Page 28 of Checking Out the Librarian

If Jonathan didn’t go for it, if Connor and his silly ideas chased him away, then that wouldn’t be any different from other guys.

Finding out now would at least be efficient.

Traditional post-hookup etiquette offered Jonathan no guidance, and driving his car in Portland weekend traffic was hardly the moment to question his firmly held beliefs about navigating morning-afters.

He was good at light sarcasm and insincere leave-takings with men whose last names were irrelevant, but Connor’s goofily transparent machinations, sweet blushes, and enthusiasm for being bossed around, wrapped in that yummy supersized package of soft curls and muscle slabs, did not have parallels in Jonathan’s experience.

Looking in the rear-view mirror of his car and seeing his puffy lips and the pink scrape a jock’s stubble had left on his cheeks, he reassessed the choices young Jonathan had made.

Maybe he should have stretched his wings more before age twenty-six. Back in his skating days, when he’d been hanging around ice rinks where guys built like Connor tromped in and out to play that sport with sticks and pucks, he hadn’t had the confidence or independence to risk messing with them, and thus limited himself to the easy, safe choices in the figure skating world.

A few of the hockey dudes had arrived surprisingly early and loitered nearby to say hello, but nineteen and twenty-year-old Jonathan had been too aware of the potential mistakes.

Then, after the pandemic-induced life makeover, he’d left rinks behind and stuck with predictable guys who, by virtue of being high-maintenance like him, would be happy to get off with him. The one disastrous exception had driven him sobbing back to his make-up loving, club-hopping, sarcasm-wielding clique.

But perhaps he shouldn’t have worried so much about his welcome from the jock end of the spectrum. It seemed that a subset of guys who’d spent their life listening to a coach really liked being coached in all sorts of ways. He would have assumed they’d prefer big daddy energy, but maybe big skinny energy worked just as well.

An actual fling with Connor, although Jonathan had zero idea of the number of hookups it took to equal a fling, could be a healthy growth opportunity to go along with his amazing job, his new city, and his private apartment.

It wouldn’t be greedy to want that for himself; it would be progress.

He could try to connect with someone new, and if it failed, Connor would be in Portland and Jonathan could just never visit the largest city in his new state ever again, not a problem at all.

Perhaps he should find one legit activity before he left Portland, if for no other reason than to have an answer to Lily’s Monday morning inquiries that wasn’t “I ate, drank coffee and fucked, then I drank coffee, fucked, and ate.”

Also, he should probably send a proof-of-life selfie, since women worried about safety, and she’d guessed why he was going to “the city.”

He’d been raised near LA, competed in Japan and Europe, then attended college in New York City; he couldn’t even think of Portland as a city if he didn’t put quotes around it. But Lily cared about him, for whatever crazy reasons, so he should let her know he was in the cavorting-with-singing-animals stage of his morning after.

Apparently that’s what friends did, and he wanted to keep the best one he had.

The rose garden in Washington Park would be an ideal choice, assuming he could park on a lovely Saturday morning in June.

A few minutes later, the gods smiled with their favors and he parallel parked on the first try. Even the phone app to pay for an hour worked easily.

The paths and grass were both immaculately maintained, not like a trail, so his cute sneakers and the cuffs of his linen casual trousers should stay clean.

Clearly, he should hook up more often. Or maybe eat more doughnuts. Okay, both.

The rose garden was a spectacular place, one that made him momentarily yearn to have a yard he could fill with a maze of roses, lilacs, hydrangeas, lilies, or whatever else inspired him, but that was a financial goal for the future. Unless his father suddenly became interested in helping him to purchase real estate instead of securing yet another Southern California strip mall, Jonathan was going to stay a renter.

His immediate need, however, was not a garden of his own, but a good selfie spot to send Lily a photo.

Opening his phone, he saw that he’d received a notice in the iEros app.

His breath did a funny thing when he tapped on the icon and read that new messages in an unfathomably plural number far more than one had arrived from Connor.

While saying awkward goodbyes in front of Voodoo Doughnut, they’d floated the possibility of keeping in touch, and Connor had casually mentioned he was going to Powell’s, in a way that had felt thirty percent like an invitation to join him at the bookstore, but Jonathan had obeyed his instincts and returned to his car.

Having seven messages from him within an hour was unusual, yes, but also, perhaps, refreshing.

And that ping made eight.

Actually, he didn’t know what it was, other than confusing, because nothing like it had never happened to him before this moment.

But he was in a shade-spattered corner of the garden, which made him free to check messages on an app without shocking anyone except himself with the fact that a hookup was already texting.

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