The Girl in the Flammable Skirt_ Stories - Aimee Bender [16]
She smiles at him but asks her original question again. She doesn’t want someone brand new to the business but neither is she looking for a goddamn gigolo. This is an important fuck for her. He tells her it’s been a few months and looks sheepish but honest and then hopeful. She says great and tells him there’s a back room with a couch for people who get dizzy or sick in the library (which happens surprisingly often), and could he meet her there in five minutes? He nods, he’s already telling his friends about this in a monologue in his head. He has green eyes and no wrinkles yet.
They meet in the back and she pulls the shade down on the little window. This is the sex that she wishes would split her open and murder her because she can’t deal with a dead father; she’s wished him dead so many times that now it’s hard to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Is it true? He’s really gone? She didn’t really want him to die, that is not what she meant when she faced him and imagined knives sticking into his body. This is not what she meant, for him to actually die. She wonders if she invented the phone call, but she remembers the way her mother’s voice kept climbing up and up, and it’s so real and true she can’t bear it and wants to go fuck someone else. The man is tired now but grinning like he can’t believe it. He’s figuring when he can be there next, but she’s sure she’ll never want him again. Her hair is down and glasses off and clothes on the floor and she’s the fucked librarian and he’s looking at her with this look of adoration. She squeezes his wrist and then concentrates on putting herself back together. In ten minutes, she’s at the front desk again, telling a youngster about a swell book on aisle ten, and unless you leaned forward to smell her, you’d never know.
There is a mural on the curved ceiling of the library of fairies dancing. Their arms are interwoven, hair loose from the wind. Since people look at the ceiling fairly often when they’re at the library, it is a well-known mural. The librarian tilts her head back to take a deep breath. One of the fairies is missing a mouth. It has burned off from the glare of the sunlight, and she is staring at her fairy friends with a purple-eyed look of muteness. The librarian does not like to see this, and looks down to survey the population of her library instead.
She is amazed as she glances around to see how many attractive men there are that day. They are everywhere: leaning over the wood tables, straight-backed in the aisles, men flipping pages with nice hands. The librarian, on this day, the day of her father’s death, is overwhelmed by an appetite she has never felt before and she waits for another one of them to approach her desk.
It takes five minutes.
This one is a businessman with a vest. He is asking her about a book on fishing when she propositions him. His face lights up, the young boy comes clean and clear through his eyes, that librarian he knew when he was seven. She had round calves and a low voice.
She has him back in the room; he makes one tentative step forward and then he’s on her like Wall Street rain, his suit in a pile on the floor in a full bucket, her dress unbuttoned down, down, one by one until she’s naked and the sweat is pooling in her back again. She obliterates herself and then buttons up. This man too wants to see her again, he might want to marry her, he’s thinking, but she smiles without teeth and says, man, this is a one-shot deal. Thanks.
If she wanted to, she could do this forever, charge a lot of money and become rich. She has this wonderful body, with full heavy breasts and a curve to her back that makes her pliable like a toy. She wraps her legs around man number three, a long-haired artist type, and her hair shakes loose and he removes her glasses and she fucks him until he’s shuddering and trying to moan, but she just keeps saying Sshhh, shhh and it’s making him so happy, she keeps saying it even after he’s shut up.
The morning goes by like normal except she fucks three more men, sending them