Christmas Eve began for you when the early morning light filtered in through your blinds, even brighter than usual due to the way it reflected off the snow outside.
You’d never slept so well before. Your limbs felt soft and heavy, draped over Larissa’s waist — you were spooning her, you realized, her taller body tucked against your front, your face buried against the crook of her neck. Her silvery waves tickled your nose and you breathed in deeply — they smelt of her perfume and the laundry detergent your mom used on your sheets and something else that you’d come to find out was Larissa’s natural scent, that hint of sweetness that emanated off her bare skin.
Her body was so soft, so warm against your own, fitting against you like a perfect puzzle piece in spite of the size difference. It didn’t feel awkward like when you’d accidentally cuddled your friend in your sleep at summer camp — it felt right, like she was meant to lie there, like an extension of your own body. You could lie there forever, you thought. God, you were so fucked, weren’t you?
Larissa stirred in your arms, then turned slightly, her eyes meeting yours. In this light, her eyelashes were like spun gold, framing bleary and unfocused eyes — a lighter blue than usual as they reflected the sun. For a moment, you thought she might pull away, or question why you were so close. Instead, her lips spread into a sleepy smile and she adjusted herself slightly against you, her own arm covering yours, her eyes fluttering shut again.
You buried your face against her shoulder, not wanting to fully wake up just yet. Your lips brushed against her pajama top, and you resisted the overwhelming urge to press a kiss to her shoulder blade. The rhythmic rise and fall of Larissa’s chest mesmerized you, you could feel every breath.
Eventually, she broke the silence, her voice so deep with sleep that it sent a shudder through your body. “Good morning, darling.” Then, mistaking your shudder for a shiver, “Are you cold?”
“Mhm,” you lied, using the excuse to your advantage and snuggling as close as possible — Larissa chuckled, pulling at the blankets so that they covered you more completely. It was pure and utter bliss, of a caliber that you’d had yet to experience up until that point in your life, and you were determined to soak it in for as long as possible, until your joints were begging you to stretch and your stomach was starting to growl.
Reluctantly, you looked up at Larissa. “I’m going to go make coffee, would you like to join me?”
Larissa opened her eyes and met your gaze, smiling softly. “I think I’d like to shower first, if that’s alright.”
“Yeah, of course.” You gave her a gentle squeeze before reluctantly disentangling yourself from her, shivering immediately at the sudden loss of warmth. Larissa turned onto her side as you shrugged a sweater over your pajamas and pulled on some woolen socks — you could feel her gaze tracing your form from behind, and what would normally make you feel self-conscious now sent a thrill straight through you. “Take your time,” you said before stepping out into the hallway, offering Larissa a rather shy smile to match her own. There was a spring in your step as you closed the door to your room behind yourself and made your way to the kitchen to get started on coffee.
~~~
Back in your room, Larissa stretched languorously on the bed. She’s slept so well that all of the aches and pains in her body from the previous day hardly mattered, going nearly unnoticed. All she knew was that she felt very warm, and that your scent lingered on the sheets, and that that made her want to bury her face in them — which she did, breathing in deeply and taking a moment to nuzzle her face against your pillow.
She had no idea what had come over you to be so cuddly that morning, but wouldn’t — couldn’t — refuse you. She’d take any scrap of affection from you that she could get — even if it meant getting her heart broken by the time you both arrived back in Jericho.
But Larissa didn’t want to think about that today, not when the morning had started so perfectly, and she got out of bed and headed to the bathroom to get ready for the day.
The shower was hot, the spray doing wonders for the tension she always carried in her shoulders. When it hit the side of her thigh, though, she hissed, looking down to see a massive bruise in a range of blues and purples fanning out from her hip and down her upper thigh.
When she was finished, she wrapped herself in a towel, careful not to rub the bruise too firmly as she dried herself, then stepped out of the shower. Glancing at the closed toilet seat, she realized that, in her daze, she’d forgotten to bring her clothes with her into the bathroom. She peeked out into your room — it was empty, the door to the hallway firmly shut, and she couldn’t hear any noise from beyond.
Crossing the room, she dropped the wet towel on the floor and pulled on a pair of underwear — deep burgundy cotton briefs, as she’d given up on lacy lingerie a long time ago. It didn’t serve her to wear sexy yet uncomfortable and itchy panties, with some fantasy in mind that someone would come along and undress her and appreciate the view. That had never happened in her 49 years on this Earth, why should it happen now, at her platonic friend’s parent’s house.
She held her bra between her fingers, also burgundy and also very plain, full coverage. She rubbed the cotton between her fingers. When had she given up on those silly, youthful fantasies, she wondered — when had she become so sensible, stopped hoping that something outrageous would happen to her?
Larissa was so lost in her thoughts that she didn’t register the sound of footsteps in the hall until the door to your room opened with a creak — she dropped her bra in surprise.
~~~
“Fuck! I’m so sorry,” you squeaked out, your hand still on the door handle. You turned away as quickly as you could to give Larissa privacy, but not before you’d seen more of her than you’d ever dreamed. “I should have knocked,” you chastised yourself aloud, your face turning redder by the second as the image of Larissa’s breasts, her bare, pale skin covered in goosebumps and those rosy nipples hardened by the chill in the air, was seared behind your eyes. You could hear rustling behind you, the snap of a bra strap. “Are you dressed? Can I turn around?”
“Yes.” Larissa’s voice was hoarse, and you turned to find her wrapped in a towel, but with burgundy bra straps peeking out of the top. She looked just as embarrassed as you did, her cheeks pink and the top of her chest near her exposed clavicles red and splotchy. Her hair was darker when it was wet, and the tight waves stuck to her cheeks and dripped onto her shoulders. You swallowed thickly.
“I heard the shower turn off a while ago, I wanted to ask if you wanted some coffee? Or hot chocolate… or something…”
Larissa’s grip on the front of the towel tightened, her knuckles pale. She nodded, her gaze flickering around the room, looking everywhere except at you. “C-coffee would be nice…”
“Yeah… Okay…” You couldn’t help the way your own gaze travelled down her body, though it stopped at her upper thigh, where the towel ended. You cocked your head to the side to get a closer look. “Is that…?”
Larissa tried to cover it but, in shifting the towel to the side, the bruise became even more visible — a massive, inky stain down Larissa’s side. You were kicking the door closed behind yourself and moving towards her before you could stop yourself, sitting down at the edge of the bed beside her. Your brows knit together and you reached out gingerly, stopping yourself just before touching her. “Can I take a look?”
There was a long pause in which you were convinced Larissa was going to say no, tell you to leave, perhaps even get angry — you wondered, guilty, if maybe you’d gone too far, if you’d finally managed to overstep. Then, finally, she nodded, and you lifted the towel, careful not to touch the bruise as you did so. It extended all the way from her hip down to about mid-thigh, and it looked painfully swollen. With a careful glance up at Larissa, who was watching your face closely, you brushed your fingers along her thigh — Larissa sucked in a breath, her brows scrunching together.
“Let me get you an ice pack.”
“I don’t need–”
“Yes, you do,” you said sternly in anticipation of an argument, raising an eyebrow. “It’ll help with the swelling.” Determined to help and ignoring Larissa’s protests, you rushed to the kitchen, coming back with an ice pack wrapped in a dish towel to find that Larissa hadn’t moved a muscle.
You asked Larissa to lie on the bed for you, which she did with some reluctance, grumbling under her breath — you sat down beside her and held the ice pack gently to the bruise.
“You’re making a big deal out of nothing…” She winced as the ice pack touched her skin. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not, it’s swollen. You’re very stubborn, you know.” You adjusted yourself behind her, placing a comforting hand on her back. The bruise was large and so you moved the ice pack down slightly, being sure to ice every part of the swelling skin.
“I’m not stubborn,” Larissa insisted, her voice rising defensively.
You chuckled. “You’re kind of proving my point.”
Larissa’s cheeks reddened, but she didn’t argue further.
You were aware of the intimacy of the moment — you couldn’t even convince yourself anymore that this is how you would care for any of your friends, because you knew you wouldn’t. Sure, you’d get them an ice pack if they needed one. But you wouldn’t be pressing it to the bruise for them, and you certainly wouldn’t be practically spooning them from behind.
You shifted your position behind Larissa a bit and used your free hand to tug her towel up enough to dab away some drops of water on Larissa’s clavicle. She shivered against you — it made the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. You were suddenly acutely aware of how closely you were pressed together, of how little Larissa was wearing, of the heat pooling low in your belly.
“Do you want to go out to lunch today?” It was the first thing that came to mind to fill the silence, to distract yourself from the less-than-pure thoughts creeping in, thoughts that you weren’t quite confident enough to act upon. “Just the two of us, I mean, not with my family. I haven’t really had the chance to show you around town yet.” You worried your lip between your teeth.
Larissa craned her neck back to look at you, smiling — you realized that, though you loved the way her lipstick suited her, her bare lips, pale and slightly cracked, were more intoxicating to you than you’d ever realized.
“I’d love to.”
~~~
You took Larissa to your favorite diner in town. It was just before the usual lunch rush hour, so you were able to snag what had once been your favorite booth — all the way in the back corner, with a window overlooking the town’s modest little park. The park was blanketed in snow, the small pond at the center frozen over, and ducks waddled across its surface, caring not for the ice beneath their feet. Your hand brushed Larissa’s lower back as you subtly guided her into the booth against the wall, the seat you usually took because the view was slightly better from that side.
It felt too easy to be like this with Larissa, on a date. Well, it wasn’t a date — you weren’t together, not really. But it felt so different today than it had sitting across from each other in the Weathervane just a week prior. You took a napkin and some cutlery from the little cup on the table and slid it over to Larissa, and her fingers brushed yours as she accepted it.
“Are you having fun? Like, actually?” you asked suddenly.
Larissa looked taken aback for a moment — then her gaze turned cautious. It frustrated you that you couldn’t decipher it. “Do you mean today?”
“Yes? Or just, like… every day? I keep feeling horrible about how I dragged you into this. You should be enjoying yourself over the holidays, not having to pretend to be someone’s girlfriend, you know?”
Larissa’s expression shifted to something soft and gentle and she smiled, taking your hand on the table and intertwining your fingers — though her eyes were still guarded. “I am enjoying myself. Your family is very kind, and I’m very grateful that you invited me. As a friend or as a girlfriend.”
“If you say so…” You blushed, giving her fingers a gentle squeeze. “I guess I just wish–”
Larissa’s gaze darted away from you for a moment, and then stayed fixed on a point above your shoulder. Her smile faltered slightly, and she quickly looked back at you.
“What?”
Then you heard your own name in a familiar voice, and you felt your shoulders tense.
(Larissa is not the principal at Nevermore, she is a fairly well-known writer) Larissa was "happily" married to a guy but lately she had started to feel lonelier for some reason until a new library opened in the city where she lived with her husband (I'm not going to specify which city) Reader worked at the library. She was the librarian and a fan of Larissa's work. When Larissa went to the library to read something, Reader got very excited and invited her to be part of her reading club. Offer that Larissa accepted because she didn't want to feel alone anymore, And also because Reader had caught her attention.
I'll leave the rest to your own imagination and I hope you take this request into account since it has really been on my mind for days😭😭
(Oh and also some smut because life is too short not to enjoy a good spicy reading😜)
Sorry if there are words that are not so clear, English is not my native language.
Hearts on the Shelf (nsfw)
AU author!larissa weems x librarian!reader
A/N: Hi anon! I didn’t 100% stick to your script—or rather I did but tweaked a few things so it’d fit my writing style—I hope you’ll enjoy what I did with your request! I love a good library AU. 🫶🏻
You always open the library before the sun has figured itself out. The door sighs when you unlock it, the lights hum and warm from cold to a forgiving glow. Cardboard still lives under the circulation desk—boxes from the last shipment that you keep forgetting to take to the back. The smell is new wood and paper dust and that crisp, high note of brand-new glue. You breathe it in like a promise.
On opening week you taped a handwritten sign beside the returns slot:
Reading Club—Thursdays at 7. Come as you are. Bring whatever book you can’t stop thinking about.
You didn’t expect many to come, but somehow managed to gather a few regulars.
Around noon, the door slides open and cold air rides in on a long black coat. You look up from your terminal—ready with your standard welcome—and the words get lost somewhere, stunned, on the back of your tongue.
Larissa Weems is taller than she looks on dust jacket photos. There’s a steadiness to the way she carries her height—nothing apologetic about it. Her white hair is done like a quiet argument against time. A red diamond sits bright on her ring finger, catching the light every time she moves, glittering like a boundary.
You’ve read everything she’s published. Twice. Sometimes thrice. When her third novel dropped, you read it overnight and came to work dreamy with lack of sleep, your heart feeling like someone had put a window in it and forgotten to close it.
Now she is here, not on a screen, not on a sleeve, but in your lobby looking at the new fiction table like she is hungry and trying not to seem so.
“Welcome,” you manage, and hear the breathless quality in the word. You try again, your voice steadier. “Welcome to the new city library.”
She smiles. It does something to your stomach you don’t have the language for. “Congratulations. It still has that—” she lifts her chin as if smelling the air— “first chapter scent.”
You laugh, and it comes out more honest than you intended. “I like to think so.”
Her glance slides to your name tag, and she says your name like she’s testing how it feels in her mouth. “Would you help me find something?”
“Anything.”
“Something that isn’t mine,” she says wryly, then softens. “Something I could read without hearing myself.”
You take her past the debut authors, past a small display of translated literature you set up because a patron said she’d never seen it highlighted here before. You offer her a small, sharp novel you loved last winter, and she turns it over in her hands like it might tell her a secret.
“Would you—” You hesitate. “I run a reading club on Thursdays. It’s very small. People bring what they’re reading and talk about why. You’d be very welcome.”
The red diamond ring flashes again as she passes the book between her hands. She looks at you. “That sounds…human,” she says. There is both longing and embarrassment in the word. “Are you sure you’d want me there? I wouldn’t want to take up all the air.”
“There’s plenty,” you say. “I promise.”
Her smile turns quiet and private, something that looks like it belongs in the margins. “Then I’ll come.”
You spend the rest of the afternoon insisting to yourself you are not counting down hours.
Thursday arrives on feet made of glass. It feels like anything could break if you touch it wrong. You arrange a circle of chairs in the back, half-hidden by the philosophy shelves, where the fluorescents turn soft over dark wood and the sound of the street becomes nothing more than an idea.
The regulars trickle in—the teenager with a pencil behind her ear, the couple who whisper fiercely about poems, the retired teacher who always brings cookies and insists they’re nothing, really. You keep turning toward the door.
Larissa walks in five minutes late, as if to make sure the group belonged to itself before she joined. She carefully chooses her seat, carefully folds her coat over the back of the chair, carefully places the book on her lap—the slim novel you recommended. The ring glints and then disappears when she laces her fingers together and sets them there, still and composed.
You start with your usual question—What is keeping you company this week?—and the story of the hour unfolds, one heart at a time. When it’s Larissa’s turn, she touches the cover like she’s patting a nervous horse.
“I wanted to read someone else’s music for a while,” she says. “I wanted to be taught how to want things again.”
It is honest enough that the group takes a breath together, and then the talk moves forward, not skittering around her name but not collapsing under it, either. She listens more than she speaks, and when she does speak, it threads through what everyone else is saying. She is generous with her attention. When the hour ends, no one rushes to leave. The teenager asks if writers ever hate their own sentences. The couple debates metaphors. The retired teacher wraps two extra cookies and slips them into Larissa’s hand with the quiet gravity of a sacrament.
After, when the chairs are stacked and the others gone, Larissa lingers among the shelves. You pretend to straighten a display.
“Thank you,” she says finally.
“For what?”
“For making a circle without making a stage.”
You nod. “You’re welcome.”
She draws the book to her chest, then taps the cover. “What should I read next?”
You pull a volume from the shelf. “This one has a mean first chapter. Not mean-spirited, but…unforgiving.” You glance at her. “I think you might like that.”
She tilts her head. “Unforgiving can be honest.”
“Honesty can be a kind of love,” you say, and then flush because it’s too big for a casual answer.
Her eyes do a small, startled thing, like you surprised her without scaring her. She leans in. “Yes.”
A moment lives between you like a candle cupped in two hands. You are suddenly aware of her breath, of the expensive, clean scent of her coat, of the fact that when she looks down at you like that, the library feels full of secret places.
A key turns in the front door—security, doing their check—and the moment skitters away. Larissa slips the new book into her bag, thanks you again, and leaves with her coat collar up against the March wind. You stay a little longer with the afterimage of her against the stacks and the knowledge that you are, once again, counting days.
She quickly becomes a regular.
Sometimes she comes for the club. Sometimes she comes mid-afternoon when no one else is around and asks if she can sit in the reading room. You start leaving the good lamp on for her, the one that makes a circle of gold on the table and softens anyone sitting inside it. She always chooses the same chair. You start to know the particular sound of the door when it’s her.
She returns the unforgiving book, a smile tucked into one corner of her mouth. “It was exactly as cruel as it needed to be,” she says. “I kept trying to forgive it. It kept refusing to let me.”
“Did you like that?” you ask.
“I liked being refused for the right reasons,” she answers, and something in you goes very still.
On a rainy Wednesday, she stands at the edge of the desk, watching rain stitch itself between the streetlights. She holds herself like she’s waiting to come back together.
“Do you ever read to feel less alone?” she asks.
“All the time,” you say. “It works, until it doesn’t.”
She gives a small smile. “And then?”
“Then I have to do something dangerous,” you say, and it occurs to you that inviting her to your club was that very danger. You clear your throat. “Tea?”
She follows you to the staff break room, where the kettle is old and the mugs are mismatched and nothing smells like anything except peppermint, coffee ghost, and the faint citrus of the hand soap. You stand shoulder to shoulder waiting for the water to boil, and the quiet between you is companionable. You hand her a mug. Your fingers brush, and you both pretend to be interested in the steam.
“Thank you,” she says. “I… don’t like asking for things.”
“Because you’re bad at it?”
“Because I was taught not to need them.”
“Those are not the same,” you say.
She looks at you like she might write your sentence down and chew on it later. The ring flashes when she lifts the cup. You notice how loose it looks on her finger today, the way winter loosens a window in its frame just before spring.
“Tell me about your favorite margin,” she says suddenly.
“My what?”
She smiles, a real one. “I’ve read your annotations in that book you recommended.”
Your cheeks heat. “Oh. Those. I—well. I’m trying not to sound like an undergrad with a crush on a metaphor.”
“You’re succeeding,” she says dryly, then adds, more gently, “I like the way you listen to a sentence. You ask it what it wants before you decide what you want it to do.”
The compliment goes directly to a place in you that believes itself unseen. “My favorite page is where the book realizes what it’s about, and it’s not what the book thought,” you say. “The page where it betrays itself into honesty.”
Larissa inhales. You feel it, the way you feel the hush right before a piece of music breaks your heart. She sets her cup down, controlled.
“Would you…show me where the quiet is?” she asks. “The quiet that’s big enough to hear that kind of page turn?”
You take her to the furthest aisle, to the square of floor between history and philosophy, where world reduces itself to the slide of a finger along spines. It is not quite a secret place, but it has the decency to behave like one.
“This is where I make the big decisions,” you whisper.
“What big decisions are there in a library?” she whispers back.
“Who I’m going to be when I leave,” you say, playful and not.
Her eyes are very blue when she looks at you. There is so much there—tiredness, stubbornness, a hunger that is beginning to admit its own name. For a second, you think she is going to step into that small square of space with you, closing the distance the way one closes a book. Instead she reaches out and touches the edge of a shelf with the tips of her fingers, making the books tremble as though exhaling.
“I could live here,” she says.
“You do,” you answer. “In a way.”
Her mouth tilts. “And you?” She doesn’t finish the question. She doesn’t have to. Do you live anywhere other than the quiet?
Your shoulders lift. “I’m trying.”
Two weeks later, she comes to the club with a slim folder and the look of someone who is doing something she told herself she would not do. After introductions and the usual scrappy chorus of people loving things, she opens the folder and takes out six pages of printed prose.
“It’s an essay,” she says in that careful, offhand way the brave have of announcing their own bravery. “About…beside-ness.”
You settle into the sound of her voice. It is lower when she reads, more textured. The essay is about the second chair in a room, about watching a door that never opens, about the way loneliness reorganizes furniture to see if it changes the shape of the air. It is about a woman who begins to write notes to the librarian in the margins of books—notes she never signs, because the writing is a confession. It is precise and clean and, in the way of clean things, devastating.
By the end, the couple is breathing like they’ve run somewhere. The teenager is licking tears off her upper lip like rain. The retired teacher puts a cookie on the table and smooths its napkin with a hand that shakes. You, who have collected other people’s feelings as a vocation, struggle to know where to put your own.
The discussion is richer than any you’ve hosted and gentler, too, as if the essay made everyone careful. When the chairs are stacked and the room returned to itself, Larissa stays seated, her pages face-down in her lap. She looks up once the door clicks shut behind the last patron.
“I don’t know how to go home after reading something true,” she says.
You set a hand on the back of a chair. It is only wood under your palm, and still you are aware of the line of your body from your heels through your spine to the top of your skull, the way you are aware of yourself when you are about to make a decision.
“Then don’t,” you say. “Not yet.”
The words move between you and hang there, a question that is half invitation. She watches your mouth when you speak.
You close the door to the reading room and flip the small sign to Closed. The city outside is black glass and rain lines. You check yourself in the reflection of a picture frame and then decide against it. This needs to be honest or not at all.
Larissa stands at the end of an aisle, her profile cut sharp by the lamp you left on for her—your lamp, the good one. She draws off her wedding ring. She holds it in her palm like she doesn’t know where it should go, then slips it into her coat pocket without ceremony. You can feel your pulse in your mouth.
“If you want me to put that back on, say it,” she says quietly.
“Do you want to?”
Her throat moves. “I want to want to. But I don’t.”
For a beat you both breathe like the other’s breath is instruction. Then she steps into your square of floor—into the place you told her is where you decide who to be—and you feel your life tilt on its axis to let her in.
“Tell me to stop if you need me to,” she says. Her hand comes to your cheek, long fingers cool from the pocket where the ring lives now, not on her body. She is asking permission with her eyes even as every inch of her reads intent.
The first kiss is an exhale. It tastes like peppermint tea and bravery. She is warm, her mouth deliberate, her height folding down to meet you. She kisses you like a paragraph when she knows where it is going—not rushed, but with an inevitability that carries its own momentum. You think, absurdly, that you will never again be able to look at the end of the philosophy section without flushing.
When she breaks for air, it is a short, startled sound, like a page tearing cleanly. She presses her forehead to yours. “I haven’t done something without permission in a long time,” she says. “It turns out I needed a better permission.”
“You can have mine,” you say, barely. “Take it.”
And she does.
Your back touches the bookcase as if the library itself wants to hold you up. She runs her thumbs along your jaw, then your throat, feeling your pulse like a footnote under her fingers. Her hands are big on you—confident, careful.
“Look at me,” she asks, and you do. The seeing makes it hotter. It makes it worse in the way you want. Her pupils are blown wide, the blue a ring you could fall through.
She unbuttons your blouse with the measured pace of someone unwrapping a secret because the unwrapping is the point. Every button is a click in the quiet. She pauses at the last one, glances up, and when you nod, she opens you. Her palm covers your sternum. You feel claimed and read at once.
“Beautiful,” she says, but it’s not a compliment so much as field notes—facts, recorded. She bends, kisses your collarbone, then lower, tasting a line across your skin until your breath is a tremor. When her mouth closes around your nipple, something in you that has been politely asleep sits up, lurches awake, and demands. You thread your fingers into her hair and try not to be louder than the room can bear.
She drops to her knees in a kind of kneeling that has nothing to do with prayer. Her hands slide over the backs of your thighs, mapping you like the sensible geography of desire. She looks up from there. “May I?” Her voice is sanded down by wanting, low enough that you feel it more than hear it.
“Yes,” you say. “God, yes.”
She undresses you only as much as she needs to, leaving half of you still librarian, the other half bare and reckless in the hush. Her mouth is warm and serious between your legs, her tongue finding a rhythm that seems like it always existed. You lean one shoulder to the books and clutch the shelf, aware in a far-off way of titles running under your fingers—histories of revolutions, philosophies of ethics—while your body writes its own essay in heat and noise.
She is thorough. She is patient. She is greedy. You come once, grateful thing that turns your knees unreliable. She holds your hips through it, murmuring into you, words you can’t catch but which feel like yes and more and again. She does it again, because she can, and the second time you shake so hard a book thuds to the floor and you both laugh breathlessly against each other like thieves startled by their own success.
“Come here,” you say, tugging at her shoulder because you’re suddenly furious with the distance of clothing and anything that is not skin on skin.
She stands. You kiss her with the taste of yourself on her tongue, the inarguable evidence of what you want. You help with her buttons this time, even as your hands shake. Under the lapel of her blouse, her bra is elegant and black. You mouth along the edge, slipping a strap down with your teeth, and she swears very quietly, a word that sounds educated.
When you push her against the opposite shelf, the lamp casts both of you in a soft gold that makes everything feel like the saxophone part of a song. You slide your hand into her underwear, and she is slick and hot and no longer composed. Her breath breaks on your shoulder. “Please,” she says. It is unadorned. It is perfect.
You touch her the way she touched you—attentive, greedy, with an editor’s focus. She tips her head back against the spines and closes her eyes, her mouth open in a hint of disbelief. You kiss the long line of her throat as your fingers find a rhythm and a pressure that makes her hips jerk. The shelf shivers with it. There is going to be a dent in the quiet tomorrow. You decide to live with that.
When she comes, it is with a sound she tries and fails to swallow. She bites your shoulder—not to mark, but to muffle—and you hold her through it, shocked by the personal, private intimacy of being the one to witness the moment she unravels. After, she breathes against your skin and laughs breathlessly. You could frame the sound and hang it.
You stay there, pressed together, letting the room reassemble around you. Rain needles the windows.
“I don’t know how to be careful with you,” she says into your neck.
“You’re doing fine,” you murmur, stroking the back of her neck, the place where loose strands of hair have finally given up the fight.
“I should feel guilty,” she says after a moment, eyes open on the nearest title as if it can advise her. “I don’t. I feel—” She searches. “Aligned.”
“Maybe truth does that,” you say. “Maybe it makes the furniture make sense.”
She lifts her head to look at you, and whatever she sees there resolves something in her face. She touches your cheek again, softer than the first time, like she is writing your features down to memorize later. “I want to read the rest of you,” she says quietly.
“You can,” you answer, just as quiet. “Come back. Tomorrow. Saturday. Whenever you can stand it.”
She grins—a real, reckless grin that sits young on her elegant mouth and lights the room better than the lamp. “Bossy librarian.”
“Hungry writer.”
She kisses you again because you both can. After, you put yourselves back together in the kind of silence that is not awkward, and does not apologize. You pick up the fallen book and reshelve it. She finds her ring in her pocket and holds it again, this time like a question that can be answered later. She doesn’t put it back on.
At the desk, you write your number on a library scrap slip because there is something right about it living among names and due dates. You slide it across to her. “For…administrative purposes,” you say dryly.
Her laugh is low and fond. She tucks the slip into her wallet like a talisman. “I’ll need to return a book,” she says, straight-faced.
“Of course. We charge late fees for bad decisions.”
“I’m done paying for those,” she answers. It lands like a vow.
She steps toward the door and stops. The city beyond is a rain blur. She looks at you a long second, not like she is saying goodbye but like she is pausing on a page worth rereading. Then she leaves, and you stand in the warm spill of the desk lamp, the library humming softly around you, every book a held breath.
You lock up, inventory your body with frank amazement, and take the trash out as if you didn’t just change your life between History and Philosophy. On your way home you replay the way she said aligned. The word sits under your tongue like a sweet.
That night, you sleep with the window cracked to let the rain in. Your phone lights up at 12:13 with a message that begins with your name and then: I’m thinking about the square of floor where people decide who to be. I think I chose you before I knew that’s what I was doing.
You stare at it, the simplicity and the audacity of it, the way it names what happened without apology. You type: Come read with me tomorrow. I’ll save your chair and the good lamp.
Three dots pulse, then vanish, then return. Yes, she writes. Please.
You lie on your back in the dark, smiling, and picture the ring in her pocket—like a period removed from the end of a sentence to see what happens when the line keeps running.
I'm not sure I've already read a post like this on the tags I follow, so sorry if this has already been discussed but-
Am I the only who was dissapointed when Enid asked "Who's Larissa?"
It's not a common name, and her name would have been on every document, and she would repeat it on every official occasion, most likely. I had really expected Enid to miss her more and maybe even to blame Wednesday for hiding the fact that she could see and talk to her.
It's like literally no student remembers / wants to remember Larissa. It's so sad (and frankly unrealistic)...