Jess Lourey - October Fest

“Oh! We don’t open for another thirty minutes.” I said, turning. I was all set to explain the library’s limited weekend hours to whomever was entering when my glance connected with beautiful eyes so profoundly blue that I swear clouds floated in his eyelashes. “Johnny!” My exclamation was half joy, half fear, a mix that comes easily to both cult members and women too stupid to fall in love with the right guy.

“Hey, Mir. Were you covering the debate this morning?” He smiled tentatively, and the sight of his full lips moving slowly over straight white teeth gave me a shiver in my happy place. Johnny and I had been dancing an awkward salsa the past few months, with him dating someone and then single, moving closer until I pushed him away, him acceding until I pulled him closer. This embarrassing hustle was made worse by the fact that his lean, muscled beauty dorkified me immediately, garbling my words and propelling me to say stupid, sarcastic stuff to cover my unease. Johnny had persisted, however, and we’d both been rewarded with a magnificent, earth-shaking, kiss-on-a-stick at the State Fair a few weeks back. Not wanting to mess up my dream image of him with reality, or give him a chance to not like me by getting to know me, I’d studiously avoided him since the spectacular, love-and-rockets joining of our lips. Until this moment.

“Johnny!” That was it. That was my conversational tour de force.

He smiled wider and shoved his hands into his jean pockets, which were slung low on his hips. During the summer, he worked at Swedberg Nursery, and he still had a residual tan from a season spent outdoors. His shaggy blonde hair hung in his face, thick as a book and curling around his neck. He was dressed in the male version of my outfit-fleece-lined brown corduroy jacket, white T-shirt, and rough blue jeans. “Hope I’m not bothering you. You haven’t returned my calls. Everything okay?”

“Yeah. Sure. You know how it is.” Why was I blushing?

He stepped in quickly and held me before I could protest. He smelled like cinnamon toothpaste and fresh air. “I’ve missed you.”

He caught me off guard, overriding my defense mechanisms and the speech center in my brain. I could feel his lean hips pressing against my stomach, his sculpted chest against mine. Dang, he felt good. “Hard as a board,” I whispered.

“What?” He asked, pulling away.

“Good lord! I mean… power cord. I need a new power cord for the library. Just, you know, going over my shopping list. Didn’t know I’d said it out loud.” I forced a grin, my face bright enough to read by.

His smile was puzzled. “I’m sure the hardware store has some on hand. I’ll check for you. I need to stop by there today, anyhow. What’s the power cord for?”

My blood was still too far south to do my brain any good. “Power,” I said.

He nodded and changed the subject, stepping back another hair. “I just came from the Senior Sunset. Mrs. Berns says ‘hi.’”

The mention of Mrs. Berns’ name should have set my danger danger radar off, but it, too, was enthralled by the magnificence that was Johnny. I’d met Mrs. Berns shortly after arriving in Battle Lake. She’d marched up to me and informed me that she was my new assistant librarian. After witnessing my second corpse in sixty days, I wasn’t in a state of mind to argue the finer points of experience or pay, or the fact that I didn’t need an assistant. She’d shouldered her way into the Battle Lake Library just like she’d shouldered her way into my life, infuriating me, saving my life, and making me look forward to my eighties. Oh yeah. Mrs. Berns turned eighty-seven last week. “Really? How’s she doing?”

He ran his hands through his hair. “The usual, mostly. She said she’s hardly seen you since the State Fair, either.”

I grimaced at the emphasis on “either.” Johnny I’d been avoiding on purpose, but Mrs. Berns was my best friend. I had been self-involved the past couple weeks, fall-cleaning my garden, prepping the house for winter by installing clear plastic over the windows and caulking drafty cracks, and catching up on my reading. Since Mrs. Berns, whose library schedule was whimsical during the best of times, hadn’t seen fit to show up for work since the summer crowds had fled town, our paths hadn’t crossed. “I’ll have to stop by.”

“You should.” He rocked a little on his feet. “She’s taking a class at Alex Tech. Oh, and she mentioned something about her son being in town.”

“The one who put her in the home?” I became aware that Johnny was feeling awkward, his body not fitting him quite right. Usually I was the artless one in this pairing. Was it something I’d said? I quickly ran through our five-minute interaction. Nah. I was good.

“I think so. She didn’t want to talk about it much.”

“Sounds like her. Now I really need to stop by. Maybe over my lunch hour.” His fidgeting escalated. “Is everything okay?”

He nodded, suddenly tongue-tied, looking embarrassed for no reason I could fathom. I wondered if he was wrestling with some internal body function. I knew how that could take its conversational toll. Clueless as to how to handle being the suaver of the two of us, I angled away and pretended to organize the pile of returned books I’d gathered from the return bin. I felt like a dumb monkey shuffling and then reshuffling eleven books, but I wanted to give Johnny a chance to compose himself without me looking at him.

I stuck with it, waiting for Johnny to retake the reins, but next thing I knew, the front door chimed and he was gone, no more words spoken. I was alone in the library with the books, my accumulated baggage, and a crisp ivory envelope Johnny had left on the counter top, “Mira James” scrawled on the front in a masculine stroke.

My first sleepover with a guy didn’t transpire until I was living on my own in the Cities at the sagacious age of eighteen. I was toxic property in my hometown of Paynesville, given my dad’s shameful death. I saw no reason to complain-everyone has their knot to unravel in this life-but I’d spent my first sixteen years on this earth with an alcoholic father and an enabling mom. He put an end to half of that equation when he slithered behind the wheel with most of a liter of vodka gurgling in his belly. He took the occupants of another vehicle down with him, head on.

You can probably guess what being the daughter of a manslaughterer does to an already awkward teenaged girl, especially in Smalltown, Minnesota. I beat cheeks to Minneapolis as soon as I graduated and spent the next ten or so years sitting in on enough English classes to earn a bachelor’s degree and drinking too many vodka and diet Cokes. It was a fear of ending up like my father that had driven me to housesit for Sunny, which was ironic because it turned out that in this west-central Minnesota oasis, alcohol was as necessary to a night out as shoes.

But before that, in high school I felt lucky to have a few girlfriends, forget dating a boy. By the time I escaped the constricting environment of Paynesville and made it into the Big World, my virginity had grown heavy, a white purse that you loved until you found out everyone else thought it was dumb. Probably I should have hung onto my purse-fashion is cyclical-rather than open it for Ben, my first official boyfriend.

He was a regular at Perfume River, the Vietnamese restaurant where I waited tables, a black-haired loner who asked me out via a note on the back of his bill for imperial beef with fried rice. Turned out he was in a band, which in Minneapolis at that time was like saying he had two hands. We hung out together in various bars for a few weeks, me with a fake ID and him monologuing about the raw originality of his music, until The Night. I hope I’m not breaking the virgin’s covenant by revealing that the pleasure of the first time fell somewhere between a swimsuit wedgie and an off-trail bike ride, lasting approximately as long as the former.