Page 81 of Checking Out the Librarian

“My birthday is tomorrow, but my parents used to compete with each other to be first, so the date has morphed into today, and I don’t know if they remember it’s actually tomorrow. I suppose it’s better than the years where she drunk-texted me at midnight.”

Connor’s face was all squished and his eyebrows were not in their normal places, but Jonathan wasn’t going to decode those emotions. He had enough of his own, thank you.

“Hey, I’m still, what’s the word, miffed? Peeved? Annoyed?” He didn’t sound it. In fact, he sounded soft and cuddly.

He sat on the bed and rested a hand on the duvet over Jonathan’s thigh. “That’s it, I’m annoyed with you, Jonathan Park, because you didn’t tell me it was your birthday tomorrow.”

The weight of Connor’s hand was better than nice, maybe because it was here, not in California, and not inside his phone or his brain, but out here in the physical plane. “I’m supposed to just say it?”

“Yes.” That was a decisive nod. “About a week ago you should have told me. Or at least started dropping hints.”

“How? I should pose at the mirror looking for gray hair and then sigh dramatically?” That was something he’d seen her do, mutter to herself and then say, “Jonathan, I was beautiful before I had a baby. You gave me this gray hair. I was beautiful before I had you.”

Connor didn’t know any of that history, so he agreed. “Sure, or you could say, oh, I better not forget to check my driver’s license and see if it expires next week on my birthday. Oh, oops, no, it’s good for another four years. That would have worked too.”

He felt too brittle for this joking. Connor clearly didn’t understand what birthdays were like in a dysfunctional family. “That’s so smooth, why didn’t I think of it.”

His fragility must have been close enough to the surface for Connor to sense, because he set his own mug on the Ribby photo coaster and gathered Jonathan into his arms. “Hey, come here.”

The big hands put a comforting weight on his back and hip, pulling him into Connor’s solidity while simultaneously pushing his mother away. If he nuzzled closer to the top of Connor’s shoulder, at a spot not quite halfway to his neck, the just-exercised dampness was lessened to a level that he didn’t mind. That, in fact, he maybe liked.

“I want breakfast. Then I have to go to work.”

“We’ll circle back to this birthday thing.”

“Must we?”

“I’m a professional birthday celebrant for people nearly as opinionated as you who have the manners of seven-year-olds because they are seven.” Connor’s big hands stroked up and down Jonathan’s back. “I do this in excess of twenty times a year, and I haven’t done the birthday song since June 5, so I’m suffering withdrawal. My craft room has been underutilized for weeks, do you hear me? Weeks.”

“I’m screwed.”

Connor glanced at the retro analog clock on his bedside table. “I don’t think we have time to do that properly and also make French toast before you have to go to work.”

“I don’t mean like that.”

“You should always mean like that.”

“I mean you are going to fuck me over with awful glitter and balloons and…and…puffy paint markers or something, aren’t you?”

“I promise no glitter. On the décor.”

“Why does that sound dirty? You look so sweet with your fluffy curls and your big grin, and you make everything sound dirty.”

“It’s my skill.” He patted himself on the chest.

Of course he fully intended for Jonathan to look at his hand and his chest when he did, and weigh exactly where French toast and fucking fell on the needs/wants hierarchy.

“Fucking. I choose fucking.”

Connor inhaled and inflated that unreasonably over-sized chest. “Well, I think you need French toast and cuddles. You’ll have to wait ’til tonight for anything else.”

Jonathan’s workday was agonizingly slow, perhaps because he’d had a crappy wake-up, perhaps because it was New York amounts of humid outside, which everyone who’d lived here longer said was not normal for Oregon.

Also, he hated the underwear he was wearing and his left sock kept slipping into his shoe, casualties of the limited clothing choices he’d taken to Connor’s house.

“You’re way too twitchy, even for you. What gives?”

That was at least a new and interesting way for Lily to ask what was wrong with him, different from the previous times she’d confronted him since he’d arrived this morning. Admittedly, that wasn’t really asking, it was more of a demand, but the earlier questions had been nicer, along the lines of “are you feeling alright,” and “whatever is wrong with you, I hope it’s not contagious.”