Page 1 of Checking Out the Librarian

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MEET CONNOR & RIBBY

Connor glanced up from his phone. “You can’t make me feel guilty. I won’t feel guilty.”

But Ribby stood by the door of Connor’s empty second-grade classroom, quivers of anticipation animating the rescue greyhound’s velvety reddish-gold flanks while he stared silently back with his big soft eyes and slightly open mouth.

“Stop making me feel guilty. I finished cleaning and everything is packed for the summer, so we’re almost done. We’ll go outside in a sec.” He returned to the most recent messages on his favorite hookup app.

BatsandBalls

Looking forward to tonight

Axel1998

Our reservation for Le Poivre is at 6:30.

BatsandBalls

Sounds great

He shouldn’t spend time re-reading messages, not when he needed to tire out Ribby chasing balls around the playground before he turned his good boy over to his work bestie. He’d told Lauren that he was going to Portland to meet an old friend who was in town, and she’d agreed to watch his dog until tomorrow afternoon.

No need to explain that “old” meant two weeks old and “friend” meant he’d stared obsessively at a photo of the guy’s abs on iEros but never seen his face.

Axel1998

Shall we meet in the bar?

The other man had chosen a trendy Pearl District bistro that excited Connor, even if his credit card gave him the side-eye for the room he’d reserved at the boutique hotel almost directly across the street from the restaurant. He’d spent last night scoping the menu on-line, decoding cocktail ingredients, and trying to settle on possibilities for this evening. He knew himself. He didn’t want to get weirdly immersed in the menu as soon as they met, so advance planning had been required.

Portland was roughly a hundred miles from Eugene. Working backwards on the timeline, he knew he needed an hour in the room to get ready because he hadn’t done any personal grooming in what felt like three dog years, and he was hairy enough that his sister called him a Scottish Sasquatch.

Figure a safety zone of twenty minutes for getting lost in downtown Portland and crossing the Willamette River at least once by mistake, and a bit over ninety minutes for the drive. That meant leaving Eugene by three would give him plenty of time.

The last couple of text exchanges, simple as they had been, drew him back.

BatsandBalls

Glad this week is done. Hardest week of the year

Axel1998

Don’t make me jealous. I still have a couple hours.

Neither of them had mentioned job specifics or real names, and he appreciated the other man’s discretion. Connor didn’t like to lie, but he didn’t tell hookups that he was an elementary school teacher, and he assumed Axel1998 had a similar reason to keep his identity separated from his profile.

While his privacy mattered, he didn’t worry about safety when he met an anonymous guy in a bar, because he was six-two and flirting with two hundred pounds. It would work out.

He touched the profile icon to enlarge the other man’s photo. Axel1998 was definitely not using a mirror selfie. Like most photos on this app, including his own, it didn’t show a face, but iEros had reliable anti-catfishing measures, so Connor wasn’t worried that these particularly nice abs were not the ones showing up tonight.

He tried to imagine what Axel1998 would look like. For some reason, he pictured dark hair, even though he couldn’t pinpoint clues in the chest and abs image, which was black and white and looked professionally shot.

One hand splayed across his stomach to show long, slender fingers and immaculate dark nail polish, which is what had first snagged Connor’s attention. The other hand was out of sight at the bottom of the photo, leading everyone to make assumptions about where that hand was and what it could be doing. He zoomed to look for the tenth or twentieth time at Axel1998‘s hand. Even in the monochrome photo, light bounced off the painted surfaces.

Every other time he’d used this app, he’d matched with a jock. He’d never chosen a guy who wore nail polish or makeup, unless tattoos counted as permanent makeup.

What would it look like to have that hand touch his body? Hot, yes, but also completely different from every memory of Tony. Maybe repeating the same shit with the same type of guy was what made him vulnerable whenever Tony texted or knocked on his door.