The Rules of Love: A Lesbian Romance

by Cara Malone

  “Yes,” Max said, not catching on to the sarcasm dripping heavily from his voice. “We can go in.”

  Everyone branched off to different departments as soon as they got inside the library, and Max briefly considered following Ruby upstairs to the children’s area. She could stick by her side, pointing out all of the different information seeking models she’d read about this week in preparation for their trip. She could try out a few of her better pickup lines or give small talk another go. But Ruby darted up the stairs pretty quickly, which signaled to Max that she wanted to work alone, and besides, Max wouldn’t be doing her share of the work if she spent the afternoon tailing Ruby.

  She found a comfortable couch in the fiction section instead, not entirely unlike the one she liked so much on the GSU library’s second floor. It was close enough to the reference desk that she could listen in on the transactions that occurred there, but far enough away that it wouldn’t be completely obvious she was observing it. She took out her notebook and sat down.

  CHAPTER 10

  Ruby headed upstairs because she figured the kids’ area wasn’t really Max’s cup of tea. She didn’t really know what to say – or what to think – after her yoga and smoothie session with Mira, and the easiest course of action seemed to be avoidance.

  It wasn’t that Ruby was uncomfortable around Max, or that she felt any differently toward her now that Mira had explained Max’s behaviors in the context of Asperger’s Syndrome. It was actually quite the opposite – she just wasn’t quite sure how to act normal after learning something that she wasn’t supposed to know in the first place, and she couldn’t erase several weeks of snide remarks and blunt criticisms. She still kind of disliked Max, and that seemed like an unfair position to take considering the fact that she was blunt because she lacked the social intuition that Ruby took for granted – but hadn’t that been Mira’s point, to avoid treating Max differently just because she had new knowledge of her?

  Ruby had gone back to her dorm after yoga wondering why the hell she should forgive all of the rude things Max said to her just because she had a medical excuse for saying them. She stewed over this thought for several hours, and then while she was eating take-out pasta in front of her laptop, she typed ‘Asperger’s’ into the search bar on YouTube.

  Over a quarter million videos popped up, and Ruby clicked on the first one – an overview that went a little more in-depth about the condition than Mira had gone in the coffee shop. The video told her that one in every two-hundred people were diagnosed with Asperger’s, that common traits included an aversion to eye contact and physical touch, difficulty detecting sarcasm and non-verbal communication, a literal mindset, dislike of small talk and other non-essential conversation, and fixation on particular topics, among quite a bit of other information.

  Max’s personality was beginning to come into focus for Ruby a little better after this first video, but it wasn’t until she fell down the rabbit hole of YouTube channels whose owners chronicled their experience with the condition that she really began to understand. She saw Max in a lot of their mannerisms and their anecdotes, and before she knew it her food was forgotten and cold on her desk and it was time to get ready for bed.

  Ruby had to be careful not to tip Max off to the fact that Mira had betrayed her rule about sharing that detail of her life, but she decided to work a little harder on remembering these YouTubers’ experiences whenever Max said something that rubbed her the wrong way, and she’d also stuck up for her in the car when David copped an attitude. It wasn’t like they were going to become best friends overnight – or maybe ever – but Max wasn’t quite the cocky, abrasive enigma that she had been before Ruby talked to Mira.

  She went over to the librarian manning the desk of the children’s area and held out her hand to introduce herself. Silently observing patrons might work for the other areas of the library, but doing that in the kids’ department was an invitation to be escorted out by security.

  “Hi, I’m Ruby,” she said to the girl at the desk. She looked about five years older than Ruby and full of youthful energy – just like the children’s librarian Ruby remembered from her branch of the Chicago Public Library when she was growing up.

  “I’m Hope,” the girl said, taking her hand. “Do you need some help?”

  “Not really,” Ruby said. “I’m a library student at Granville State and I’m doing a project for one of my classes about information seeking behavior-”

  “Professor McDermott,” Hope said, nodding her head. “Yep, he loves that project.”

  “You get a lot of GSU students?”

  “Yeah, that and I did that project myself six or seven years ago,” she said with a laugh.

  “Oh, a GSU alum – nice to meet you,” Ruby said, smiling. “Anyway, I just wanted to ask if I could sit somewhere unobtrusive to watch your interactions with the kids. I’m thinking of specializing in children’s librarianship myself.”

  “Absolutely,” Hope said. “I’ve got a story time coming up in about half an hour, so this area should start getting busy soon.”

  “Perfect,” Ruby said. “Thank you.”

  “Any time,” Hope answered, and Ruby glanced around the room for a good place to sit. Pretty much the only seating that wasn’t kid-sized was a pile of beanbag chairs in one corner, so she picked one up and carried it over to the end of the picture book shelf where she wouldn’t be in anyone’s way. She took her computer out of her bag and tried to navigate the tricky task of getting comfortable with a laptop while sitting less than five inches from the floor.

  She managed eventually, pulling up a blank document and preparing to write down her observations. Unfortunately, it looked like no one in Granville believed in showing up early to story time, so she had some time to kill waiting for the show to start.

  That’s when she got to thinking about the other half of her conversation with Mira. The part that contained the phrase, I’m pretty sure she’s into you.

  It seemed almost masochistic to think of Max that way – for all the times she’d said something that got Ruby’s defenses up, and for all the times she’d gone to bed thinking of Megan and letting the tears seep into her pillow. Ruby was definitively not ready to throw her hat back into the dating ring, and she certainly couldn’t see herself doing so with someone as prickly as Max.

  But on the other hand, a tiny voice in the back of her head kept reminding her that her very first impression of Max had been something along the lines of hot damn. A new thought popped into her head, and she wondered if a one-time hook-up could be the solution to both of their problems.

  Max was apparently into Ruby, but she said herself that she didn’t have time for a relationship. And Ruby was lonely and – to be perfectly honest – a little bit sexually frustrated. She’d been to yoga five times in the last week and no matter how much sweating she did, she always went home to her empty dorm feeling lonely and hollow. If they hooked up, she could get it out of her system and move on.

  Ruby was just beginning to wonder what Max was like in bed, and whether all the things she’d read about Asperger’s and sexuality – more specifically an aversion to it – were true for her, when a couple of kids started coming up the stairs and saved her from her own thoughts. She shook the idea away like an old cobweb and put her fingers to her keyboard, ready to take some information seeking behavior notes.

  CHAPTER 11

  Max had a page and a half of notes gleaned from her observations of the reference desk when she saw Ruby coming down the stairs. Her heart skipped a beat and a few more potential conversation starters flashed through her head, along with the same gut instinct that had caught her off-guard the first night she met Ruby. Go talk to her.

  She slung her backpack over her shoulder and held her notebook in front of her, walking toward the bottom of the staircase and pretending to be reading over her notes until she came within three feet of Ruby. Max couldn’t quite bring herself to go full rom-com and literally bump into her, so she
stopped short and looked up from her notes.

  “Oh, hey,” she said as casually as she could manage. “Getting good data?”

  This was about as good as any of the other questions she’d come up with in the past few hours, and certainly better than some of the ones laying in the great reject pile in her mind.

  “Yeah,” Ruby said. “I just got done watching ten preschoolers attend story time, and I think I got some pretty unique stuff from it. I doubt there are very many studies on the information seeking behaviors of people who don’t even know how to read yet.”

  “Uh, that’s great,” Max said. For all the time she’d spent thinking up icebreakers, she’d failed to consider what she’d say after the initial question, and now she was feeling tongue tied. After a silence that felt like it dragged on too long, she finally came up with, “I got some pretty good data from the reference area. I was thinking about heading over to the Audio/Visual department next.”

  Then, in her most daring moment in recent memory, Max felt the color rise into her cheeks as she swallowed hard and asked, “Do you want to come with me?”

  “Oh,” Ruby started, her eyes shifting away from Max for just a second before coming back, betraying her discomfort.

  Max blurted, “I mean, unless you have somewhere else you wanted to go. We don’t need two people in AV.”

  “No,” Ruby said. “I want to. I think it will be interesting to see if people use the library’s DVD collection the same way they used to use Blockbuster.”

  “Me too,” Max said with a quick smile.

  “Have you seen David or Lydia?” Ruby asked as they walked.

  “No,” Max said. “Not since we got here. Do you think they’re gathering a lot of data?”

  “I don’t know,” Ruby said. “I don’t really know David, but I think Lydia is a harder worker than she looks like. She’s probably doing okay.”

  “It’s my experience that twenty percent of the group carries eighty percent of the weight,” Max said with a shrug. She very much doubted that either of her other two group members were doing much other than sitting around and waiting for the time to pass so they could have the rest of their Saturday back.

  Max and Ruby went into the Audio/Visual department, which was a room unto itself with shelves lining the walls and a few freestanding stacks in the middle of the room. There was a desk near the door with an elderly circulation clerk standing by to assist people – like an old-fashioned video store clerk – and other than that, the space was deserted. To keep from becoming too conspicuous, Max suggested that the two of them walk around, pretending to browse the stacks.

  “If we see anything of interest happening, we can watch the interaction and then go a few rows over to take notes out of sight,” she said, and Ruby nodded.

  “Sounds like a solid plan,” Ruby said, tucking her laptop into her bag and taking out her phone in order to take more covert notes.

  Ruby turned and ambled slowly down the first row of DVDs and Max followed behind her, wondering how much distance to keep between them. This was a completely novel experience for Max, walking so close to Ruby in the confined space between the shelves. It made Max’s heart rate increase, her pulse beating in her ears. She settled on a healthy three-foot distance, far enough away to be impersonal, but close enough that they wouldn’t seem like two complete strangers following each other around and around the stacks.

  Max felt dizzy with all of these decisions, each second a new one adding itself to the mix – Should they speak? What would she say? How long could they keep walking through this tiny area before the circulation clerk grew suspicious? Did Ruby think it was weird how Max was tailing her? But Ruby just wandered ahead, her fingers absently trailing along the plastic spines of the DVD cases, and it seemed like not one of these anxiety-inducing questions was racing through her head.

  “Oh, have you seen that one?” She asked casually, pointing to one of the videos. Prozac Nation. “I loved that when I was a freshman. Christina Ricci is incredible.”

  Oh, Max thought, so that’s how small talk starts.

  She felt a little disappointed at how easy Ruby made it look. How many questions had she brainstormed and then rejected? And it was as simple as pointing to a DVD on the shelf. Max thought she might write this down in her notebook later if she remembered.

  “No,” she answered. “I don’t watch many movies.”

  “What about that?” Ruby asked as they turned the corner and she pointed out Mr. Nobody.

  They must be working their way backward through the stacks, but in any case, Max just shook her head again.

  “That’s a shame,” Ruby said. “That’s one of my all-time favorites. We should make a list of greatest hits to bring you up to speed while we’re here.”

  “According to whose list?”

  “Huh?”

  “Greatest hits according to whom?” Max asked again. She could practically hear Mira snapping at her to stop being so empirical, but it seemed like an important distinction. “If such a list were to be made, there should be a specific set of criteria followed to determine which films make the cut.”

  “So scientific,” Ruby said, but it was not in the irritated tone that usually accompanied statements like that. Max was used to being told she took everything too literally, typically followed by a roll of the eyes, but Ruby just brushed it off and said, “It’s a painfully subjective list, and it’s according to me. I may not be Roger Ebert, but I’ve seen a hell of a lot of movies.”

  “Okay,” Max said warily, wishing that there was some kind of rubric they could assign to the task. Still, it was nice that Ruby was taking an interest in her woefully underdeveloped knowledge of the film industry, and it was easier to talk to her when there was a goal to work toward.

  Max turned to a fresh page in her notebook, dated it, and wrote ‘Greatest Hits in Cinema According to Ruby Satterwhite’. She jotted down Prozac Nation and Mr. Nobody, then asked, “Are we going to rank these as well?”

  “I think we better, if we’re going to really make a definitive list,” Ruby said, turning to smile at Max. The expression hit her like a hundred butterflies erupting into flight in her stomach, and she didn’t quite know what to do with it except seek more of that feeling. It became a short-term goal to make Ruby smile at her again.

  “What about that?” Ruby asked, making her way further up the aisle and pointing out another DVD. “The Life Aquatic – Bill Murray is an oceanographer making a documentary at sea and a zany Moby Dick storyline ensues.”

  “Nope, never saw it,” Max said, jotting the title down in her notebook. They were coming back around to the side of the stacks nearest the circulation desk, but there still weren’t any patrons to observe. For his part, the clerk sitting at the desk seemed completely disinterested in what was – to Max – the most exciting moment of her life so far.

  Maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration, but her stomach was hitched up into her throat, she could feel her cheeks growing red hot with nerves, and she felt slightly nauseous whenever she thought about how close she was walking behind Ruby. The distance between them dwindled down to two feet as she followed her around to the next row of DVDs.

  Max had no idea what changed since her last tense interaction with Ruby, but she wasn’t about to question this windfall and ruin everything. Even she could feel the heat building between them. Ruby kept glancing back at her as she scanned the shelves, looking at Max, looking at her notebook, letting her eyes linger as they slowly inched from her hands up her chest and to her lips. Max didn’t need two pages of notes on Brad and Caitlin to know that look was seductive.

  “Imagine me and you,” Ruby said, and Max’s breath caught in her throat.

  She bit her lip, searching frantically for a response to this sudden invitation. It was like Ruby had read her mind, and Max didn’t have a readily available answer.

  “Umm,” she asked breathily, “what about us?”

  “No,” Ruby said with a delicate smile.
“That’s the name of the movie. Imagine Me and You. Surely you’ve seen that one – it’s kind of iconic.”

  Max shook her head and Ruby gave her a look she couldn’t quite decode – if she had to guess, it would have been disbelief mixed with amusement. She looked down at her notebook, walking and writing to keep from revealing the flush of her cheeks until suddenly she crashed into Ruby, who had stopped walking.

  “Oh, sorry,” Max mumbled, taking a step back, but Ruby didn’t make any of the usual moves people made after an unexpected collision. She didn’t let out an embarrassed laugh, or look away, or make more space between them. She stood her ground and kept her eyes on Max.

  And then, before Max had fully processed all of this puzzlingly unorthodox stillness, Ruby put her hands on either side of Max’s face and pulled her close, planting a short but firm kiss on her lips before taking her hands away again.

  If Max’s heart had been pounding before, it was galloping now, adrenaline shooting through her veins and something carnal and insistent tingling between her thighs. She shut off her mind and let her body take over, pressing Ruby against the shelves and kissing her. It was the most intense sensation she’d ever experienced, all of her consciousness floating out of her mind and distributing itself into each point of contact between them – their lips, her hands on Ruby’s waist, Ruby’s hands wrapping around Max’s back and pulling her closer, their limbs entwining and their chests pressing together. She felt Ruby’s tongue flick across her lips, and then slide into her mouth, sending her into the most extraordinary sensory overload she’d ever experienced.

  And then just as quickly as it began, it was over.

  “Ahem,” the circulation clerk barked behind Max. Then he called, “Hey, this isn’t that kind of video rental.”

  Ruby pulled away, sliding out from beneath Max’s embrace and talking a few steps away to straighten her clothes and compose herself. Max did the same, her body acting out of muscle memory to smooth the pages of her notebook that had become wrinkled in the fray while her mind reeled. What the hell just happened, and why did it have to end?