She put a clamp on her wayward thoughts. Tomorrow would be soon enough to tell him, when he came to show her how to use the espresso machine. It wasn’t as if they were friends or anything.
Tamsyn thought back to this morning’s meeting, to that moment when she’d thought he might kiss her. He’d been so close, his gray eyes—dark as storm clouds before torrential rain—fixed on her lips. Her whole body had gone on high alert from the instant he’d brushed against her, all her feminine sensors pinging at that merest of touches. She lifted her fingers to her lips. What would it have felt like, she wondered, if he’d followed through on what she thought had been clear intent in those tempestuous eyes?
A thrill rippled through her body as her imagination took hold, and she closed her eyes, lost in the moment.
“Are you planning to nap there all day? I’ve got somewhere to go to, even if you haven’t.”
Gladys’s raspy voice jarred her out of her reverie.
“I’m sorry, I’ll be out of your way in a minute,” Tamsyn said, lurching to her feet and stacking the chair back where she’d found it.
Accompanied by mutterings of “young people these days,” she headed back out the main door and onto the street. Behind her, Gladys activated an alarm, clanged the front doors closed and methodically locked them.
“You still here?” the old woman asked as she reached the pavement.
“I was wondering if you could tell me where I can find the information center.”
“That’d be me,” Gladys said crustily.
“Oh, okay. Maybe you can help. My mother is from here and I’m trying to track her down.”
“Hmmph. I thought you had a familiar look about you. Your mother a local, is she?”
“I…I think so. Ellen Masters, have you heard of her?”
Gladys fossicked through her voluminous crocheted handbag before extracting a lighter and applying it to the cigarette still hanging from her wrinkled lips. She sucked long and hard on the filter, an expression almost close to happiness spreading across her lined face.
“Can’t say as I have. Maybe she doesn’t want to be found.”
The old woman’s statement hung on the air between them. Tamsyn was initially at a loss for words but pressed on.
“Well, do you know where I can view an electoral roll?”
Gladys took another long pull at her cigarette, the smoke filtering out between her lips as she spoke. “Library could be your best bet. Ask for Miriam, tell her I sent you.”
“Thank you. Where can I find the library?” Tamsyn answered, but she was talking to thin air.
For an old lady Gladys sure did move fast, and she was barreling down the pavement toward the local pub as if she was on a deadline. Frustrated and unsettled by the comment about her mother, Tamsyn pulled out her phone and keyed in a search request. Ah, there it was. The library should be just around the block from where she stood now. Given that the blocks were tiny, she was there in five minutes, only to find the doors closed.
She gritted her teeth as she studied the opening hours on the neatly hand-printed notice stuck on the inside of the glass door. She’d just missed them. She jotted a note on her phone with the hours and promised herself she’d be back on Wednesday before she attended her first day as the seniors’ coordinator.