“They work at the library,” I explained. “One is mostly normal. Marjorie is ... Well, you’d have to meet her to get it. She’s eccentric.”
“Eccentric. Should I be worried about that?”
I shook my head. “She pries, but knows when to quit. She comes by every morning to get coffee for her and her wife, Henrietta. She drinks it black and Henrietta leaves room for cream.”
Piper’s lips curled upward as I mentioned their coffee orders and mine fell to the floor. I knew I sounded like a nerd, but my love for coffee did that to me. “I’ll file that away right behind my intense love for the Oxford comma.”
“Do I even wanna know?”
“My editor was pushing for me to rewrite a lot of my sentences so that I’d stop using the Oxford comma, but doing so would remove a lot of my voice as the author. So I had to fight with her to keep them, and she finally gave in.”
“At least I’m not the only one with a passion,” I replied. “How long have you been writing?”
“Officially, over seven years. But I’ve been published for four.”
I tried to do the math in my head. She looked young. Like she was barely twenty, but when she spoke, I got a different idea.
“I started writing when I was seventeen. Or atleast I finished a novel then. I got published when I was twenty, in case you were curious.”
“I-I know better than to ask.”
“I hear that I look younger than I am, so I take it as a compliment. Unless you were about to tell me I look thirty, then please keep that to yourself.”
“You don’t look anywhere near my age.”
“So you’re thirty?”
“Older.”
“Forty.”
“Oh,come on. Not that old.”
“I could’ve said fifty. You have a gray hair.”
My hand immediately went to my scalp. “No I don’t.”
She laughed. “Checking for them, are we?”
“No,” I tried to lie.
“Sure, Theo. I’ll pretend to believe that.”
I blew out a breath, trying to resist the urge to smile at her. I didn’t want her to know I was enjoying this. She was so vibrant when she was comfortable with someone.
But I didn’t want to think about her being comfortable with me. People usually weren’t.
“Thirty-six,” I answered. “I’m thirty-six.”
“You don’t look a day over forty.”
“Now you’re making fun of me.”
“I am. You’re frowning, but also not? I don’t know how to describe it.”
“You’re a writer. Shouldn’t you know?”
She smiled up at me. “Sometimes I forget words when something good happens to me.”
