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“Well, this UPS driver has a Ph.D. in English literature, so I guess yeah, I like to read.”
“No shit.”
“Yeah, no shit.”
“Seriously?” I still had the feeling of being pranked by the world, as if someone had sent me a poetry-reading, PhD-holding buff hunk just to mock me and my loneliness.
“Driving for UPS pays better than teaching, if you haven’t heard.” Aiden raised his eyebrows.
That wasn’t all that surprising to hear. It was one of the reasons I hadn’t gone to graduate school myself. Working as a librarian afforded me even more time with books than teaching would have. It also paid as much as a professorship, and it didn’t require anything more than a BA.
“Do you enjoy it?” That was also a dumb question. But what else could I say?
“Yeah, I enjoy it — oh, oh shit, I have to go.” Aiden tapped at his watch, then at his handheld computer. He must’ve been on a delivery schedule. He turned and started walking away.
I called after him. “You want to?” I couldn’t believe I was doing this. But I was. I couldn’t let this guy get away.
“I want to?” Aiden looked at me, puzzled.
“Do you want to come back after work, and we can have coffee?”
Again, I couldn’t believe that I was doing this, saying this. Here I was, outwardly, openly asking out the UPS driver.
Before this day, I had never asked anybody out. I’d always been the one asked out. But I felt something for Aiden, something like an attraction that was driving me. I knew I had to act on it.
Chapter Three - Aiden
Seven P.M., an hour before library closing time, I got there as fast as I could. I changed out of my UPS uniform into jeans and a t-shirt in the back of an Uber car.
Once I arrived at the library, the nosy desk clerk was nowhere to be found. Good, for some privacy and discretion. Bad, because Eleanor wouldn’t be handed to me on a silver tray by the clerk as she usually was. I would have to fish her out from wherever she was hiding before bringing her out to coffee at whatever place the Yelp app recommended.
Alone amidst the tall Roman ceilings, I had to ring the front desk bell by myself and whisper-shout, “Eleanor! Eleanor!” It was the year 2021, and the New York Public Library was still using a simple mechanical bell? Maybe it was intentionally quaint, New York style.
Eleanor peeked her head out from the back room. Then hid again and closed the door like a groundhog. Then peeked out again, this time waving for me to come to the back area with her.
A waist-high door blocked me from going to the employee area. I silently pointed down at it. Eleanor shrugged and pantomimed for me to push open the door. I did. I was behind the library counter. It felt like sneaking into the principal’s office after school. She waved me to go into the back area. I followed.
The back area wasn’t much; gray carpet, dim fluorescent lighting, generic inspirational posters, and a soda vending machine. It resembled the “office” area of the UPS processing center that loaded my truck every morning.
Eleanor smiled. “Here, I’ll show you my hideout.” She took a right, a left then turned her key in a door lock. Inside the door was an office, windowless, with an overfilled bookshelf, a desk holding a laptop, a space heater for chilly New York mornings, and an espresso machine. The Khalil Gibran book was on the desk, next to the laptop.
The room was a diminutive, scaled-down version of a study or an office. The entire tiny space was clearly Eleanor’s domain. It smelled like her. I had come to recognize that smell — maybe discount-store soap and shampoo — in my two short encounters with her.
She pointed at the espresso machine with her eyes. “Can I make you an espresso?”
That was unexpected. It was late already, but what the hell. Of course, she could. “Sure. As long as you make one for yourself too. I don’t want to be the only one staying up.”
That sounded unintentionally suggestive. But what the hell. I had just called a customer in a closed library and agreed to drink an evening espresso. Maybe a remark about “staying up” was only the natural progression of where that entire train of thought had started going.
Eleanor punched one button, then another. Wheels clicked and whirred inside. Magician-like, she pulled two small glasses from somewhere under the desk and had the first glass under the slow, pungent espresso drip just as the first drops came. She switched out the first glass for the second by the time the drops were drying up.
“I kind of thought we’d be going out for coffee, actually.” I grinned, shifting my weight to one side to show off my pressed-fitted t-shirt and slim-fit jeans.
