Page 2 of Checking Out the Librarian

Usually, he and whoever he matched with settled on a sports bar, discussed beers and teams, nodded through required exchanges of information, then went somewhere to grapple like Iowa Division One wrestlers. No complaints.

But while Axel1998 looked muscular, he was also slender. Connor guessed the word was lithe, or maybe lean. Definitely not wiry, that was old guys. And they were meeting at a bistro with a French name, so this time was different.

This year, Connor was, frankly, exhausted. The private school where he taught had decided to expand enrollment. His class had been three students larger than previous years, which didn’t sound like many kids, but felt like an additional dozen puppies had been dropped on him for almost ten months.

Facing the final weeks of the year, he’d been too tired to get excited over any profiles until Axel1998, nail polish and lean and a promise of something new. An adventure.

He looked down at his own frayed cargo shorts. All year, he dressed teacher-nice in the building, but it was the final in-service day before summer break. He’d been bleaching high-touch surfaces and scrubbing dried boogers off the bottoms of tables, so it was the one time he came to school looking like a frat-boy. The Oregon University T-shirt wasn’t even a sentimental one from the baseball team, so waiting until it had three holes to remove it from rotation was probably two holes too late.

His duffel bag, already in the Subaru, contained two outfit choices. Whatever he didn’t wear to dinner, he’d wear tomorrow to go to Powell’s Books and poke around the city. Despite his current clothing, he wasn’t an uncouth slob. He used conditioner and had a two-step night-time skincare regime. Regimen. Regime. Whatever.

It wasn’t internet influencer performance-level skin care, but he felt comfortably certain he wasn’t too unkempt for the average gay man’s taste, and if his clothes or product choices were insufficient, then he could fall back on his quads and glutes, which were absolutely sufficient, no lie detectable.

His butt could compensate for myriad personality flaws, thus he’d opted to feature it in the profile photo his buddy Hank’s friend Emma had snapped for him.

While Emma had obligingly captured photos of Connor leaping and pretending to do athletic things in tight black shorts, Hank had offered terrible straight-guy advice. Neither of them had mocked him too hard, Connor assumed because Emma was nice that way, and Hank because he was always nice when Emma was watching.

A wet nose pushed against Connor’s bare knee.

Ribby is here, the nose announced.

And then the greyhound attached to the very good nose turned a circle and pointed at the door and then turned back to Connor.

Ribby is here, but also, Ribby is ready to go.

In Connor’s head, his dog sounded like a squeaky toy but less annoying. Maybe like an intelligible Minions character?

“Sure, buddy. We can go. I won’t go anywhere without you. Except to Portland. I’m going to Portland without you.” If he said it in the who’s-a-good-boy voice, Ribby wouldn’t even realize he was being farmed out to his third-favorite place in the world until they pulled up at Lauren’s house.

Connor knew his two-bedroom fixer-upper with its tiny yard was at best Ribby’s second-favorite place, because his parents’ Eastern Oregon ranch was, no surprise, heaven.

Realistically, his own house was probably no better than third place, since he didn’t feed Ribby table scraps and Lauren had a preschooler who dropped noodles.

He checked his classroom for the last time. The mini-fridge was unplugged, emptied, and scrubbed down. He’d cleared the June birthdays board and left it waiting for September names, thoroughly wiped every white board, and even emptied both pencil sharpeners.

Ribby escalated to a tiny whine.

“Okay, boy.” He hefted the bag of leftover snacks and the other bag filled with spare kid-sized clothes to wash at home before he reassembled the emergency clothing box. “Come on, let’s get these in the car, then we can play.”

Without other people and the muting effect of door and wall decorations, his footsteps echoed in the concrete hallways leading to the exit. He’d be back in ten weeks, but until then he planned to have a busy summer of house remodeling, softball, and hopefully, hopefully, please let him finally figure it out, dating.

That meant dating someone who was not Tony. He was never going to date Tony. Tony was never going to come out, date him, text him dinner plans, or any of the things regular people did, so it was time to finally, and totally, forget Tony.

Ten minutes later, he realized that throwing a wet and nasty tennis ball into the expanse of the school’s miniature soccer field had the unfortunate effect of leaving his brain with too much freedom to fret about tonight.

He took a deep breath filled with cut-grass aroma, one of his favorite scents after years of baseball, and threw hard at the fence. “There you go, Ribby-boy.”

The dog shot across the field, his days as a racer pushing him to speed Connor envied.

He told himself not to hope that Axel1998 would be a guy who would look at him like Jonathan Bailey on Bridgerton looked at everyone, grumpy and yearning and needy all at once, but he couldn’t make himself stop.

Ribby returned with the still-nasty ball, and Connor wrestled it from his mouth with lots of pets.

“Your daddy is a dork. Did you know that?”

He threw it again, and Ribby ran far and fast as soon as he saw his beloved ball take flight.

Connor knew he was generally a happy, out-going guy, which made teaching littles a decent fit, but he wanted to use his smile to make someone else warm up to the world. He wanted to find a grouchy duke who smoldered slowly—wait, smoldering was a one-speed-only expression, wasn’t it? Whatever, he wanted to find a grumpy duke and teach him to smile. He was a very good teacher, was, in fact, an award-winning teacher.