2. Mia #2
“I would have made myself really big, waved my arms, made a lot of noise. Mountain lions try to avoid humans. I could have scared it off. I could have thrown stuff at it. Like…” I think about the contents of my car.
“Water bottles.” I don’t have much in my car.
There are books, of course. Lots of books.
But I shudder thinking about throwing books out into an open field at a wild animal.
What if he mauled them? I look down. “My boots.”
David has turned back and is frowning at me. Again. “How do you know all of that?”
“I got it right?” I ask. I know I did. I want to hear him say it.
“Yes. Besides getting back in your car, locking the doors, and calling for help.”
“Right. Of course. I would have gotten back into my car and locked the doors.” We both know I couldn’t have called for help. No need to bring up my not-working-right-all-the-time phone again.
“How do you know how to scare off a mountain lion? Did you just guess? “
I put a hand on my hip and give him a little smile. “I have a superpower."
He narrows his eyes. “What’s that?”
“I’m a librarian.”
He doesn’t respond.
“I know lots of seemingly random facts. Lots of trivia. I read a lot. I look things up for people all the time and I remember a lot of it. And we did a class a couple of years ago about what to do if you come across various common wild animals around here. It started because a little boy had started feeding a stray dog in his backyard and then his dad realized it was actually a wolf.”
David is just listening.
Come to think of it, David probably knows that story. He might have been called to pick the wolf up for all I know.
“So,” I go on. “His dad brought him into the library to look up facts about wolves so he’d be able to recognize one in the future.
If he ever needed to. And then as we talked, I decided we should offer a class for kids to recognize local wild animals and what to do if they happen to see one in their neighborhood or hurt alongside the road.
That was the first time I did a class involving animal tracks. ”
“Would have been a short class,” David says. “Since the entire instruction for if you see a wild animal in your neighborhood or hurt alongside the road is: ‘Call Game and Parks’. Right?”
“That was part of it,” I assure him. “But we wanted the kids to feel comfortable identifying the animals and what to do if they were out playing and saw a hurt squirrel or a bird with a broken wing.”
“They should still call us,” David says stubbornly.
“It’s okay for the kids to know more about the animals than that,” I insist.
“Is all of this book knowledge why you felt comfortable walking around finding animal tracks all alone miles from town?”
He’s really hung up on this. I also don’t like the way he says ‘book knowledge’. As if that’s not really knowledge . “Yes, I learned about animal tracks and where to look for them from books . As hard as that might be to believe,” I tell him.
“So why can’t you just show kids photos of the animal tracks in books ?” he asks.
“Libraries have a lot more resources than just books,” I say.
Though books are my true love and, obviously, the main attraction.
“We offer classes and tutorials, WiFi access, help with filling out forms, movies and music, maps, we even recently started a lending library where people can borrow tools and pots and pans, and things like that.”
David continues to frown—he’s going to have terrible wrinkles by the time he’s forty—but now it’s clearly in confusion. “Why would someone need to borrow pots and pans from the library?”
“If they’re baking a cheesecake for the first time and don’t have a spring-form pan,” I say, as an example.
“Or they’ve decided to try to bake bread, but don’t have a loaf pan.
Or they’d like to use a crock pot and don’t have one.
Or they want to make crepes and need a crepe pan.
Or they want to try making a bundt cake.
Or they want to try using a wok, but don’t want to buy one.
All of those things are expensive if you’re just learning and aren’t sure you want to keep doing it.
It’s a great way to learn and practice.”
His brow furrows, but then he nods. “You got me.”
“I did?”
“I was going to say that they could borrow a Bundt pan or a loaf pan from literally ninety percent of the homes in Sapphire Falls, but I’m thinking woks might be harder to find.”
I laugh. “And honestly, the loaf pans, crock pots, and Bundt pans are probably all being used and can’t be loaned out.”
Then the most surprising thing of all happens.
David smiles.
And yeah…he’s definitely going to be a problem for me.
Scowling David is hot. Sandwich making David is sweet. Smiling David is…panty-melting.
I take a deep breath and look away from the smile that makes me want to really study his mouth.
“Look, if it weren’t for the flat tire, I would have been fine,” I tell him.
“I went out, found some tracks, realized my phone wasn’t working, and was going to head back to town.
It was still plenty light, the storm was way off?—”
“It was still plenty light when you realized you had a flat?” he demands.
Oops. That gives him a pretty good idea how long I’d been stuck out there. “Yes. But I was fine.”
“Sitting around for hours alone? “
“Yes. I got some…work…done.”
He lifts a brow. “What kind of library work did you get done sitting alone in your car without a working phone? “
I wrote three thousand words on my fanfiction in the notebook I always keep tucked in my glove box, as a matter of fact. It’s not work , in the make-money sense of the word. Or in the I-do-it-because-I-have-to sense. It’s actually pure joy.
“I was fine,” I tell him, instead of telling him I write fanfiction about a series of romance novels by one of my favorite authors.
Her books are steamy and fun, but there’s a group of us that want more from the stories beyond the happily ever afters she writes. So we have a fanfic forum.
There are a few people who write murder mysteries in her small town that the cop and firefighter she created solve with their friends.
A few that have introduced paranormal characters.
That started out as an off-shoot of the books one of the characters in the series writes, but it’s expanded beyond that.
For instance, there’s a wizard in town no one knows is a wizard and none of us are sure if he’s a good guy or a bad guy yet. I love reading those.
And then there’s the group of us who write the very, very steamy side of town.
Yes, there’s a secret, invitation-only sex club in this little town and there are all kinds of fun things happening there.
That’s where I spend most of my time.
“I could have easily spent the night out there,” I tell David, stubbornly keeping my imagination from thinking that I need to add a Game and Parks officer as a visitor to the club.
I see the muscle in his jaw tick.
“How?” David demands. “No food? No water? A tornado could have tossed you and your car. Hail could have shattered your windshield. Lightning could have hit you?—”
“Isn’t being inside a car when lightning strikes really safe?
” I stupidly interrupt. But I can’t not comment, because I’m right.
“The electricity is directed through the metal and into the ground, around whoever is inside. One instruction people are given during thunderstorms and in the presence of lightning is to get in a car.” I pause.
“We do storm preparedness training at the library in the summer and winter. Tornado season is wild but winter around here can be really dangerous too.”
As if he doesn’t know. I realize I’m poking the bear.
Why? I’m not really the type to do that.
But god he’s hot when he’s protective and upset about the idea of me being in danger.
He takes a step toward me and I suck in a quick breath.
“What about when you got out of the car?” he asks.
“Why would I get out of the car if it’s raining and there’s hail ?”
“You don’t think you’re going to need to pee all night? “
“I…” Okay, he has a point. Dammit.
Satisfied that he shut me up, he goes on. “There are also wild animals. Poison ivy and oak. No one even knew you were out there. Tell me how you were fine .”
I’m familiar with what David is doing thanks to another man I know who wears a badge.
My dad does the worst-case scenario thing constantly too.
I think it comes with these jobs. Or maybe these jobs draw people like this.
People who instantly think of all of the horrible things that could happen and then make it their responsibility to keep it all from happening no matter that they’re dealing with full-assed humans with free will. Or Mother Nature.
“Look, it was a flat tire. Shitty things like that happen. Worst-case scenario—” Yes, I’ve learned to point out the real worst-case scenario to my father, so his imagination doesn’t get ahead of things, especially when it comes to my sister, my brother, and me.
Okay, mostly me.
My dad absolutely sees me as needier and more fragile than my siblings.
He knows it. He knows I know it. He tries not to.
But even talking to a family therapist, talking to my mom, talking to me , about it hasn’t gotten him fully over that I wasn’t his to take care of for the first ten years of my life and that he didn’t get to be my protector until I was in foster care and he and my mom could adopt me.
“I would have spent the night in my car safe from wild animals, hail, and lightning. Then I would have walked the four miles to Bob’s house in the morning when I had light,” I tell David.
He looks at me with an unreadable expression. “You mean if the tornado didn’t get you.”
I don’t roll my eyes, but I want to. “Yes. If the tornado didn’t get me.”
“Speaking of that tornado, we should go down to the basement.” He turns and starts across the kitchen again.
I sigh.
Scott Hansen never says, “You’re right, I overreacted” either.
Yeah, David is just like my dad.