor equivalent of the film we’d just watched. We’d had enough sexual chemistry for both of us to be curious about dating chemistry, but it wasn’t there. And what would I have done if it had been there? Date him for the ten remaining days and then ditch him when Cory returned? I’d seen him too many times now. Any more, and the situation might get messy.

I was about to ask him to drive me back to my car when a group of Cory’s coworkers entered the cidery. My blood chilled. I blinked and checked again. Cory wasn’t with them, thank goodness, but before I could angle myself away from them, they spotted me, and their chatter stopped. Then it started up again, whispered and fervent. My gaze drifted casually back to Justin, as if it wasn’t a big deal that they’d seen me. As if I hadn’t started to sweat.

Justin glanced over his shoulder to see what I’d been staring at, but Cory’s friends had turned and were heading toward the bar. “Everything okay?” he asked.

Something came over me. My energy dialed up, and I became flirtatious again, laughed harder at his jokes. He seemed confused but not displeased. I wasn’t proud of my behavior, but I also couldn’t bear to let word get back to Cory that I was unhappy.

As we left, I linked my arm through Justin’s and pulled him close against my body. My eyes shone until I was back inside his car and the doors closed.

The mood dropped.

“Do you want to come back to my place?” he asked uneasily. It had become a question again, not an assumption.

I couldn’t look at him because I couldn’t look at myself. “I’m kind of tired.”

He took that in, and then nodded. As he dropped me off, he seemed disappointed but not hurt. “Call me if you change your mind.”

“Thanks,” I said, and I meant it. But I knew it would never happen.

The situation with Justin left me antsy and unfulfilled and ruminating about dating. Not dating like it had been with the app, but dating like it had been with Cory. Conversation and laughter and connection. I decided to ask out Gareth on the final Thursday of the month. The worst he could do was say no, and he was a nice guy, so at least he would say it politely. And sure, if he turned me down, I’d have to hide in the annex every Thursday night for the rest of my librarian life, but the miserable situation with Macon would probably force me to quit soon anyway.

My plan had been to ask him out to the movies—a safe, obvious bet—but then Amelia Louisa Hatmaker, one of our favorite regulars, a funny and slightly batty middle-aged woman, regifted us a generous present. “I’d say I’m too busy, which I am,” she said, “but really I’m too chicken.” None of us had wanted it either, but we promised to find a good home for it. Hours later, nobody had bitten, and the novelty and freeness of the gift had wormed its way into my psyche. By the time Gareth arrived, I was so nervous that I fleetingly lost touch with reality and could barely verbalize when he checked out his five discs, which was how I found myself bursting outside and chasing him into the parking lot before I missed my chance forever.

“Hey!” I blurted.

He startled and turned around.

I hurried up to him, rushing the question, too. “I was just wondering if you wanted to go on a”—oh my God, these were the most ludicrous words ever to come out of my mouth—“hot-air balloon ride with me this Sunday.”

His expression circled from confusion, to surprise, to the pleasure of being asked out—he was going to say yes!—and then back to confusion. “A what now?”

I understood why he thought he’d heard incorrectly. “It’s ridiculous, I know. It’s a gift from another patron. We all laughed it off, but then I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I wondered if … maybe … you wanted to go.”

Nope. He was not going to say yes.

“Uh, yea—yeah.” It came out in an adorable stammer. “Sure.” His voice grew confident and jokey again. “I mean, I love ballooning.”

“You do?”

“No. I haven’t thought about hot-air balloons since I was a kid. I mean it. Not once.” He laughed and scratched his scruffy beard. “But yeah, I think I’d like to ride in one … with you.”

The pause before with you made me flutter. We exchanged numbers, he gave me a dizzy smile of disbelief, and my heart soared as I sailed back inside through the double doors.

“Did you just ask him out?” Macon demanded.

I hesitated. Then I said it like a challenge. “I did.”

I thought you said you weren’t going to ask out any patrons. He didn’t say it out loud, but it hung between us all the same. I moved behind my station and avoided his gaze. A minute later, he removed the pen from behind his ear and pointed it at me. “What about that other guy?”

“I’m not seeing them both, if that’s what you’re asking.”

He tapped the pen rapidly against the desk, about to say something more, but then shoved the pen back into place. “Sorry. It’s none of my business.”

It wasn’t. But I also couldn’t help but feel like I’d dragged him into it. “It’s okay,” I muttered, retrieving the gift voucher from the desk drawer and slipping it into my pocket.

“ Ballooning ?” Macon said. “You’re actually going ballooning with him. With Gareth Murphy.”

“No,” I seethed. “I’m going with Mr. Brember.”

Our rhythm was so off that it took him a few seconds to realize I wasn’t serious. His confusion clicked into understanding.

“Yes, with Gareth Murphy,” I said.

His expression darkened with fury. “Yeah, I know.”

“Then why did you ask?”

“Forget I said anything.”

“That won’t be hard since you never talk to me anymore,” I snapped.

He winced, and immediately I felt like a tremendous piece of shit.

“I’m sorry.” My voice dropped into a quiet plea. “I understand why you don’t, and I know you want me to quit, but I can’t. Not yet.”

He looked flabbergasted. “I don’t want you to quit.”

“Oh.”

His expression collapsed and then screwed into wretchedness. I sensed him wanting to explain himself and then, after a struggle, closing back up. The smell of smoke from the fireplace seemed to intensify, but it was only because the spark between us, tentative but volatile, had been extinguished.