“Chuck your job,” Sam said quickly, “but for Christ’s sake don’t lose twenty pounds. I’ll take you to Tahiti.”
“Don’t be facetious.”
“I’m not being facetious. Tahiti’s very nice. If you’re conventional, we can make it a honeymoon.”
“These days, if I were conventional we’d have to make it an affair. Look, um, I know, we’re supposed to go over to find Mr. Demarkian. I called you. You’re doing me a favor. I can’t stop talking fast. Give me a minute, all right? I’ll calm down.”
“I don’t want you to calm down,” Sam said seriously. “I will take you to Tahiti. It is nice. You could even use your French.”
“Why not?” Glinda said. “I have very good French. I can listen to people saying ‘How is it possible, Sam Harrigan and the old maid librarian’ in a different language.”
She hadn’t meant to say it—she really hadn’t meant to say it. She’d had a lot of experience being the fat, intelligent one. She knew better. It was just that she was holding the Library Journal in her hands, looking at the drawing of a frazzled librarian on the cover and thinking she didn’t even like libraries, when she wanted a book she bought one—and it just came out. A second after it did, the office was so quiet it felt like the inside of a vacuum jar. Even the sounds coming from outside the office seemed to have been cut off, the people in the library rendered mute.
“I’m sorry,” Glinda said, and thought: They’re probably all out there staring through the glass at me, wondering if I’m having a nervous breakdown or what. She put the Library Journal back down on the desk very softly and refused to look through the glass. If they were staring at her, she didn’t want to stare back. “If the ALA heard me talking, they’d probably have me arrested for egregious stereotyping. We’re not supposed to say things like ‘old maid librarian’ these days.”
“Did somebody call you that? Did they say that to you? ‘Sam Harrigan and the old maid librarian.’”
“It was something I overheard.”
“Were you meant to overhear it?”
“No.”
Sam had been standing against the door. Now he came across and sat down on the edge of the desk, as close to her as he could come, so that Glinda could feel the heat of him.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“For your having had to hear that. It was my position that did it, after all, and maybe the way I’ve gone about all this. I mean, without the show, what am I? A shaggy old fart with gray hair who smokes cigars and hasn’t bothered to keep himself in shape.”
“You’re Sam Harrigan.” Glinda smiled. And then she laughed. “And I’m an old maid librarian.”
“Are you?” Sam asked her. “An old maid, I mean.”
Glinda blushed. “No.”
“Well, that’s good, anyway. But you’ve got to stop thinking of yourself this way, Glinda. It’s imperative. Old maid librarian. Lose twenty pounds and start living. I’ve been driving myself crazy all morning trying to figure out what was wrong between us last night and it turns out to have been your insecurity complex. Bloody Hell. It just won’t do. You’ve got to give it up.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s making it damned hard to seduce you.”
Glinda had gone down to the floor in the middle of Sam’s speech, starting to pick up the mess she had made and feeling a little stupid. Now she shot up and grinned. It had been a long time since she’d talked this sort of nonsense with anyone. She’d forgotten how much fun it was.
“Is that what you’ve been trying to do,” she asked him, “seduce me?”
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether or not you want to be seduced.”
And that, Glinda realized later, was when it happened. One second everything was light and teasing. The next it was different, shifted, so that when she came out with the first thing that had come into her head, it sounded much more significant than she had meant it to be.
“Do I?” she asked him.
There was still that window wall, looking out on the check-out desk, making them available for view to a good cross-section of a very small town. Sam seemed to have forgotten about it and Glinda decided that she just didn’t care. He put a hand in the hair at the back of her neck and pulled her close to him. She wrapped her arms around his chest and felt him slide off the edge of the desk and up against her. After what seemed like minutes, they came up for air and Sam answered her last question, courteous to a fault.