Libby the Librarian: A Rom Com Novella (10 page)

“You always give women jewelry right before you break up with them.”

“I don’t—“ Adam paused. I think he realized just then that there was a great deal of truth to my accusation. “I’m not about to break up with you.”

“Of course you’re not about to break up with me!” I was getting yelly again. “How could you? We’re not even together!”

“If, as you claim, it’s impossible for me to break up with you, then how could me giving you jewelry mean that I was—about to break up with you?”

“
That’s circular reasoning.”

“Yes, it is.”

I just sat there on the bed, twisting my soggy tissue until it turned into little soggy bits. Adam, who had been standing there looking at me, finally came and sat down. He still had the locket in his hands. He sat beside me—close but not touching—and opened up the locket.

“I miss her,” he said.

“Who?”

“That one,” he said, pointing. “Th
at girl in the picture.”

“That’s me.”

“Is it?”

“You don’t miss that girl,” I said. “You miss how easy it was being with her.”

He didn’t say anything.

“How many girlfriends have you had in the last
ten years?”

“Fourteen.”

Fourteen? In that span of time I’d had two and a half boyfriends. The half being my cyber-boyfriend from the Ukraine. We’d talked about meeting a couple of times, but it never happened. I’m not one hundred percent sure Ukrainian Cyber-boyfriend was even a man. The pictures he sent probably weren’t of him. The pictures I sent him certainly weren’t of me. But I digress—

“That’s an average of 1.4 girlfriends for every calendar year
,” I said to Adam.

“That sounds right.”

“Would you call any of those relationships difficult?”

“No.”

“And why do you think that is?”

“I only date emotionally mature woman?”

If that was true, then we were definitely doomed.

“I disagree,” I said. “I think your relationships
just never progress past the easy stage.”

That sounded
very wise. Very circumspect. Too bad I didn’t have any idea where I was going with it.

“You m
ay be right,” Adam said. He reached back and retrieved the other box. “Since you didn’t like my other gift, maybe you’ll like this one better.”

I opened it. It was a matching bra and panties. Black lace. Very sexy. No man had ever given me lingerie. Historically, I’ve considered lingerie a pretty shoddy gift to give a woman, seeing as it’s usually more for his benefit than hers. But in this case—

“Does this mean—“ I didn’t want to force him into a yes-or-no answer.

“Whenever you’re ready.”

I took the locket from him and tried to put it on. My fingers were shaking so badly he ended up having to do it for me, which was fine. It made it a more romantic gesture, anyway.

We started back up
right where we’d left off. It was supposed to be another seven days before my new lingerie became relevant—and then only the bra—but I proposed that we scrap the whole Structured Transition. We would have been done with it already if we—well, mostly me—hadn’t freaked out about Sydney being pregnant.

“You can’t just go changing your mind, now,” Adam scolded. I think he was secretly pleased that I didn’t want to wait, but was getting such a kick out of
how easy it was to work me up and leave me hanging, that his pride won out over his libido, which is saying something about the size of his ego.

I
had started sleeping over, or that is to say I had started staying over. There was so little sleeping going on that I’d catch myself falling asleep at my desk at work.

I was still uneasy. There were too many things undefined between us
, and I wasn’t so naïve as to think that sex was going to change any of that.

Summer term was over
. The two weeks between summer and fall terms are when Dr. Maxwell takes his annual vacation. He doesn’t call it a vacation. We are instructed to refer to it as a research trip, which is what it really is. Dr. Maxwell finds relaxation stressful, so he uses his vacation time to “liaise” with other institutions.

It was during this period of time
, while Dr. Maxwell was out and about being a scourge and pestilence on Our Nation’s Institutions of Higher Learning, that Adam unexpectedly upped the ante on me.

Lately, Adam had been avoiding my office, but in an abrupt reversal of policy he started dropping in every day, mid-morning, about the time everyone in the research department takes their coffee break.

The weeks between summer and fall term are very much a Dr.-Maxwell’s-away-and-the-mice-will-play type of situation, and we suddenly all get very lax. We come in late and leave early. Most importantly, we take advantage of Dr. Maxwell’s absence to close our office doors, which is something he actively discourages. We get our real work done, as usual, but we stop having to pretend to have something constructive to do when there is no actual work to be done.

Adam showed up at my office around ten in the morning on the day my new bra became relevant.  I was wearing it, of course. He immediately wanted to see it.

“Shh!” I said.

“I’ll close the door.”

I told him not to close the door, but it was too late, he already had.

“Why are you locking it?” I asked. I wasn’t exactly comfortable with where this was going.

“So no one will walk in on us.”

“And why would that matter?”
Playing stupid has never worked. Not once. But I still try. 

“
Because I enjoy my job,” Adam said. “I’d like to keep it and I imagine you’d like to keep yours.”

We still had the desk between us
. Adam leaned back against my closed door and gave me a dazzling smile. I’m a sucker for that smile. I’d do anything for that smile. I think Adam was counting on that.

“
I want to see it.”

“Oh, this! Why didn’t you say so,” I said and leaned across my desk to hand him my stapler.

He took it out of my hand and put it back on the desktop.

“I want to see the bra I got you.”

I toyed with the idea of taking my bra off under my shirt and pulling it out my sleeve. Except I can’t do that without getting hopelessly tangled. I know. I tried that method with no success for three straight weeks at sleep-away camp the summer I was twelve. I’m only slightly less shy now about exposing my body to public scorn and ridicule.

Not that I expected Adam to scorn and ridicule me. I’
ve finally gotten over my paranoia that he isn’t actually attracted to me, and this is all some elaborate and unspeakably cruel practical joke.

“
Hurry up,” he said. “I’ve only got five minutes.”

I did what he wanted. I unbuttoned my buttons, but I left my shirt tucked
in to expedite reassembly.

“Come over here.”

I went over to his side of the desk. I expected him to kiss me, which would have done enough to tingle my spine on its own, but he didn’t kiss me, yet. Instead he leaned me against the desk, placed my hands flat on its surface and took his long index finger and started tracing lazy figure eights on my skin, starting at my neck and working his way down until he was following the lacy edge of my bra.  

“What’s tomorrow?”
He asked.

He knew what tomorrow was. After only one day in the lime-light,
the bra would hit the fan—or the floor, more likely.

I would have been miffed with Adam for revving me up like th
is in the middle of the day in the middle of my office, but since he had to borrow a newspaper to preserve his dignity during the three block walk back to his own building, I decided he’d already gotten what was coming to him.  

Tuesday was pretty much what I expected. So was Wednesday. We had a routine now. Adam would come into my office. He’d lock the door. I’d do whatever he told me to. Five minutes later he’d leave
, and I’d spend the rest of the day flushed, moist and frustrated beyond belief. Everyone in the research department must have known what was going on, I don’t know how they could have missed it.

Day twenty-eight rolled around on
a Friday—the last day before Dr. Maxwell was returning from his vacation. Adam arrived late—no newspaper—which made me pretty sure today would be a departure from our little routine.

“You know what today is,”
Adam said, before he even got the door shut. I did, but I didn’t think he’d want to do that right there in my office—not as clamorous as I can get—besides, four and a half minutes wasn’t really enough time, even considering I’d been halfway there already for what felt like weeks.

“I canceled my eleven o’clock appointment, “ he said, as if he could read my mind.

Geezum Crow and Mill a Kockingbird!

H
e started clearing off the top of my desk. He knew better than to sweep it all off on the floor like they do in the movies. Clearing off my desk didn’t take long. I like to keep my desk clean.

“Pull up your skirt.”

I could do that. I’d done that on Wednesday. I was wearing one of my new pencil skirts. I worked it slowly up until it was mostly around my waist and my panties peaked out from underneath.

“Lean over the desk.”

That I did not expect.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“One of these days, I’m going to tell you what to do,” I said.

“Terrific. I look forward to it. But not today.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

“Elbows on the desk. I only have fifteen minutes.”

Oh,
sweet sisters Brontё and Doby Mick!

He started running the flat of his hand back and forth between my legs.
Over my panties.

He stopped. Surely that wasn’t
all. It couldn’t be all. He couldn’t stop now. He still owed me thirteen minutes. He’d practically promised.

He came and stood in front of me
. He leaned down and kissed me. Sweetly at first, then with something that felt a lot like desperation.

It was at that point that
he finally said it, he actually said, “I love you, Libby.” I tried to say it back, but I’m not sure he understood me, what with the fact that he had my lower lip between his teeth at the time. Then, before I could reach out to stop him, Adam was behind me again. He and his super-terrific talented hands.

“Wait—“ I said. “I want to—“ I’d been about to say something about how I didn’t want to experience this on my own,
and that I wanted him to come back where I could get my hands on him. I wanted to say something about having dreamed about our first time together and that dream definitely not having involved hearing the water cooler going, “glug, glug, glug,” in the background, but I was so close to the edge at that point already that every articulate thought was melting away. I’m not at all sure he’d have understood a word I said, anyway. 

Frig’n Rhea the mother of Zeus
!

I
had my head down on the desk now with both hands clamped over my mouth to stifle my sound effects. It felt so good—unbelievably fantastically good, but about then, through a lush haze, I noticed that one of those little metal frames that held the labels on my file cabinet was coming loose. That disconcerting fragment of disorder brought me back to the surface.

“Stop!” I said, standing up so suddenly that Adam lost his balance and fell back into the door.

“I don’t want to do this here,” I said. Adam was terribly disappointed, but not for long. It was asking too much of him to send him back blocks across campus without the aid of a shielding newspaper, so I indulged in a little role-reversal and made him stand on a chair and drop his pants. After a couple of false starts, I managed to send him away sated.

That evening we did things properly. Like adults. On Adam’s bed. Later on, we tried the kitchen floor
—cold and slightly crumby. Then, sometime after midnight, the shower—very wet and a little slippery. In the wee hours of the morning, Adam floated the idea of trying out the hammock on his deck, but I squelched that notion. I’m way too clumsy to survive sex in a hammock.        

We were now having full-on, totally-naked, grownup-people sex. It was terrific. I looked and felt like a billion bucks, but I was no closer to knowing where this was all going to end up. Adam hadn’t repeated his declaration of love, and I was too shy to make my own, so we were stuck in a no-man’s land between bed-buddies and lovers.

Sydney was three months pregnant, and even though I don’t think she really wanted him to, Adam went with her to her prenatal checkup.

He asked me if I wanted to go along.

“Are you kidding me?”

He wasn’t. I tried to explain how inappropriate that would be and how uncomfortable it would make Sydney to have me there.

“But you and Sydney are friends.”

“No, we aren’t.”

“Well, you used to be friends.”

“We were never friends.”

“Well, maybe you can become friends.”

I doubted it. But it was important to Adam that we try, so I called up Sydney and asked her out to lunch.

Lunch
was very awkward. After twenty minutes of completely meaningless small talk, Sydney came to the point. “I know you’re worried that Adam and I are going to get back together,” she said.

That was exactly what I was worried about, but I’
d never voiced my fear out loud to anyone—unless you count Dickens or Poe.

“Adam never loved me,” Sydney said.

That was probably true, but how did she know?

“I broke up with him because I knew he never would
love me.”

She had no way of knowing that.

“Do you love him?” I asked.

“No.”

He didn’t love her. She didn’t love him. Nobody loved anybody. There didn’t seem to be much of a problem here. Except for me.

“Adam loves you,” Sydney said.

That was exactly what Shasta thought.

“Adam is very fond of me,” I said. “And I’m very fond of him.”

“And you’re sleeping together.”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t love him?”

Of course I loved him. How could I not?

“I don’t know. There are lots of different types of love.”

“That’s true, but—“

Just then the waiter brought the check. Sydney never did finish her sentence.

“Look—“ she said, once the waiter was gone. “I have no intention of doing anything to jeopardize your relationship with Adam.”

That was nice of her to say, but it wasn’t that simple.

“I think Adam
would really like for you and me to be friends,” I said.

I thought Sydney was going to cry there for a second, but she didn’t. Instead she came around to my side of the table and gave me an awkward hug.
I’m chalking up that embarrassing display of emotion to pregnancy hormones.

“Let’s go shopping,” Sydney said.

I didn’t want to go shopping, but I couldn’t very well follow up my let’s-be-friends speech with an I-hate-shopping-and-we-have-absolutely-nothing-in-common speech.

Shopping wasn’t as bad as I’d anticipated, but I still have to say that it’s very weird to pick out onesies for the baby of the man you love and not be the mother.

I hadn’t anticipated how enthusiastic Adam would be about the whole Sydney-and-Libby-are-friends-now thing. I’d failed to grasp—when I’d made the gesture—just how important it was to him. He started wanting the three of us to do things together. I was less than thrilled.

We found out the baby was a boy
, and he got even more excited. The day the OBGYN showed us the ultrasound, Adam went straight out and bought a tiny baseball mitt and a little jersey. I guess he thinks that’s what fathers-to-be are supposed to do. Adam doesn’t even like baseball.