Baumgartner Generations: Henry (2 page)

“The call
number for the
Kama Sutra
book is 375.4 W.” She pointed to the scrap of
paper. “That’s what you wrote down.” She hit the back button on the screen to
the book Henry had originally looked up. “The call number for the book you
wanted is 372.4 W. You transposed the five and the two.”

“Brilliant,
Henry,” he muttered.

She used one
of the stubby pencils to correct the number on the scrap of paper, trying to
hide a smile. “Well, the good news is this book should be on the same shelf.
And it’s much more age-appropriate.”

“Pretty
diverse subject matter to be on the same damned shelf,” he growled as he
followed her. She had picked up the other book to re-shelve it.

“They’re
both guides,” she explained, getting back up on the stool. Henry reached out to
hold her hips again without thinking and she smiled a thanks down at him. “You
know, those
Idiot Guides
and the books
For Dummies
, they’re all
shelved in the same place, by last name. Just so happens both are written by an
author with a last name starting with W.”

“Oh damn.” Her
shoulders slumped. “
Teaching Kids to Read for Dummies
isn’t here.”

“Is it
checked out?”

“I don’t
think so.” She slipped through his hands on the way down to the floor and the
feel of her lithe little body gave him a jolt. “It would have said so on the
computer. I bet someone’s stolen it.”

“That’s
pretty low, stealing from a library.”

“Happens all
the time. I can’t wait until books go all-digital. No more stealing, no more
late fees, no more re-shelving!” She regarded him, cocking her head to one
side, and he didn’t point out the obvious
no more librarians
conclusion
implied in her train of thought. “Do you have an e-reader?”

“You mean,
like one of those Kindle things?” He shook his head. “I’ve got a laptop,
though.”

“You can
check it out digitally if you want.” She sounded excited as he followed her
down the row and back through the aisles of books. Pausing at the row of
computers, she frowned. “But I don’t know if it would work so well for your
little cousin, reading it on the computer.”

“Oh that’s
okay.” He waved her concern away. “I’m just reading it so I can help him. The ‘Dummy’
in the title is me, not him.” That he believed the statement to be more true
than he wanted to admit, even to himself, was another point he wasn’t going to
bring up.

“That’s so
sweet.” The look she gave him made him want to melt.
There
was the
reaction he’d been expecting in the first place.

He hoped his
blush appeared properly humble. “Thanks.”

“Let’s see
if we have a digital copy.” She sat back down in front of the terminal, typing
away again, and this time Henry sat beside her. He was big for the little
chairs, but she fit perfectly, crossing her slender, shapely legs and leaning
toward the screen.

“So are you
a librarian?” He didn’t believe it for a minute.

“I’m just a
student assistant,” she explained, frowning as used the mouse to scroll down
the screen. “I started working here last year and love it so much I changed my
major to library science.”

“So you’re a
sophomore?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

At least
she’s not a senior
, he told himself, not volunteering the fact that he was
just a lowly freshman. She could probably tell anyway, the way he’d been
stumbling around the stacks, looking lost. His roommate, Dean, said freshmen were
like baby pigs, lost and rooting around looking for something to get into. Of
course, Dean didn’t really consider himself a freshman, even though he was. His
parents were both alumni, his brother had graduated the year before, and his
sister the year before that. He was like a celebrity on campus, a first string
wide-receiver on the U of M football team.

“I’m sorry.”
She pointed to the screen. “It’s not available as an ebook.”

“Ah well.”
He shrugged. “We tried, right?”

Her eyes
were a bright, shocking blue, and that, combined with the red hair and the
smattering of freckles across her nose, and the way her lips pursed and her
brow furrowed, made him think he’d never seen anything cuter in his life.

He’d seen
lots of girls in his five weeks on campus—blondes, brunettes and redheads
alike. Dean had introduced him to most of them. Some of them had been real
knock-outs, the sort you couldn’t even approach without stammering and going
cross-eyed, the kind you knew had to spend hours getting ready to go out every
night.

But this
girl…she was so naturally pretty it was hard to even wrap your head around it.
She was the kind of girl that would grow old gracefully, who would spend her
whole life looking beautiful not because she tried to be, just because that’s
who she was, at her very center. It radiated out of her like light and he
gravitated to it like a moth, feeling like he was bumping his head against
glass the whole time.

“How about
this one?”

He just
observed her as she spoke, trance-like. “Huh?”

“We’ve got
Phonics
for Dummies
.” She tapped the screen with her fingernail. “And most
beginning reading problems usually stem from a phonics issue anyway.”

He stared at
her, not really understanding a word she was saying, just sort of basking in
her light. Now he didn’t feel like a moth—he felt more like a lizard on a rock,
lazy and slow to respond, with no other thought in his head but his own basic
need, which was growing more apparent by the moment.

“Um, okay,” he
agreed. She could have said, “I think you should set your hair on fire and jump
out the window,” and he probably would have agreed. Good thing they were in the
basement.

“How
exciting!” She stood, smoothing her skirt, and he remembered the texture of the
material, wooly and soft, under his hands. He couldn’t have agreed more about
the exciting part. “Let’s go upstairs. The ebook system is brand new, and this
will be my first digital checkout!”

“So I can
say I was your first?” Henry grinned as he followed her to the elevator.

“Dubious
honor.” She pushed the button, giving him a sly, slanted look as she reached
down to pick up the book he’d left in the chair. “But I suppose you can say you
broke my digital-checkout cherry.”

He laughed.
“Not quite as fun as the other one.”

“Print
books, you mean?” She winked as the elevator doors closed behind them.

“Right.” He
nodded. “That’s what I meant.”

Of course,
now he was thinking things he shouldn’t and silently cursing the guy who got to
hit that for the first time, if he was being totally honest. Which he wasn’t
about to be, at least out loud, with the girl standing next to him.

“Have you
ever read the
Kama Sutra
?” She leaned in close, as if there was someone
else who could hear her, leafing through the book she’d picked up on their way
into the elevator.

He eyed her,
surprised, brain devoid of any snappy comeback. “No.”

“Look at
that.” She paused at one of the pages. The book didn’t just have drawings of
people, no—it was fully, pictorially illustrated. Christ. Henry swallowed, studying
what was essentially porn open in the girl’s hands.”Do you think that’s even
possible?”

“Ouch,” he
agreed, noting the position, the guy standing, the woman’s legs bent at an
awkward angle. How was he even holding her up?

“Oh, but this
one’s nice,” she said, stopping on another page. The couple was kind of
spooning.

“Nuh-nice.”
Henry stammered.

“Sure you
didn’t want to check this book out?” She winked and he noticed that even her
eyelashes were red.
A natural redhead.
That meant that wherever else she
had hair on her body, it was most likely red, too. She interrupted his straying
thoughts. “No law saying you can’t. Thank god.”

“Yeah,
censorship sucks,” he agreed, boldly reaching over and flipping a page. Then
another. He could smell her, a light, clean scent, soap or shampoo maybe.

She stopped
him, a small noise escaping her throat. “That one.”

The guy’s
face was buried between the woman’s thighs, her legs up over his shoulders. You
couldn’t really see anything, but you knew just what was going on.

“One of my
all-time favorites.” Henry’s arm brushed hers as he reached out to turn the
page again.

“Mine, too,”
she breathed, making another noise at the position on the next page. “That’s a
fun one. Ride ’em, cowgirl.”

“Is it just
me or is it hot in here?” He shifted from foot to foot, peeking at the lights
on the elevator. They were passing the ground floor now. Checkout was on the
second floor.

“Got kind of
intimate all of a sudden, didn’t it?” She was so close he could count her freckles.
“Elevators do that to me anyway.” Her voice was low and sexy. The tone made his
mouth water. He saw a smile playing around the corners of her mouth. “Closed
spaces.”

“You’re
obviously not claustrophobic.”

First floor.
Almost there.

She laughed
as the elevator doors opened, stepping out and walking toward the checkout.
Henry followed, giving up his student ID, which doubled as his library card,
watching her as she typed and swiped and did whatever she needed to do.

There was
another woman watching them—probably the real librarian, a pudgy woman with
short black hair and thickly painted on red lipstick that was bleeding into the
faint outline of her mustache. She was a far cry from his wet dream archetypal
image of a librarian, but her demeanor was similar, the serious frown, the
watchful eyes. She looked like she was about to say, “Shhh!” at any moment.

The flirty,
suggestive girl from the elevator had disappeared—the redhead turned into
all-business when the librarian was around.

“Okay, I
think I did this right.” She handed back his card. “You’ll get an email with a
link. Just click it and download the ebook file. It will expire in two weeks.”

“Two weeks?”
Henry gulped. How in the hell was he going to learn to read in two weeks?

“You can
check it out again, as long as it hasn’t been requested by someone else,” she
explained. There was a line behind him now, and the red-lipstick librarian was
watching them with raised eyebrows.

“Okay you’re
all set…Henry,” the redhead said loudly, squinting at his card as she handed it
back to him.

“Thanks.” He
leaned forward onto the counter, his voice dropping to a whisper. “You know,
they say you never forget your first.”

She smiled.
“But you don’t even know my name.”

“I’m such a
dog.” He pulled out his wallet so he could put his card back—just an excuse to
talk to her longer. “With a long string of ebook checkout firsts all through
the state…”

“Olivia.”
She leaned forward to tell him, so close he felt her breath on his cheek.
“Libby.”

He heard the
girl behind him grumble loudly as he slipped his ID into his wallet.

“Maybe I’ll
see you around, Libby.” Henry put his wallet into his back pocket, stepping
away from the counter.

Libby
winked. “I’ll be here.”

*
* * *

The
dragon-lady, a name passed on year after year to incoming freshman by her
former students, was a formidable figure in front of the classroom. She towered
over them, her heels clicking up and down the aisles, hips swaying. She
reminded Henry of both a dragon and a cat at times. It was the way she moved,
the way her eyes narrowed, and if she had a tail, it would swish constantly.

She was also
drop-dead gorgeous. It wasn’t just her curves—and the woman had those in
spades, and in all the right places—she had a kind of cool beauty that made
your breath catch in her presence. Unlike most women her age, she hadn’t
followed the trend and cut her hair short. Instead it hung long and free, so
black it was almost blue under the fluorescents. She wore it up on occasion, or
braided into a long, thick plait down her back, but mostly she didn’t and it
was a terrible distraction.

It was her
eyes, though, that mostly got to Henry. They were dark eyes, framed by thick
lashes, and they watched him. It seemed as if she watched him constantly.
Whenever he looked up, her gaze was on him, as if she knew him, or knew
something about him. It was unnerving. But it also intrigued him.

“Mr.
Baumgartner.” Professor Franklin sighed loudly as he fumbled with his
microcassette recorder. He never took notes. Instead, he’d used his recorder
all through high school and it was proving to be invaluable in college as well.

“Uh…yeah?”
Henry glanced up, turning the cassette over and pushing the red button. Not
that he wanted to record this exchange for posterity. For some reason, she
liked to focus on him, single him out.

“Must you do
that?” She had her paperback version of The Great Gatsby open, had been in the
middle of reading them a passage, when his tape had run out.

“Do what?”

She pointed.
“Use that…thing?”

“It’s…”
Necessary
was the word that came to mind. Instead he said, “Easier.”

“Easier than
what? Taking notes?” She waved her hand around the room. Everyone else had a
notebook open.

“Yeah, for
me.” He sounded more defensive than he wanted to. “It is.”

“Easy isn’t
always best.” She considered his recorder, the tape turning again. “Can I go on
now?”

He felt his
face burning. “Sure.”

She began to
read again from the book, “He had intended, probably, to take what he could and
go—but now he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail.
He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn’t realize just how
extraordinary a ‘nice’ girl could be. She vanished into her rich house, into
her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby—nothing. He felt married to her, that was
all.”