By Greg Metcalf

“I don’t need these renewed, just returning.” The man set down the books, a stack of four—the top one Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, the three below equally thick, like wood between the top one and the library counter. He held them like a casserole dish filled with a cheesy lasagna dense with sauce and meat, made with saturated boiled noodles—not the dry no-need-to-boil modern ones—ready for the oven. He slid them toward the librarian in a way that suggested the pressing of his weight. She met them halfway, letting her fingers touch his. She pulled them to her edge of the counter. Emitted a squeal as she hefted them and turned to place them in the return bin. Her instinct to turn the binds up to read the titles resisted only by the strain in her wrists. 

“Not exactly light reading.” She boldly joked with her back to him, with a desperate hope she wouldn’t turn around and find him leaving. 

“Pretty good stuff.” He was still there, his arms drawn back, but still pressed over the counter toward her. “Would you like to meet for a drink, sometime?”

“Yes,” she said, after waiting a moment. Smiling and maintaining eye contact as he smiled and maintained eye contact as the moment passed. Perfectly. “Yes, here’s my number.” She jotted it on a scrap of paper with a handy short yellow wooden pencil. She gave it to him and then left her opened hand out, steady. Perfectly, as she swooned. 

He tucked her number in his wallet and shook her hand. “I’m Adam.”

“Kathy.”

She watched after him as he walked away. Then two other librarians emerged from behind her, and she tried to appear composed. “Don’t do it, honey,” one said, and Kathy tried to turn but found herself squeezed still on both sides. 

“He seemed interesting.”

“No,” the other said. “Seems only. Trust us. What kind of book lover doesn’t own a single one?”

“One who frequents libraries?” Kathy said. 

“And what,” the first said, “reads from thousands of pages of erudite literature in less than a couple of weeks?”

“Maybe he spends all day reading.” Kathy added, almost breathlessly, “Maybe he’s a writer.”

“And has nothing to say about them except that they’re…,” the two of them said together, “pretty good?”

“He might just not be big on discussion.” Kathy still watched him through the library’s glass double doors. He crossed the parking lot and left her sight without reaching a car. Kathy immediately pictured, within walking distance, a tiny apartment designed as an elaborate reading room and, in a corner, a writing desk. 

“No, trust us, honey, you want to stay away from that one. I spent all morning, over breakfast, trying to discuss books and ‘pretty good’ was the only thing he ever had to say.”

The other gave a nod and began slowly shaking her head. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that player reader has never opened a book in his life.”

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Greg Metcalf is the author of Flowers on Concrete, a novel, Hibernation, a YA thriller, and the memoir Letters Home: A WWII Pilot’s Letters to His Wife and Baby from the Pacific. He has four other completed novels, unpublished to date. His short fiction has been in Confrontation and online at Boston Literary Magazine, Toasted Cheese, and others.