“We can find the rest of the original story,” I finished for her. “Fuck, Sunny, that’s brilliant. You’re amazing.”
She flipped her dark tresses over her shoulder. “I know.”
I was close enough to her right now that I could smell coconut. I wanted to bury my nose in her hair and breathe her in until I forgot that air smelled any other way.
“This is a huge breakthrough, and now I feel like I owe you a commensurately huge muse breakthrough,” she said, and I made myself straighten and step away from her.
“It’s fine,” I mumbled. I took out my phone and snapped a picture of the soldiers’ names to send to the Cat Advisory Text Thread.
“It’s not fine, and after you sat through a one-man staging ofThe CrossFit Monologues, I feel like I’m actually in the red on this—”
Voices came from the stairwell, and Opal and Fabienne appeared like helpful nymphs of the archives to see if we wanted to make copies of anything. We did, and so they swished off to get the copier key, their high heels clicking.
Sunny was staring after them with her lips parted and her tongue pressed to the roof of her mouth—an expression of utter mischief. I suddenly saw where this was going.
“Sunny,no,” I said.
“Sunny,yes,” she declared, and before I could protest, she was already springing up the stairs after the hot librarians.
Chapter Eleven
Sunny
“Hot librarians, hot librarians, hot librarians,” I began to chant the moment we stepped through the revolving glass door and onto the street.
“What did you even say to them?” Isaac asked with an annoyed shake of his head.
“I was very straightforward,” I explained as he opened the passenger door of the truck for me. “I said which one of you lucky librarians wants to go on a date with Isaac Kelly?”
He jogged around the front of the truck and gave his best effort to look completely uninvested as he asked, “Well, who I am I stuck with?”
“Opal called dibs immediately, but plot twist: Fabienne asked if we could make it a double date with me! Maybe we’ll both end up with a muse. They could, like, come over and organize all your old books in sexy librarian lingerie.”
“What does sexy librarian lingerie consist of?” he asked, his voice a little raspy as he side-eyed me.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t imagine what those two were wearing under those tweed skirts.”
His gaze dragged up the length of my torso, but before he could say anything, his phone went off in a quick series of chimes.
He took his time reading through every message while I not so discreetly tried to read over his shoulder, but he had a silly privacy screen on his phone. “The privacy screen is a bit much,” I told him.
“Not when you’ve had your privacy violated as many times as I have,” he said, still distracted by what was apparently the world’s longest text thread.
“I’ve already let you violate me plenty of times.”
He glanced up with a smirk and then returned to his top-secret messages.
“Is it Steph?” I asked. “She’s a shark, but such a mommy. Oh my God. The things I’d let her—”
“We’re going to the post office.” He threw the truck in reverse and rolled through a quiet stop sign.
“So you were texting the postmaster?”
“My Cat Advisory Text Thread—I mean, it’s more of a council thanjusta thread—has another idea of a place to check for information about the story,” he said as we turned a corner. I could already see the tiny little post office, a small red brick building wedged between a tailor called the Last Thread and an antique shop called Old as Dirt.
“Your cat what now?”
He parked in a free spot across the street, avoiding the parallel parking in front of the actual post office, and said, “They’re my friends.”
