“Luckily that’s not an issue with your new boss,” she said.
“I’ve told you already.”
“You’ve told me what?” she said.
“I can’t look at you and see anything but the thirty-year-old Liesl I first met. So you’ll never be old to me.”
She tried to imagine being back in her thirty-year-old skin, sliding a slender arm against an almost unfamiliar body just to feel the electricity of it, but she couldn’t get the picture of their current anatomy, of the lines and crevices, to go dark for long enough. The red light kept bringing them forward.
“Perhaps,” she said, “that’s a way of making sure that you never seem old to yourself.”
“Maybe. Wouldn’t I be clever if that were the case?”
“I think we’re drunk,” Liesl said, slipping an arm through his even if it wasn’t slender and thirty years old. Touching him because the whiskey gave her an excuse and because she wanted to see what it felt like with this body.
“I know,” he slurred. “It’s great. What about you, Liesl? Where do you fix me in time?”
“Ask me tomorrow when my head is clearer.”
“I’d prefer to know now when you’re not thinking straight.” He ran a hand across the knuckles that were holding onto his arm, and Liesl saw a flash of hunger register across his face, or maybe she saw a reflection of her own ravenousness. But only a flash, because the sight of her front door, of her chrysanthemums, shook her loose. She pulled her arm free of his.
“This is me.” Liesl pointed at the third house on the street where they were standing. “Thank you for the walk home. And for the help.”
“Come on. I’ll walk you to your door,” Francis said.
He stood next to her as she unlocked it. The city stretched around them, empty. But the doorstep was crowded, intimate.
“Good night then,” Liesl said. “Get home safely.”
***
Liesl had the feeling of swimming through gelatin when she arrived at work the next morning.
Dan, looking impossibly athletic in his too-tight jeans, looking like he and his combat boots could go chop down a tree or build a house at a moment’s notice, caught Liesl and her saggy under-eye skin as soon as she came in. “No Miriam again today.”
“It’s not yet nine.”
“She usually arrives by eight thirty.”
“I know. But she doesn’t have to arrive until nine.”
Dan shrugged and pushed an empty book truck, the constant prop, toward the elevator.
“Who’s scheduled to work the desk this morning?”
She had a growing sense of anxiety about Miriam’s absence. A heaviness that started in her stomach and rose through her throat like acid after a heavy meal.
Dan turned back around. Slowly, always slowly.
“How would I know?” he said. “I just shelve the books.”
Then again, the heaviness in her stomach could have been all the Dewar’s.
“You usually know,” she said. The elevator dinged its arrival. Everything at the library moved at a crawl.
“Miriam has the first shift.” He wheeled his prop into the elevator. “Makes it especially strange that she’s not here yet. Given that we open in a few minutes.”
Liesl decided she hated Dan. But that might have been the hangover.
“Thanks for alerting me,” she said. “Like I told Max yesterday, I’m sure she requested vacation time from Christopher before his departure.”
“None of my business. I just shelve the books,” Dan said.
He disappeared into the elevator, and she was glad to be rid of him. It was four minutes until nine. She opened the door to her old office. The office she had tidied and closed up before her sabbatical. There was a folder of photocopied notes and pages waiting neatly on her desk. She took it with her to the reference area. Fussing over some work during a quiet reference shift would be a gift, she decided.
“What are you doing up here?” Francis asked, appearing around the corner almost as soon as she sat down at the reference desk.
“Covering for Miriam.”
“Gone again?”
“Looks like it,” she said. “I thought you might take the morning off.”
“I’d have called. I wouldn’t leave you wondering about me like that.” He walked behind the desk where she was sitting and looked over her shoulder. She could smell his laundry detergent. “What are you working on?” he asked.
She leaned back. Just a little. So that he could better see the research materials in front of her. That she was leaning into his chest was a side effect. “My book materials,” she said. Francis reached across to the open folder, and in doing so, he briefly rested his hand on hers.