The Teacher Checking Out the Librarian
1. Meet Connor & Ribby
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.
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.
Ribby came back and nudged the sticky, grass-covered ball at his knee.
“Sure, buddy, I got it.” He bent to dig his fingers behind Ribby’s ears and stroke the neck places where his fur was so soft that Connor could touch it for hours.
Ribby looked up with golden-brown eyes that made Connor think of maple syrup. He wanted a person to look at him like that.
Logically, he knew it was ridiculous to think that tonight’s hook up would have a fairy tale ending, but somehow his stupid imagination was already setting two mugs on his kitchen counter for a slender, dark-haired man somewhere just out of sight.
Ribby bonked him again.
He was an idiot.
“You’re such a good boy.” He trotted along the edge of the field and gave Ribby a pop-up instead of a deep throw, keeping it interesting.
Throw, think, pet Ribby, throw, think, repeat.
If tonight didn’t work out, and he couldn’t find enough backbone to resist Tony’s inevitable All-Star Week messages, maybe he should use geography to his advantage and go home to the ranch early this year.
He knew Tony was lonely and afraid of losing his big-league career, that’s why he was always such a hot-and-cold, here-and-gone, presence in Connor’s life, but Tony never seemed to grasp that Connor was lonely, too.
After Christmas, he’d decided not to wait around hoping that a handful of hookups a year was ever going to be more. Honestly, he didn’t think there was any foundation left between him and Tony for any sort of more, because they weren’t the same guys they’d been in college.
He’d been young and happy with a lack of commitment, but now he wanted more, and Tony didn’t. Maybe thought he couldn’t, but didn’t even want to try. Hadn’t ever tried.
They were over. They had been for a long time, even if the busy school year had deferred the self-reflection washing through him during the quiet moments of today.
One more throw.
He wiped his hands on his shorts.
Tonight, he had places to be, fancy nail polish and a lithe guy to meet, and a hell of a lot of self-improvement to do first.
“Here boy, bring it in! We’re getting on the road!”