Chapter Six #3
I wasn’t sure what prompted my next question. It wasn’t something I’d asked anybody, apart from Cory, since childhood. The topic was too culturally shameful, especially for those who prided themselves on being well educated. Perhaps I just wanted to keep him talking. “Do you believe in them? UFOs?”
“Sure,” he said.
I was startled by his answer, but also by how casually he said it.
Over the years, I’d read a few of our books and watched a number of documentaries.
I’d gone from not believing in the phenomenon at all to believing that something , who knew what, was there.
It was an open loop inside my mind that I returned to and picked at but never grew nearer to closing.
“In the sense that there are things up there that we, the public, and maybe even the government and military, can’t explain, yes. That’s straightforward enough,” he said.
I nodded, a little disappointed.
“And most of the answers are surely mundane. But it seems like some of them aren’t. And the implications and possibilities are all… pretty extraordinary.”
I felt so close to him in that moment, over this silly thing that wasn’t actually a silly thing.
Macon was smarter than me. He’d had a full decade longer to read and research and think and observe the world.
What he said carried weight with me. I had assumed he would dismiss the subject out of hand, but his curiosity and open-mindedness made me feel better about my own.
I had expected to be ridiculed. Instead, I felt comforted.
“I think so, too,” I said.
And his eyes lit up, just a bit, just enough for me to notice.
It was the first time I wondered if maybe he didn’t feel as confident about his opinions as he appeared.
Maybe he worried about what I thought of him, too.
The energy between us realigned, and for the rest of that shift we couldn’t stop talking, wondering, puzzling, and marveling at all the possibilities that existed in the universe.
It didn’t take long for our tenuous friendship to disintegrate again.
We’d had a good Friday and an even better Saturday morning, and that afternoon I was in the back room helping a polite man who’d just been released from a long prison sentence sign up for an email account.
So much of my job was tech support, guiding people through filling out tedious forms online.
Mr. Brember was shooting the man dirty looks, and I was shooting them back.
Be kind , I mouthed. Mr. Brember’s face soured even further, but he returned to his funeral plans.
Thankfully, the man didn’t notice the exchange.
He was too absorbed in the overwhelming work of reintegration.
A question cut through the building’s din. “Is Ingrid working today?” The voice was loud and assured with a strong rural North Carolinian accent.
My heart jolted. I spun around in my seat to find Justin at the circulation desk.
Macon affirmed in his low, respectable library voice that I was.
Although I couldn’t hear much, I detected a touch of surprise and wariness in his tone, perhaps because Justin wasn’t a regular.
Macon must have mentioned the computers, though, because Justin looked in my direction.
Our eyes caught, and he grinned. I gave him a small wave.
He gave me a huge one back and gestured that he’d wait up front until I was done.
“How do they expect anybody to memorize a password this complicated?” the man beside me mumbled.
It took ten minutes to guide him through the rest of the process, and the whole time I was flushed and distracted by overheard snippets: Justin inquiring about the stained glass, and Macon giving unusually abridged answers.
Justin joking about the dangers of having a lit fire around all these books, and Macon not bothering to pretend we didn’t hear this same joke several times a week.
Why was Justin here? Our relationship so far had been purely carnal.
His presence was embarrassing—I wished he’d stop trying to engage Macon in conversation—but also flattering.
It was another warm winter day, and he was wearing a light jacket over a T-shirt.
His posture was as assured as his voice, and it was clear, even with the jacket on, that he had a nice body.
A climber’s body. I felt a stir that was indecent for work.
Still, as I approached the desk, my plan was to slip behind it to avoid the awkwardness of making physical contact with him in front of Macon.
This plan was thwarted when Justin reached me first, swooped me into his arms, and pecked my cheek.
Though the greeting felt natural, I quickly pulled away and placed the barrier between us.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. I didn’t look at Macon, but I was conscious that we were being observed.
Justin’s hips leaned seductively against my station. “I was picking up a new sump pump at the hardware store over there, and I thought, I wonder if Ingrid is working today?”
I spread out my arms. “I am.”
“And then I wondered if you’d want to go out tonight. Maybe to an actual restaurant this time. Or a movie. Or, I don’t know, this might be really out there, but: dinner and a movie.”
“Oh, um.” I couldn’t help but beam. “Yes.”
“Good,” he said.
“Good,” I said.
“Okay, then. I’ll text you the details.” His eyes twinkled as he gave the desk a little tap of triumph.
The second he was out the door, Sue and Alyssa appeared from the annex.
“Who was that ?” Alyssa asked.
Sue raised an eyebrow. “‘Maybe to an actual restaurant this time’?”
“We’ve met up a few times for drinks,” I said.
We’d had drinks once. The other times, I’d driven straight to his house.
I was as surprised as they were by this turn of events; Justin showing up and publicly asking me out went against everything movies and television (and even most novels) had taught me about relationships built on sex.
But we had been hanging out a bit more, before and after.
I had no idea if any of this was normal or unusual.
Alyssa hooted. “Look at your face.”
I blushed harder. I wasn’t even sure how much I liked him, only that I did and that it had been exciting to see him again. “His name is Justin.”
“How old is he?” Sue asked. The silver hair.
“Forty-one.”
“It suits him,” Alyssa said.
Macon’s jaw was clenched as he grabbed an armful of new fiction and stalked away to shelve it.
I’d been trying my best to keep all of this away from him, but it had been difficult with the others teasing me and requesting stories about the dates that had gone awry.
They couldn’t get enough of those. But this was even worse.
Our workspace had been invaded by the man I was sleeping with.
My coworkers were too polite to ask, but none of them needed to ask.
Macon didn’t need to ask. Justin and I had the body language of two people who had fucked.
What did Macon think about me sleeping with somebody older than he was?
Sometimes I wondered if this was why he had rejected me, if the decade between us made me seem young and immature.
But I had always been attracted to guys who were older than me, Macon obviously included.
However, I did realize that this was an odd thing to admit, considering my longtime relationship with a man who was exactly my same age.
Justin told me to pick the movie, and we met at the indie theater downtown.
There was a new one about Emily Bronte, but I knew better than to do that to him, so I went with my second choice, a film that had made the Oscars shortlist for Best International Feature.
The poster made it look dangerous and edgy, but I should have read the reviews, because it turned out to be somber and introspective.
Long pensive shots of the protagonist forced us to sit with her sadness and self-destruction.
I was into it, but the entire two-hour running time was tinged with the discomfort of being aware that Justin wasn’t.
He fidgeted in his seat, not having the patience for such a slow pace.
The long takes brought to mind Tarkovsky and Gareth, and how I could have relaxed beside Gareth.
Even if he didn’t like the movie, he would have been interested in it.
A dangerous step further: I wouldn’t have taken Gareth to the Bronte film either, since he wasn’t a reader.
But Macon was. I could have taken Macon to either film.
“I could wipe you from my life with a snap of my fingers,” the protagonist said to her boyfriend in a devastating scene.
Justin wasn’t my boyfriend, but I heard the snap all the same.
When the movie finally ended in an ambiguous manner, Justin whispered, “That’s it?”
Although he’d promised “an actual restaurant this time,” he drove me to the cider house where we’d first met up.
“You like this place, right?” he said. But I could tell it was more for his comfort than mine.
We shared an appetizer sampler platter, and it wasn’t like our first date at all.
We had reached our conversational limit.
He was telling me about a trail he wanted to hike, and I felt him sussing me out, trying to see if it was something I’d be game for doing.
Hiking was okay, but this particular trail sounded long and strenuous, the outdoor equivalent of the film we’d just watched.
We’d had enough sexual chemistry for both of us to be curious about dating chemistry, but it wasn’t there.
And what would I have done if it had been there?
Date him for the ten remaining days and then ditch him when Cory returned?
I’d seen him too many times now. Any more, and the situation might get messy.