Page 23 of Checking Out the Librarian

“A blanket blanket”—Connor gestured to the foot of the bed—“or a meat blanket?” He flopped a heavy arm and leg across Jonathan’s body.

“I beg your pardon?”

Connor was stifling laughter. Jonathan wanted to call it mirth, but he wasn’t that much of a pretentious asshole, despite the phrase that had just exited his mouth.

“Your face,” Connor said.

“No, your face.” Somehow this man made him sound like a fourth-grader. So, the older person in the room.

Then Connor bounded off the bed and tossed the white duvet over Jonathan. “I’ll be right back, don’t go.”

He was already in the bathroom by the time Jonathan said, “It’s my room.”

“Right, I forgot.”

Jonathan heard water running. Connor drank loudly. Water ran again. Then he returned wearing a towel wrapped around his waist and carrying a glass for Jonathan and a damp washcloth.

“You don’t have to ask. It’s a different glass.”

The water was nice, and he swapped the empty glass for the warm, damp cloth.

“You missed some before. I thought it might be bugging you.”

It had been, but he hadn’t thought Connor, a man who used a phrase like meat blanket and didn’t look away politely while Jonathan wiped dried smears from his inner thighs, would have noticed.

As soon as he finished, Connor twitched the cloth from his fingers and bent to press his lips to the skin below Jonathan’s navel. “Better?”

Now he felt squirmy for a reason he couldn’t identify, or more accurately didn’t want to identify, so he snapped. “It was not a boo-boo.”

“Oops, sorry.”

And he disappeared into the bathroom again, and again with the water sounds. Rummaging around sounds. What the fuck was Connor doing in there?

“Hey, we use the same cleanser!” Connor sounded ridiculously excited from the other room.

“Are you going through my things?” He couldn’t possibly; it must be a mistake.

“Yep. Wow, you have a lot of products.”

He tensed, remembering the muddle of bottles and jars he’d crowded in the corner of the vanity after he’d rushed to get ready for dinner.

When he’d still been skating and sharing rooms with his mother before competitions, she’d warned against letting other people see his silly products. She’d told him to hide everything back in a suitcase, because that much excessive crap would make people think he was messy and undisciplined. Too messy to clean up after himself and too undisciplined to win, she’d said.

Now Connor had seen it, all of it.

Jonathan felt colder. He tugged the duvet tighter across his shoulders and tried to sink into the pillow, even though it wouldn’t make him warmer and couldn’t hide him.

“Is this good? Does it work?” Connor came around the corner holding Jonathan’s tube of Jo Malone lime, basil and mandarin lotion.

It had not been a bargain purchase.

“I’ve been thinking I need to do something for my elbows, especially now that it’s summer.”

Jonathan took a deep breath and looked at Connor, the only other person actually in the room, or at least the only person Jonathan wanted in the room.

He stood in a way that twisted his torso three-quarters toward the bed, like one of the statues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and lifted his arm, pointing his elbow at Jonathan but at the same time twisting to show the arena-sized span of muscles popping over his ribs and chest. Precisely which muscles, Jonathan had no idea, because despite years of skating competitions and the workout schedules involved with being fit enough to rotate multiple times in the air, he’d never bothered to learn the specific names for the places on his body that popped when he lifted his arms.

Well, after several years of school, his own didn’t precisely pop anymore as much as blink, but Connor’s various muscles appeared and took their bows quite regularly.