5. Helen
I’m doing my very best to stand as still as possible.
Arriving at work after my appointment with Dr. Sandra, I was dismayed to learn that the heater had gone haywire. The usual toasty wintertime warmth of the library has become a hot, sweltering stuffiness not nearly so agreeable to my wardrobe—my usual black leggings with one of my oversized knit sweaters that’s more of a dress than a top.
The easy solution would be to just remove the sweater, but there are a number of barriers to this plan. Namely, that I am only wearing a tank top underneath said sweater. For most people, wearing a tank top in public wouldn’t be anything all that remarkable, but I like the ambiguous bulkiness of my turtlenecks. In one of my sweaters, with no makeup, big glasses, and my hair tied up in a topknot, I can be invisible.
A tank top allows no such luxury. A tank top shows off arms and shoulders and a generous scoop of neckline when you have natural double Ds. A tank top fits to one’s form, suggesting the shape of the body underneath.
Paired with my leggings, a tank top practically begs the world to look at me and say, This is my body. These are its contours, ambiguity be damned. Behold, and be amazed! (Or something along those lines.)
So my alternative solution is to push up my sleeves, put up my hair into a stereotypical librarian bun, and try to stay very, very still in the hopes of preventing my body temperature from rising. I’m still sweating like a sinner in church, but right now it’s a sort of tolerably gross, damp state of being, and I don’t want to tip the scales into the territory of intolerably disgusting.
“Kimberly.” Erica—blithely wandering around in her own tank top, her skirt rolled up to the point where I half wonder why she even bothers wearing the thing anymore—drops down into her swivel chair with a dramatic flourish. “Take over restacking. I’ve been doing it for hours and it’s soooo hot.”
It’s been twenty minutes. I hesitate, not wanting to be a jerk and not contribute my share, but also realizing that taking over restacking will sabotage my genius plan of not moving. “Umm. Maybe we can wait until the heater’s fixed, or at least until tomorrow?”
Erica purses her lips, giving me a none-too-subtle once-over. “Look, I don’t want to be that person, but you did come in late today because of your ‘therapy’”—this said with skeptical air quotes—“and you know how those books add up if we don’t get them back on the shelves in a timely manner.”
Funny how Erica doesn’t seem to care so much about the books piling up when it’s her turn to restack the shelves but she has to leave early for a date, or a concert, or “drinks with the girls,” or one of her mystery chiropractor appointments.
I motion down to my outfit, trying to appeal to her sense of pity. “It’s so hot.”
“I know. Maybe next time you should bring a change of clothes,” she says, as though I’m being completely unreasonable for not having anticipated that the heater was going to break out of the blue.
Come to think of it, Erica could have given me a warning, since she’d been at work for an hour and a half before I arrived. It would have been an easy detour to stop off at my apartment on the way over and grab an appropriate change of clothes. Gritting my teeth against this new realization, I do my best to shove my sleeves up even higher, then push the cart into the stacks.
I only make it two and a half aisles before I admit defeat. It’s just too hot to be wearing a woolly-mammoth sweater. Besides, the library is virtually dead due to the overenthusiastic heating, so only Erica and a few of the die-hard public computer users will see me—and most of the latter are so consumed in whatever it is they’re using their computers to do that they probably won’t even give me a second glance.
That settled, I remove my sweater, giving an audible gasp of pleasure as the offensively hot piece of clothing is discarded. The toasty air hits the bare, damp skin of my arms, my collarbone, my shoulders, and it is glorious.
Sure enough, I encounter no one in the stacks as I finish unloading the cart. I wheel back toward the front desk, anticipating my bottle of water and upcoming break, when I’ll be able to stand outside in the freezing air for fifteen spectacular minutes.
“Kimberlyyyyyy!”
The irritation and urgency in Erica’s voice makes me stop in my tracks, teeth clamping down in instinctive aggravation. Lord, give me strength. For one moment, I allow myself the luxury of hiding behind one of the stacks before—taking in a deep breath—I peek my head around the corner. “I’m here!”
No sooner do the words leave my mouth than I freeze, stunned to see the Red Unicorn standing at the counter, a flustered Erica standing opposite him. It’s unusual to have a second sighting so close in the same week, so I hadn’t even considered the possibility of running into him in my current tank-topped state.
The Red Unicorn’s own concession to the heat is that he’s unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt and rolled up his sleeves, revealing tantalizing glimpses of muscled, tattooed forearms and a broad chest faintly visible through the top of his white undershirt. The edges of a tattoo creep up over the rim of his collar.
Somehow, it feels even hotter all of a sudden.
Erica raises her voice, managing to sound both relieved and irritated at the same time. “There she is. I’m sure an error’s been made.” Her tone leaves very little room for interpretation as to who might have made this error. She gestures for me to come over.
You’re not my boss, I think irritably, not liking how Erica is trying to show off for the Red Unicorn and make it seem like I’m her underling. But I also can’t refuse to help a patron, no matter how annoying Erica is being.
I’m so flustered by Erica’s behavior that it takes me a moment to remember the tank top of it all. Right now I’m partially concealed behind one of the stacks, but I’ll have to walk across the room, right in front of the Red Unicorn, on full display.
You are ridiculous, I tell myself sternly. It’s just a tank top. But as I force myself to take one step forward, then another, I feel as though I might as well be completely nude, being sweater-less under the Red Unicorn’s gaze. I avoid his eyes, but it suddenly feels extremely difficult to do something as ordinary as walking across a room. What do I normally do with my hands when I walk? Why are they just pointlessly hanging there like that…?
I swallow down a relieved sigh as I reach the counter, feeling at least a little more concealed now that my bottom half is hidden behind something. As this is my considerably larger half, it’s probably the better part to have obscured. “What seems to be the problem?”
“This gentleman has a book on reserve, but I can’t seem to find it. Someone must have shelved it wrong.”
Gee, Erica, could you be a little more obvious? I think in my best snide Chandler Bing voice. To the Red Unicorn, I offer a polite smile. “Okay, let’s see if we can figure out what happened to it.” I hesitate. The easiest option would be to look up his name, but I’ve been avoiding knowing it for all this time. I don’t actually want to know who he is. I want him to remain the nameless Red Unicorn, an anonymous, safe, almost-fictional man who can never disappoint me. “What was the name of the book?” I ask instead.
“Death on the Nile.”
Smiling to myself, I remember seeing him reading a Poirot mystery the night before. He must have finished it already and ordered the next. I’m the same way with mysteries, exercising as little restraint with them as I manage with Pizookies. “Of course—another Agatha Christie.”
Too late, I realize my mistake. I’ve just unwittingly betrayed that I’ve been keeping track of his books. The Red Unicorn looks perplexed, furrowing his brow a little. “What?”
I paste on my blandest smile, even as my heart races, knowing my only hope is to play it completely and totally dumb. “Agatha Christie wrote Death on the Nile, another one of her many mysteries!”
The pucker in the Red Unicorn’s brow increases, but he doesn’t comment, and I hope that I’ve convinced him, or at the very least confused him enough that he won’t know what to think.
“Hmm.” Grateful for the distraction, I focus on the computer screen in front of me. “I’m not seeing any order for Death on the Nile. When did you make it?”
“Last night.”
“And you received confirmation that it was here?”
Erica lets out an irritated groan. “I already asked him that.” She smiles, sickly sweet, at the Red Unicorn. “I’ll check in the back. See if it got misplaced.” She offers one last accusatory glare at me before disappearing into the back room.
The Red Unicorn clears his throat. “It’s not important. I can come back for it later.”
I hate the thought of him—of any patron, really—wanting a book and not having it available. If he ordered the book last night, it must have been after he finished the one he’d been reading in the restaurant. He might be playing it cool now, but I know from experience it’s such a disappointment to think your book is waiting at the library only to have it not be there after all.
I offer him a sympathetic smile. “I don’t mind looking through the reserves again, just one more time, if you want to wait.”
He shrugs, so I turn my back to him and begin looking through the spines of the books. It’s tedious work but it takes my full attention for a few minutes, distracting me from his presence.
Well, mostly. He’s so silent that I glance over my shoulder a moment later, just to make sure he hasn’t disappeared. What I see makes me do a double take in surprise.
The Red Unicorn is doing a slow, leisurely perusal of my body, starting from my feet and winding up over my calves, my thighs, my backside, lingering there for a long moment before continuing up past the small of my waist, my back, and finally meeting my gaze over my shoulder.
For a brief but intense moment we just look at one another. Then the Red Unicorn slides his gaze away.
I resist my first instinctive urge, which is to awkwardly cover my body, and I force myself to turn around to face him. I will use my most normal, everyday voice because what happened isn’t a big deal. He just looked at me, that’s all. People look at each other all the time. This is not an event! “I’m sorry.” My stupid, traitorous voice sounds suspiciously winded, like I’ve just come running up a flight of stairs. “I’m not seeing it.”
“I’ll come back.” I see a muscle in his jaw pulsing, and then—as if he can’t help himself—his eyes dart down to my breasts, and just as quickly away again. He stands there for a moment, not speaking, then abruptly leaves.
I stare after him, baffled. The Red Unicorn, who has not so much as looked at me once the entire time he’s been coming to the library, has by all appearances just…checked me out. As absurd as it sounds, I don’t know any other way to describe what just took place.
Holy. Cow.