“What do you mean ‘Aaron Stone’?” I mimic them back at her. “Am I not me?”
“To the kids that come here after school? The women that view this as their happy place, the boys that come here as their only safe place before they have to go to a home life that might not be amazing? You’re not a regular person. You’re Aaron Fucking Stone. You know that. This can’t go well.”
Her passion for this place, the people that frequent it, it touches me, takes me aback.
“I won’t let it become a problem, Gem. I promise. I’m not here to cause a distraction. I’m here for you.”
“For me?” she clarifies. She sounds disbelieving, at best.
“Yeah, for you. Anything you need, I’m at your service.”
“I don’t need a lackey, Stone. I just want to do my job. Sort through whatever the fuck,” her hand furiously gestures between us, “is going on here. Process my emotions and shit. And that’s a little hard to do with the cause of said emotions staring me down, waiting for me to give him an order.”
“Don’t mind me!” I reply easily, crossing one leg over the other, resting the foot on top of my knee. “I’m actually just gonna read while I wait, if that’s okay with you.”
“Read?” she stutters back, like an accidental echo.
“Isn’t that what people do here?” I can practically feel the twinkle in my eye. It would definitely get a zoom-in close-up shot of its own if thiswerea rom-com. Or a Netflix Christmas movie.
She huffs and stands back up again. “Since when do you read, kid?”
“Since I wanted to get to know my best friend better,” I say, a little smoothly, if I do say so myself. “Got any recommendations for me? Maybe you could make me a list of your favorites?”
It takes her an hour or two to make good on that request, but after she unlocks the front doors and opens up, some other staff and volunteers arrive and do God-knows-what for an eternalage, she seems to be out of ways to avoid me. She comes back over, slamming a piece of paper down in front of me, a list of what’s gotta be twenty or thirty books on there in her cute, easy-to-read handwriting.
My eyes widen at the size of the thing, but I shoot her a grateful smile and snap a picture of it on my phone in case I lose the page.
“Thank you, miss librarian,” I tell her, and it sounds a little sexier than I meant it to once it came out, but I’m not taking it back.
“Assistantto the librarian,” she corrects me.
“Well, youarethe best assistant I’ve ever met,” I tell her.
Her eyes narrow on me, but it’s a hollow glare, I can see they’re softening already. She’s really having to work at this facade she’s thrown up. I don’t blame her for it. Just gotta keep showing up, making up for all the ways I fucked her up, fucked her over. Show her I’m here for her for once—for good.
She turns and begins to walk away, but I call out to her quietly before she gets too far. “Ma’am?”
The glare she shoots me at that,whooo, my Gem can be a spicy one.
“Do you mind helping me find one of these to start with? It’s been a while since I’ve used the Dewey Decimal System,” I tell her innocently.
She grabs my arm and yanks me out of my chair, and I follow her more than willingly. After a few seconds, she seems to realize touching me is counterproductive to staying mad at me, and she drops my forearm like it burned her fingers. I watch her flex them absently, like she can get the feel of me out of them if she tries hard enough, as she leads us through the stacks, into what is undoubtedly the romance section, based on some of these covers.Speaking of spicy…
“This is where most of them are going to be,” she tells me. “A few in the fantasy section.” She tilts her head, thoughtful for a second. “Some were erroneously placed in YA before I got here, but I fixed that. Anyway, you can find them by the author’s last name, along this row,” she gestures with her hand, pointing in front of us, and then behind us, “and this one, for the most part.”
I approach the shelf she’s directly in front of, bending my upper body forward like the book right by her head issofucking interesting, just for an excuse to be closer to her. Her nostrils flare and I can hear her take a deep inhale through her nose. I might do the same, relishing in her nearness, her scent, striving to take her in with as many of my senses as possible in this short moment.
After a second, she sidesteps out of my personal space—or her own, that I overtook, more like it—and grabs a book off of a shelf about eight feet down from where I’m standing.
“Here,” she says, roughly passing it to me. “Start with this one.”
Our fingers brush as I take it from her, and she doesn’t release it instantly. “If you make one single joke about this book, the characters, the plot, the cover, the writing,anything? You’re out of here.” Sheesh. She’s touchy about her books. My face must tell her I think so, because she leans closer into me and threatens me again. “I mean it. This is my favorite author, one of my all-time favorite books, and I won’t have you desecrate it. Fictional men are thebestthing to be found on this God-forsaken planet. I won’t listen to you verbally defile one of my favorite ones. You getonechance with this, kid.”
And with that, she releases the book and heads back to the front desk, her hair swinging in a short, chic ponytail behind her with each step. My eyes follow that ponytail—and that walk beneath it—the entire way, before I head back to my new seat and make myself comfy.
And thus begins the first week of winning back my spot in her life. A comfortable routine of meeting her outside her house early each morning, coffee in hand (in a temperature-controlled tumbler from now on), following her to the library, settling in for a day of reading her favorite books, getting to know more about her likes, her thoughts, her feelings in a different way than I ever have before. I manage to deflect undue attention from the regulars for the most part, and I pause every day about an hour before her lunch break, when I go to get a different takeout order (curbside, so as not to draw more attention to myself than necessary), and I bring it back for her, leaving it at the front desk, never pushing my presence on her, but never far away either. She doesn’t take me up on any of those tasks I offered to do for her yet, but I think she sees that I’m serious about being here for her, and that’s the first step of my master plan.
TWENTY-EIGHT
