The Story Guy (Novella) (3 page)

lieberries: Or I’m not. Good night (good morning?), Brian. BTW, my name’s Carrie.

GearTattoo: Good night, Carrie.

I snap my laptop closed. It seems impossible, but suddenly I am drowsy. When I close my eyes, I can hear the streetlights under my window start to snap off, one by one.

Wednesday, 11:48 a.m.

After practically running all the way, I force myself to stop and breathe at the archway that separates the library’s campus from the park. I spent Tuesday in a kind of delicious state of torture, pretending I was debating whether or not to show up today.

A million times, I’ve nearly told Shelley, especially when she sauntered past my desk with our library science intern, Justin, who had also noticed my air of disreputability.

They teased me and we joked about a spinster’s secrets, but I told them nothing.

I did carry my phone around with me to sneak peeks of Brian’s picture from his ad. And then, late Tuesday morning, when I went to look for what must have been the tenth time, I was met with a message from MetroLink:
This user has removed their post
.

I felt high and breathless, realizing I was the reason he had taken it down.

It has been almost a year since I’ve really dated, after shutting down my experience with the online site. More than two years since anyone serious. I’ve never before been bothered by the social clock—that many of my friends have had their own little families for several years now hasn’t depressed me or made me anxious or even lonely.

I like my job. I like that I have small niches of friends, of three different generations, that all do different kinds of things in our artsy rust-belt city.

I like that I am an only child and can have my parents’ attention to myself when I need it. I like my noisy apartment that I’ve rented for more then ten years. I could get serious about dating, but dating is something I
don’t
like unless I already know I like the person, have already cultivated at least a tiny bit of a crush out in the wild, away from the pain of a first coffee date.

When it comes to sex, I admit to feeling empty.

The feeling is like those shiny gourds they sell this time of year that look so fat and heavy but are actually paper light, with seeds and strings rattling around inside. My life is cozy, but I’m starting to let myself think I want something wet and aching stabbed
through it. I want something substantial. I want to gorge myself. Excess.

I am concerned that it has taken only one day of my own imagination to situate Brian as the potential feast, especially when this is so utterly tenuous.

Simply hearing him speak could break this spell. Even the smallest hitch of disappointment in his face could turn my stomach against it. Years of living alone have made me trigger-sensitive to the motivations of others, and even a trace suggestion that something isn’t aligned when we meet will ruin this charge I’ve had since early Tuesday morning.

When I look over to where the teahouse shelters are grouped, I can’t see anyone but a pair of office ladies eating lunch in the one farthest away from the water fountains. The second I start on the path toward them, I see a tall, dark-haired man on a bike stop at the fountains. He’s wearing a dress shirt under a sweater, and as I watch, he chains up his bike to the pergola closest to the fountains and rolls down a large cuff he’s made in one leg of his dress pants to keep it out of the way of the chain.

Brian.

I can’t see any meaningful details except how he moves his body. He’s lanky, broad-shouldered, and sure. He rode his bike like a wiry kid accustomed to riding his bike everywhere. When he sits on the bench, he doesn’t fidget or get out his phone. Just like in his picture, he crosses his legs, crosses one arm over his body.

I laugh because I feel a little afraid. He’s serious about this. His ad was an honest statement of what he wants accompanied by a picture anyone could identify him from. He’s done this before.
Just kissing
.

I already know, as I walk slowly toward the pergola, that I will do what he wants. This is such an uncharacteristic certainty for me that I can hardly begin to analyze it.

There are still a few last steps before I will appear in his line of vision and he will guess who I am. My brain can’t decide if it wants to send an icy or burning wash of nerves down my spine, so it does both alternately. And now I’m half a dozen paces away, right where he can see me, and oh. He’s just so lovely. I try clearing my rough throat, and he’s standing and grinning and his dimples are in both cheeks.

“Carrie?” His voice belongs to him, low and determined.

I stop, not quite close enough to prompt either one of us to shake hands, which
seems wrong for what we’re here for. “Hi. You’re Brian?” I sound breathless, and I feel my face warm up with embarrassment.

“I am.” Brian puts his hands in his pockets, as if he knows why I stopped, and I shuffle another step forward. Our eyes meet, then look away. “I knew you were you ’cause you brought the umbrella.” He nods toward the old-fashioned cane umbrella under my arm.

“The blue scarf didn’t match my outfit.” I try to look into his eyes again, but it’s like staring into the sun. A sun with green eyes and curly lashes. My brain must be washed with hormones to steal these details so efficiently.

“Please, sit down.” He sits down himself at one end of the bench, giving me options. I sit in the middle, not right next to him, but not on the other end, either. Under the pergola is a very pleasant shadow that helps.

I turn to him, putting my umbrella on the table, arranging the pleats in my skirt over my knees, the hem of my sweater over my hips, fussing as though I’m settling into a church pew with my mother instead of a park bench with a superhot stranger who shortly will introduce his tongue into my mouth. Probably.

He’s watching me, but it feels patient. I have to blow out my breath or I’m going to pass out, and it comes out like a laugh. “I’m nervous.”

“It’s okay.”

I finally make eye contact that takes, and my heart slows down in a delicious way that fills me with something I can only describe as peaceful recklessness.

“You must not work far from here if you’re on a bike.”

“Nope. I work in the Federal Building. I’m an attorney; I prepare government contracts.” He moves his hand out of his pocket and over the knee pointed toward me. Is it weird that I think his fingers are perfect?

“Wow.”

“Not really.” He moves his thumb in a circle over his kneecap and I’m mesmerized. “There’s a whole whack of us doing the same thing. I’m mainly in it for the benefits.”

“Oh.” When I look up into his eyes again, he reaches under his sweater through the vee and pulls out a pair of glasses. When he puts the silver-rimmed frames on, he’s a
professor fantasy come to life.

“I have bad near vision. Lots of contracts.”

I tap the side of my own. “I have bad vision vision.”

He reaches over and pushes the bridge up my nose. “I like them.”

First contact. Not even skin to skin, but the slide of my plastic frame over my nose under the power of his index finger makes me hyperaware of all my parts normally covered by a bathing suit.

“Ah-h. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” He smiles.

“I work at the library.”

His smile gets bigger. “I kind of figured.”

“Do I look like a librarian?”

“Well, yes. In the very best way possible, but that’s not why I figured.”

“No?” I think he is flirting with me.

“No. Um, it was more the ‘librarians dewey it better,’ ‘lieberries’ thing.”

I groan. “Right. Seriously nerdy, huh?”

“Again, in the best possible way. Your email address is why I contacted you.”

“You have a librarian fetish?” I don’t mind. Not at all.

“Who doesn’t?” He laughs again, and for the first time, there’s a little blush, right under where his eyeglasses kiss his cheekbones.

“You look exactly like your picture. Maybe better.” I can’t believe I just said that, but he seems to have a librarian thing, so let’s do this.

The pink on his cheeks satisfyingly deepens. “Thanks. It’s meant to be a likeness, being a photograph and all.”

“It’s just that it’s unusual for MetroLink personals. They’re typically a bit …”

“Seedy?” he supplies.

“I was going to say anonymized, but yeah, that, too.”

“
You
were looking on them. You found me.” He doesn’t sound accusing, not when his voice gets a little deeper and softer like that.

“I like them, like reading them. I—” I almost explain my thing about how the men’s voices sound in my head but realize he’s one of those men, and I’m not sure what
he would think.

“I’m glad you read them.” He rests one finger, the finger he slid my glasses up with, on my knee. I am certain I can see smoke rising from that spot. “Because it means you’re here.”

This should be more awkward.

I obsess about the idea that his finger on my knee, which he has already moved away, violates the promise in his ad not to touch me below my shoulders and that the fact of this violation really, really, really turns me on. I slide forward without looking at him until my shin presses against his knee.

He takes a very deep breath in, and at the same time that I look up into his face, he’s curling his palm around the nape of my neck. His hand is hot and my skin shrinks into goose bumps all over.

“Okay?” He keeps our gazes connected, and everything about the way he holds his body, touches my neck, is asking permission.

I didn’t realize I was waiting for him to ask until I feel consent melting my bones. “Yeah,” I whisper. And so he won’t mistake what I want, “Kiss me.”

The pressure on my nape increases incrementally until I remember I should lean up. When I do, he bends down, and he very softly combs his other hand through my short curls. I shudder, hard. That has never happened. The one-second loss of control over my body is bliss.

I feel his breath on my lips just as he moves his hand through my hair again, and I short out. I’m a shivery, buzzing mess. “Jesus,” I swear, and the expletive moves my mouth over his.

He fits his bottom lip gently between mine, and he is holding my head. “Mmm.” He hums, and I suck that bottom lip right into my mouth. It’s crazy. His mouth is cool and sweet. He stills. Squeezes my nape. “Okay.” He breathes into my mouth. “
Okay
.”

Because apparently I had just given him permission to eat me alive.

I have never had a first kiss like this. Is it that he’s a stranger? So beautiful? If so, I am ruined for anything but beautiful strangers for the rest of my life.

He is so hungry seeming, so explicit with his lips and teeth from every angle he tips my head into. I can feel my heart pounding every place from my eyelashes to my clit.
I grab the front of his sweater so that I don’t spin away, and then I feel him lick,
lick
my bottom lip! I make a noise I’ve never heard myself make.

He tastes good. The first time our tongues meet, after what seems like hours of teasing with his knowing lips and teeth, I feel as though I am gliding, sinking, melting into him. He slows down, way down, and I reach up and pull him so close into my arms that his stubble catches on the armpit pills of my sweater.

He’s playing with my hair, sifting it with his fingers, and because it’s short I feel the gentle slinkiness of that touch all over.

He smells like toothpaste and laundry soap and sun. Under the pergola, the sound of this kiss echoes, and it’s indescribably sexy. He is straddling the bench now, and I scoot up into the space between his legs, and
God
, my shin barely brushes his unmistakable erection and we moan at the same time.

He drops his forehead to my shoulder, breathing hard. I open my eyes to the rich blue of the fall sky and grin. He gives me wet, open-mouthed kisses over my neck, with just a little daring suction. The gusset of my underpants slides against me and it feels fantastic, a sweet throb.

Something tight and burning grabs hold of my middle and to attempt to release the pressure of the unnamed feeling, I drape bonelessly against him and hug him to me. I turn my face into his neck and inhale. The tight feeling doesn’t go away until I feel myself start to blush.

He clears his throat. “Carrie?”

“Yeah, Brian?”

“Librarians totally dewey it better.”

I laugh, and it sounds husky and slow. “Is that so?”

He eases back. He looks solemn and flushed. He straightens my glasses and my hair, slowly. He doesn’t quite make eye contact, but briefly catches my gaze as our breathing returns to normal.

“Was that okay?” It’s the first time he’s sounded anything but sure, easy.

“Oh, Brian, that was …”

“I think it was intense, more than …” He stops. Looks up. “More than this has been, and I want to make sure I read you okay, that you …”

My heart bungees down and back up. “I was right there with you. Intense, but to put it your way, in the best possible way. Nothing amateur about the game we brought today.”

He laughs, rolling his eyes at my deliberate goofiness. “May I see you next week?”

I could cartwheel. Do a chain of cartwheels, right across the park. “Yes. You absolutely may.” I think about what he had been trying to tell me. “Brian?”

“Yeah, Carrie?”

“Is it that it hasn’t been like this before, with, you know, the other, um, Wednesdays? Is that what—”

“Yes. In fact, I can safely say I haven’t been kissed like that in recent memory, if ever.” He rubs his hand over his mouth, but I can tell that he’s smiling at me behind it.

The pleasure fills me. I have a permanent grin. And blush. “Same goes.”

He grins back and I suddenly have a thought. Why did this have to be just Wednesdays? “Hey, Brian, if you’re up to it, maybe we could—”

There it is. The kind of look I was afraid I’d see from the beginning, just a shade of something closed and not up for discussion. He walks backward to where his bike is chained, and he stumbles into a grin, too quick, his back foot worrying the tire of his bike. “I’ll see you Wednesday, Carrie the Lieberrian.”