by Olivia Dade
They each took a stack of papers and began covering the names of the authors.
“We still agreed on the grading system? Ten points max for writing quality and ten points max for heat level?” Angie asked.
“Agreed.”
After slapping a few more sticky notes on her pile of entries, Penny looked up. “Angie, should you have told Grant about this contest?”
“I almost did,” Angie said. She too stopped in her work. “But then he told me he was obligated to report any misconduct to Tina, and that he’d lose his job if he didn’t.”
Keeping secrets from Grant . . . it made her stomach churn. She’d come within a second of blurting out the details of the sex-scene contest that afternoon. Only some visceral sense of self-preservation had saved her and her job. That, and her fear of seeing the look on his face when he found out what she’d done. The disappointment. The disapproval. The realization that he’d chosen and slept with the wrong woman last night. The relief when he realized he had a convenient excuse to end their relationship.
I can’t date my employee hurt a lot less than I don’t want you. By far.
“Maybe he would’ve tried to protect you,” Penny pointed out.
“At the expense of his job? I don’t think so, honey.” She shook her head. “His dad contracted the West Nile virus and requires constant care. Grant needs to stay here and stay employed.”
God, she’d felt like a cold bitch for not finding out more about his father’s illness. A million questions had almost spilled out of her treacherous mouth. Where was his father getting treated? What could be done to make him and Grant’s mother more comfortable? How was Grant’s brother helping? Did Grant need any support during his dad’s convalescence?
Asking those kinds of personal questions, though . . . it wasn’t her place anymore. Even if Grant wanted comfort, she couldn’t provide it. Some other woman would have to . . .
She almost threw up at the thought.
Which brought up the other reason she hadn’t asked more. Every second of conversation with Grant hurt. Ached, with a pain she wouldn’t have thought possible after only one night together. Keeping up a cheerful front in front of him had exhausted her, more than she’d ever imagined it would. Her plan: from now on, see and interact with him as little as she could. For the sake of her emotions, but also so she could conceal the contest from him.
“And we can’t find a way to cancel this contest without any patrons complaining?” Penny asked, a glimmer of hope in her eyes.
“Nope. Julian entered a story.”
Though the twenty-something salesman had only been coming to the library for a couple of months, he’d already earned a solid reputation as their most arrogant and complaint-happy patron. Only Mary seemed able to tolerate him, probably because she deserved sainthood.
“Red Tie.” Penny shuddered. “Never mind. If you cancel the contest, he’ll contact his senator and demand a drone strike on our library.”
“Red Tie?” Angie asked.
Penny waved a hand. “Because of what he wore to the New Year’s Eve event. You’re right. You can’t cancel the contest, or else Julian or someone else will complain, and you’ll get fired. So what’s your plan for dealing with this?”
Angie stared blankly at the stack of sex scenes in front of her. Her brain hurt from a day spent considering the right course of action. Well, that and her fatigue after a long night of screwing her boss. Not to mention crying about said boss in the employee bathroom during breaks. Basically, her brain had a lot of reasons to feel like mush. So did her body.
“Here’s what I’m thinking.” Angie rested her chin on her folded hands. “I have to hide the contest from everyone outside Battlefield. If I can do that until after Valentine’s Day, I’m home free.”
“Just how likely do you think that is?” Penny asked.
“Snowball’s chance. Flying pig. That level of probability.” Angie sighed. “But not telling anyone offers the only potential win-win option I see. And it protects Grant, no matter what happens.”
Penny frowned. “How?”
“If Admin finds out about the contest, I can argue that I concealed it from him, so he shouldn’t take any blame. And if they don’t find out, he and I can both keep our jobs.”
The thought of getting fired made Angie cringe. What would she do without her library and her coworkers? A master’s degree in library science wouldn’t get her too far outside actual libraries, and landing a job in another library would prove difficult without positive references from her supervisor and Administration. Even if she could find another library to take her . . . what about the community she loved? What about her friends?
Penny rolled her chair over to bump against Angie’s. “I could say I created the contest.”
Angie smiled, warmed by her friend’s loyalty. “No one would believe you. More importantly, I won’t endanger your job for a contest you told me was—and I quote—‘basically a cry for unemployment.’ I only wish I’d listened.”
“I could do it.” Penny sat up straight in her chair, her jaw set. “I could go to Admin tomorrow and tell them the whole thing was my fault. I’d make them believe it.”
Angie blinked back tears. “Thank you for the offer, Pen, but no. Absolutely not. As soon as I found out you went to Admin, I’d contradict you and tell them I planned the contest. We both know they’d pinpoint the real culprit in a heartbeat. Don’t blacken your reputation for nothing.”
She took Penny’s small hand in hers and gave it a squeeze.
“I don’t want you to take the blame for me. I just want you to support me as my friend. No matter what happens,” Angie said.
“And secretly grade sex scenes after business hours,” Penny noted with a wry quirk of her lips.
“That too.” She squeezed Penny’s hand one last time and let it go. “Which reminds me. Unless we want to stay here until the morning, we need to start reading some smut.”
“Wow,” Penny said two hours later, scrawling her scores on the piece of paper attached to the manuscript. “That turned dark.”
“Bob?”
Penny lifted the blue sticky note and peeked beneath. “Bob.”
“Remind me to set aside the new Lizzie Borden biography for him in the morning,” Angie said. “He always enjoys deaths involving axes. I mean, he prefers murders that take place out in nature, but axes are his second favorite theme.”
“Anything good in your pile?” Penny asked.
“I’ve had a couple of contenders. One hot dominatrix scene with a rock star. Another story involving a schoolteacher. I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but it turned out she’d been naughty. I gave bonus points for creative use of pencil erasers and rulers. Also for the things the hero did to her when he made her stand in the corner.”
Penny looked up, a knowing gleam in her eye. “Sarah?”
Angie dug through the pile for the story and looked under the sticky note. “Sarah.”
“Good thing we have a girls’ night out planned for Friday. I’ll have to ask Sarah whether she based her story on real life.”
“Some of the things that happened in that story . . .” Angie shook her head. “For the sake of the school janitors, I hope not.”
“Can she even enter this contest? Doesn’t working here during her school breaks make her ineligible?” Penny asked.
“I guess it does. I’ll strike her story from the list of favorites and buy her a drink on Friday as an apology,” Angie said. She crossed through the scores on the sticky note and grabbed another printout. “The last entry I read involved pirates. Want to hear about it?”
“Sure,” Penny said. “I could use a literary palate cleanser after Bob’s entry.”
“Understandable. So the dread pirate Fernando—” Angie began.
“Please tell me he meets ABBA at some point in the story.”
“No. Now shut up so I can get to the good part. Fernando’s kidnapped Charity, the virginal heroine. She’s plead
ing for him to spare her virtue. And then he tells her what he can do with his wooden peg leg, and she has an orgasm right then and there. Just from his words. No foreplay or touching required.”
“Fernando’s a talented man,” Penny said.
“When he finally touches her with what the author calls his”—Angie double-checked the manuscript—“wooden plank, she passes out from ecstasy. Before actual penetration. And the hero refers to it as shivering her timbers.”
“Lucky Charity,” Penny gasped, choking back laughter.
“I have to hand it to the author,” Angie said. “He or she gives the best, most erotic description of a cutlass I’ve found in all of the entries. And I do mean entries.” She waggled her brows.
Penny giggled one last time. “I’m only guessing, of course, but . . . Pretend Pirate Clarence?”
“Pretend Pirate Clarence,” Angie confirmed with a quick flip of her sticky note.
Honestly, she shouldn’t have bothered looking. If the Battlefield Library had boasted more than one buccaneer-obsessed patron with a fondness for eyepatches and the word matey, she’d have known about it already.
“Thanks. I feel a bit less queasy now. Or equally queasy, but in a different, better way,” Penny said. “Back to work.”
The two women bent over their papers again. And for each minute spent concentrating on something other than her predicament and bruised heart, Angie felt stronger. More energetic. More like herself. She made a mental note: If even amateur sex scenes could distract her this effectively, Lord alone knew what her Kindle and vibrator could accomplish. Later tonight, she should finally download Long Train Coming and see what happened. By tomorrow morning, she could be a new woman.
“Um . . . Angie?” Penny asked. “Come take a look at this entry.”
Angie took it and skimmed. “Impressive. Do you think this one should win?”
“Doesn’t it seem . . . familiar? Like you’ve read it before?” Penny asked.
She took a closer look. Now that Penny mentioned it . . .
“Hold on,” Angie said. “Let me Google a few key phrases and see what pops up.”
She sat down in front of the workroom computer and booted it back up. “What’s the most distinctive sentence you see, Penny? Something that wouldn’t appear in any other story?”
“ ‘The tremor vibrated from her body into his, like a pure voice that could shatter glass from a distance,’” Penny read from the page in front of her.
A few keystrokes later, Angie had their answer. “Plagiarized. From a book I put on the display, Carlotta and the Carnal Coven.”
Penny pursed her lips. “Slutty witches. I remember.”
“So that’s a definite no,” Angie said, watching Penny jot a few words on the sticky note and put the manuscript on their pile of lower scores. “We should check our other favorites for plagiarism too. But let’s do that and finish our reading tomorrow. It’s getting late, and we still need to put up the posters for the new contest.”
“I don’t have any storytimes scheduled in the morning. I can read and investigate our high-scorers then, assuming Grant doesn’t spend all day here.” Penny paused. “Speaking of whom . . . Angie, I want to ask you something.”
“Shoot.”
“You know I think women should have sex whenever and however they want it.”
“As evidenced by your adventures atop our poor stuffed giraffe.”
Penny turned pink. “Yes. My point is that I don’t think any less of you for sleeping with Grant last night.”
“But?” Angie braced herself.
“But . . . I’m wondering if you’d have made the same decision under other circumstances. If your meeting with Tina hadn’t upset you so much. I guess what I’m asking is whether you had sex with him because you really wanted to, or just to forget a bad day. Because if it’s the latter, that kind of worries me.”
Angie thought for a minute, tapping her forefinger against her chin.
“Okay,” she finally said. “I understand what you’re saying. In all honesty, the meeting with Tina might have fed into a certain . . . recklessness on my part. But I wouldn’t have had sex with anyone but Grant. He’s special, Penny. I thought we could have something special. And that’s why I slept with him. Not because of that meeting with Tina.”
“You thought he was a real possibility?” Penny asked.
“Yes,” she said, her voice cracking. “I’d hoped for a lot more than one night.”
Penny stood up and circled her arms around Angie’s shoulders from behind. For the second time in two days, Angie leaned into her friend for comfort.
“I’ve never seen you this sad about a man,” Penny said. “Don’t think I didn’t notice the crying jags in the bathroom. I simply thought that meeting with Tina was still bothering you. Or that you regretted your night with him.”
Angie rested her cheek on Penny’s forearm. “As awkward and upsetting as the situation with Grant is . . . no. I don’t regret last night. I couldn’t. For the first time in my life, I met someone who made me think of a future together. A happy one.”
“I’m so sorry, honey,” Penny said quietly.
“I’m trying to think about it this way: If it happened once, it can happen again. I just need a few days apart from Grant to get over . . . whatever this is, and move on.”
“I’ll keep him away from you tomorrow, no matter what,” Penny vowed.
“I’d appreciate that,” Angie said. “Because another day in his company, and I won’t be responsible for my actions.”
12
“You’ll be spending the next couple of days with Grant,” Tina Ysaid.
Angie dropped her cell phone on the bedroom carpet. When she finally managed to pick it up and turn on the speaker, Tina was still talking.
“. . . trust-building exercises. Becoming a team. Most of the managers at Downtown are participating, and there should be room for two more.”
Angie stared in horror at her phone. “Um . . .”
Tina didn’t seem to notice the small, pained sound. “Winona from HR made the decision last night and called me first thing this morning. She thinks if you two know each other better, you’ll find it easier to rely on his judgment and follow his orders. I’m not convinced. Given your recent probation, however, you should do whatever you can to please her.”
“True.” Angie rubbed her forehead with her fingertips.
Tina added, “Also, Winona recently took a course on trust-building activities, and she’s looking for as many guinea pigs as possible to test what she learned. Not that she used the phrase guinea pigs, of course. I believe she chose the term victims instead.”
Angie looked at her bedside clock. Not even eight in the morning, and her plan to avoid Grant was already shot to hell. “When you say trust exercises, what exactly do you mean? Is she sending us to a ropes course? Because I have to tell you, heights scare me. We’re talking peeing-my-pants, screaming-for-my-mommy terror. Doing one of those things wouldn’t make Grant trust me more. It’d only make him wonder if I had continence and mental stability issues.”
Tina chuckled. “No, you crazy woman. Not a ropes course. Only a few exercises to acquaint you two and get you working as a cohesive unit on the library’s behalf.”
“What about Battlefield?” Angie asked, searching for any reasonable excuse to discourage Winona’s plans. “Don’t you need me there?”
“I’ve talked to Penny and Mary, and they can cover for you.”
“Oh, goodie,” Angie muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing. When and where?” Angie asked, resigned to her fate.
Two hours later, she walked into the Downtown Niceville Library and headed for the large meeting room on the third floor. She glanced at her watch. Ten minutes to spare—enough time to track down Helen and talk with her friend before spending the entire fucking day with Grant. God help her. If both her job and her heart survived the day, hosannas were in order. And beer. And more pervy
e-books.
When Angie arrived at the Adult Information Desk, Helen was reading local obituaries over the phone to a patron. Her coppery hair hung in loose waves to her round shoulders today, and her glasses had slipped to the tip of her nose as she stared at the computer screen.
“Willa Hyacinth MacGregor, eighty-two years old. Viewing tomorrow at nine. Montgomery Carleton Howard, seventy-three. Service on Sunday at half past four. Yes, that’s it for today. Talk to you tomorrow, Mr. Breward.” Helen hung up the phone, jotted a few hatch marks on the reference statistics page, and leaned in close to Angie.
“Whenever I talk to Mr. Breward, I feel like the Librarian of Death,” she whispered. “I know he can’t read and wants to find out if his friends have died, but I always worry. What if a relative or friend of the deceased happened to be standing nearby?”
“As long as you’re not killing people to pad your reference statistics, I think it’s okay,” Angie said. “So how many Pippi references did you get yesterday?”
Helen grinned. “More than five. Probably because I worked on the second floor, near the children’s section. Only one request to carry a horse, though. And I’m not sure that guy knew about Pippi Longstocking. I think he was just high and hallucinating farm animals.”
Angie laughed. “Downtown is a different universe from Battlefield.”
“You don’t say.”
“We still on for girls’ night Friday?”
“Wouldn’t miss it. How could I skip hearing the story behind the Hickey of Mystery?” Helen asked.
Angie couldn’t suppress a groan.
“That’s not a good sign,” Helen said. “Unless I misinterpreted a guttural sound of remembered ecstasy.”
“Nope.”
“Then I repeat: Not a good sign.”
“You’ll find out Friday night,” Angie said. “Time for me to spend the day doing trust-building exercises with the man who gave me that hickey.” She saluted an open-mouthed Helen and headed toward the meeting room.