Page 21 of Love is a Game

“It can’t leave the library,” he told her.

Her eyes widened, and she raised her hand in protest. “Oh, no,” she began, “I am not working on my proposal with you around. I need to take this stuff home with me.”

“Not possible. I’m responsible for it. I can’t risk losing anything. It has to stay here. Nonnegotiable.”

He watched her eyes harden. He could tell she wanted to argue, and he was ready to hold his ground. Instead, she surprised him. “Fine,” she conceded, “but you are not allowed to bother me while I’m here. Just give me space to do my work and do not speak to me. Those are my terms, lawyer man. Can you handle that?”

“I’m a librarian,” he corrected.

“Right,” she said derisively. “Do we have a deal or not?”

“I guess I can live with that.”

“So can I see it now?” she asked.

“Right this way.”

He led her behind the circulation desk to his office door. The stacks of boxes were visible through the glass walls, filling the floor except for a small path that led to his desk, which was covered in file folders.

“Wow,” she said, taking it all in.

“Yeah. This is what a hundred and thirty years of hotel records looks like. This row of boxes here is what I’ve already gone through. It’s somewhat organized. Everything else, well, some boxes are organized better than others.”

“Are there digital records?” she asked, her tone hesitantly hopeful.

He shook his head. “Not that I’ve been able to find. I know they started using a computer about twenty years ago, but someone broke into the place after it shut down and they took all of the electronics. Hazard of sitting empty, unfortunately. Lucky for us, the Gregsons kept meticulous paper records. More than they needed to, as you can see.”

Sadie’s mouth set into a determined line and she nodded, looking over the boxes again. “All right, then,” she said, opening a box. “I’d better get to work.”

He was hesitant to leave her alone. Who knew what she would find, what trouble she could cause? Robby had insisted she have access to everything, but unsupervised access felt like too much. He had no idea what traces of his childhood were in those boxes. The last thing he wanted was for her to find some embarrassing picture of him as a chubby toddler.

“Is there something else?” she asked, eyeing him over the box lid.

“Just be careful with this stuff,” he told her. “It’s old.”

She raised an eyebrow and pointed at something behind him. “You have customers.”

“Patrons.”

She said nothing, just shooed him away with her hands. He glanced toward the circulation desk and saw an elderly couple there waiting for him. He looked back at Sadie and pursed his lips. There was work to do, he couldn’t just stand there watching her, and he had agreed to give her space. He clenched his jaw and left her alone.

For the next hour he kept his word and didn’t bother her, but he couldn’t stop himself from glancing into the office whenever he had an opportunity. She appeared to be organizing everything, sorting folders and moving boxes around. Part of him wanted to be annoyed that she was disrupting his piles, but he knew it would probably be easier for him this way. He hadn’t exactly kept things in order.

Over the course of the afternoon, he helped a family to renew their library cards, found a middle schooler the book she needed for her English class, and was able to put away all of the books on the reshelving cart. At six o’clock on the dot, he set down the paperwork he was going through and made his way to the office door.

“How’s it going in here?” he asked, giving her a once-over. Her dark clothes were dusty, and her ponytail had been wrapped into a bun held in place with a pen. He stifled the sudden urge to pull the pen loose and watch her hair fall around her shoulders. To bother her, he told himself, but the desire seemed to be deeper than that. He ignored it.

“It’s a mess,” she told him. “It’s going to take forever to find what I need in all this.”

“Well, it looks like you’re off to a great start,” he assured her, “and it will all be waiting for you when you come back tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” she asked, looking up at him. “But I just got started.”

He tutted and raised his hands in a helpless gesture. “Sorry, it’s six o’clock. Library’s closed.”

“No, I . . . This isn’t . . . But . . .” she sputtered, her cheeks reddening.

He pointed to a dusty spot on her shirt. “Looks like you’ve got a little something there,” he told her before walking out of the office. When he heard her frustrated growl, he grinned. Not a bad first day.