Chapter Text
“Ugh, shit.”
Roses didn’t make tree sap, but they leaked plant fluid when nicked, making them a tempting treat for aphids. Losing an entire garden to the little green bastards was not nearly as uncommon as it should have been: You were struck with this particular misery thrice before now. The first time had been a few short weeks into their flush, and you’d probably wept a bucket of tears for each rose. Watching something you love die never got any easier, but you still stood vigil over your hard work withering away.
Under your watchful eye, the infestation festered, viridescent blots crawling across bright red petals. Standing firm and frustrated in front of the town library, you crunched the numbers, figuring out how long these bushes had been planted. Two years, give or take a bit of time. You had planted them in the morning, beneath a cozy blue sky. The ground had been hard but that hadn’t deterred you. It’d been a beautifully warm sunrise, bolstering the hope in your heart. It fluttered like bird wings. Your smile had been so wide it ached, teeth bared in a threat to continue on despite it all.
The memory struck your nerves like a match. Across your body bloomed the staggering compulsion to do something as you watched the carnage unfold. Saying goodbye to this garden was unacceptable. You had one shot to save it, and wasting it was not an option. One method, quick yet brutal, stuck out in your mind as you mentally rummaged through aphid killers. Surely, no one would mind if you made a little detour before clocking in. There’s always a good reason to be late.
“Wow. These are beautiful.” A clear voiced interruption pierced your thoughts. Fresh as spring grass. An air of monotony twined through the voice. It belonged to a man.
You saw him when you twisted slightly. Away from you he stood, at a distance so that you could take in his full form, and the shape of the jacket hanging on his slouched shoulders. The pale morning sunshine was draped over him, highlighting the curves in his jaw, the slope of his long nose. Average height, with a build that read average, too. The warm wheat color of his hair looked wonderfully paired with the greens of the hills behind him, the rolling plains of spring like an accent to his form. And yes— he was a familiarly unfamiliar man; undaunting, uninteresting, unaddressed. Perfectly run of the mill, but you supposed that not many people were perfectly anything.
The words tumbled right out of your mouth. “There’s aphids on them,” you urgently told the stranger.
Blinking at you with his face set in blandness highlighted the surprise permeating his gaze. His eyes were a shade of rotten blue you had seen only once before. After a harrowing storm tore through the town, trees had fallen on the roads, making it hard to get around. On the way to the market, you’d hopped over a branch barely attached to the big, ancient looking tree just outside the parking lot. It might have been struck by lightning, since it had split slightly at the trunk. But inside the wreckage, you peeked at something strange. Rings of a fungal infection that were a peculiar shade of dead body blue, wrapped around the innards of the old oak tree that was in the way.
The man with eyes like an infection blinked again. “Aphids?” he parroted.
“Yeah! See?” Without worrying if he could see them from that distance, you exposed the deepest part of the bush. A wave of little green dots unfolded like the edge of the ocean from within, undulating as the insects all skittered about, feasting on your babies. “They eat the roses.”
Still standing in that spot, the man gestured open handedly to the bushes. “And… What are aphids, anyway?”
“Little bugs, of course. They’re related to flies. I think?”
His thick brows raised in questioning. “You think?”
“Yeah,” you bantered, feeling the breeze on your skin as you looked at the suspicion he was fighting off his face. Spring was in its opening nights still, and the wind was just starting to smell damp, fertile. “I think. Some people call them greenflies, or blackflies… They don’t fly, though, actually. Their diet is basically plant juice, so when they find a place to eat, it’s lights out for them.”
Confirmation that the bugs didn’t fly seemed to encourage him. As he crossed the empty stretch of stone pathway between you two, the stranger spoke in his clear, smooth springtime voice. Something monotonous wedged itself deep into his tone. “The aphids or roses?”
Gaze following his approach, you flatly replied, “The roses. That would be such a shame.”
When he finally arrived close enough to see the bugs, he said, “Eugh,” and his lip curled in disgust.
“That isn’t very nice,” you chided. “Bugs have lives too, y’know.”
Your upbraiding did not stop him. “You didn’t exactly sound thrilled about them, either,” he bit back. Then, with more interest, he prompted, “What do you do for an… aphid infestation?”
Answering without thinking about it, you told him, “Well, the method I’ve used before might be a little brutal…” It was only after the words had left your lips that you wondered why he posed the question.
Disbelief twined through his voice bluntly. “Really.”
Beaming, you chirped, “It’s not a joke. So… basically, you set a predator loose on them. A very easy to get predator. You know what eats aphids?”
“No clue. I don’t garden,” the stranger informed you. As he spoke, his hands found the pockets of his sherpa lined jacket.
Sighing, you let your own hands find your hips, performing exasperation. “Well, it’s ladybugs, since you don’t want to play along. Ladybugs gobble them right up, which saves the roses. But then they die, too.”
“Circle of life, I guess.” His reply was punctuated with a disinterested looking shrug.
Mimicking him, you replied, “Pretty much.”
Looking down at the rose bushes, their leaves and petals peppered with an infection, the blond stranger blinked his odd blue eyes. Reading his expression felt as possible as snow in the summer. What was the likelihood he had trained his face to be that stoic? It was a mask, you reasoned, though not the sort you could project an emotion of your own on. He mostly looked bored, standing there silently for what felt like several long moments.
Then he suddenly said, “I’ll be back,” before swiveling away from you.
Despite supposing that now would be the ideal time to clock into work, you chose to continue your vigil standing over the roses. Dying alone sounded awful to you, much less giving up on the bushes, and now it seemed like you were losing hours in just seconds. At least the aphids were a thriving community. Bending a little closer, you watched them scuttle along the green stems and leaves and you watched them move along rose thorns in noxious little clusters. From the drained stems of your beloved flowers, the horrid little aphids would grow strong. Circle of life, indeed. You should have named the bushes.
It may have been nearly a half hour before the man whose name you didn’t know returned as he said he would. First, he was a tiny little dot calling out to you in the distance. Then, he was just a few long strides away from you. In his hands, he held a small cardboard box. “You’re still here,” he observed.
“You said you’d be back,” you replied, curious as a cat. “Besides, I don’t want them to die alone.”
Something about this statement set off a spark in his stare, a flicker, a flinch. “Who?”
“The roses, silly.”
“...Right. About that,” he gestured to the bushes again, “you said it’s ladybugs, right? They kill these guys?”
“Sure do,” you nodded. “They can really set fire to an aphid infestation.”
Holding up the box, he moved closer. Every long, quick step he took gave you the impression he was used to going somewhere. “Lucky for you, I remembered where the home improvement store is.”
Beneath the thick knob of his bloodroot white wrist sat the raised highlight of an aging scar, caught by the sunlight. It stuck out against his skin like a bruise. The pale wound wrapped around his arm, shaped into something that might have been a lightning bolt or perhaps ocean waves, an odd form that made your mind draw up questions. Taking the box from him with a bloom of curiosity in your gut, you popped open the smooth cardboard. Inside, you saw a gaggle of black and red beetles, all of them skittering about aimlessly. Delight flushed out the curiosity immediately, harkened by a painfully bright smile you couldn’t fight off. Hope was a bird in your chest, ready to flee the cage.
“That’ll save the roses, right?” He blinked down at you when you looked up at him, the stranger with fungus blue eyes and simplistic kindness.
It delighted you to say, “Just about. There’s only one more thing that’ll really help their odds.”
“What’s that?”
“A good spray-down from the hose.” You closed the cardboard box, casting the bugs back into the shadows, and the morning sun was growing warmer by the moment on your skin. Sprinklers had gone off over an hour ago, with the crack of dawn, but a spritz from the automated system was hardly enough to pull off what was needed. “We shake ‘em off, then let the ladybugs have a nice, big, banquet.”
His brows were in danger of disappearing into his hairline when the stranger asked, “We?”
“Sure. I’ll spray, you spread the bushes?”
He blinked again. You wondered if this was a signal he was processing something. “Maybe I have somewhere to be.”
“And what’s more important than the rose bushes?”
A moment stretched into nearly a minute while you beamed up at the stranger with fungus blue eyes. Doing it alone was possible, but why bother? He was invested enough to spend his own money on an entire box of ladybugs. If the aphid infestation were diabetes, the stranger had just bought you a supply of insulin. Not a small, simple favor, you reasoned. He must have reasoned it, too—or maybe the kindness was just deeply genuine— because eventually, the man whose name you didn’t know was parting the barely wet rosebushes to allow you a clear spot to spray them down. With a little bit of finesse, he only got slightly wet, though he complained a fair bit more than you thought was necessary about it. Water dries, you reminded him.
After you set the ladybugs loose, he left, leaving you without a name to the face. It was all very quiet, in truth. A simple ‘thanks’, to which he said, ‘don’t mention it.’ You felt he very well meant it. His departure came with the presumption you would never see him again.
Despite the odd morning, your day proceeded as it always did. In the library, where books upon books waited to be rented out, devoured in a week, then brought back home. No one was none the wiser to the rosebush saving procedure done earlier, though they certainly had a lot to say about how late you were.
A humdrum week slithered by. During mornings, you checked on the rosebushes. Ultimately, they subsisted through the attack. Which is to say, the rose bushes transformed into a graveyard for aphids, and the ladybugs surprisingly evolved into a thriving community that went over well with the younger patrons to the library. It was spring, and more of them were coming through the after school hours.
Life proceeded like it had for the last few years. Between the morning and the afternoon, stock filled your time. In the afternoon, you spent the hour with a tame lunch. Amidst post-work hours, you were customarily home with a brief list of chores, then knee-deep in the flowering soil of your backyard garden.
One evening, when most of the lights in the surrounding homes were beginning to dim, you noticed a peculiarity: The vacant home next door wasn’t so vacant. Three years, four months and two weeks ago, it had been home to a family who outgrew it, following the birth of their third child. Thanks to this, they hastily said goodbye to you and yours, and thus the Joneses were no longer residents of Sweetpea Lane. The house, though, it stayed, and it stayed empty for all those days. There had once been a black truck parked in front of it a few months ago, just sitting in the driveway of that abandoned two story house. For a few nights, you had the audacity to think you had new neighbors. When the lights inside never went on, however, you started to suspect that someone had a house guest who just so happened to know which house was empty at the time. Ergo, free parking space.
But that Thursday night, with your feet planted in the dirt and a glass of wine in your hand, you noticed a peculiarity. The light was on in that house next door, the one the Joneses had left so suddenly, and it was probably one of the bedroom lights. Not that you had ever been invited into the house at any point during your tenure as a resident of Sweetpea Lane, but rather, it was one of the back rooms on the top floor. Admittedly, a bathroom light was just as likely.
Friday morning, there was a small white car in the driveway. It looked about as personalityless as a sheet of printer paper, as if it had been pushed out of a machine, manufactured only moments before. The license plate looked a little strange to your eye; namely, the size seemed a little wrong. The color was a little off. The paint was a nasty looking blue, like a bruise, or perhaps even a fungus. Chalking it up to sun damage, you put yourself in the driveway on Saturday morning, too.
The first set of knocks, no one answered. Which was a slight problem in your mind, because the cookies weren’t getting warmer despite the weather. Adjusting your stance, you looked back at the plate perched upon your palm, where the chocolate chip dotted cookies looked back at you, perhaps a little delectably. The second set of knocks, you noticed that there were signs of life on the porch.
Beneath your feet was a newly placed black welcome mat, frayed filigreed edges betraying its age. A window off to the side of the house was cracked, curtains drawn; curtains hadn’t been on the windows a week ago. Most damning was the dying plant by the door, small and potted and sat in a sad looking, dirty corner. The pot was too small, you noted. Elephant ears’ root systems were far too large for something that teeny. To your eye, it also made a shit hiding spot for a spare key. Temptation blossomed all twitchy-like in your fingers, which thankfully were too occupied by the plate of freshly baked cookies to indulge in their wanton ways.
Which also didn’t matter terribly, because on the third knock, the door welcomed you inside by opening itself a smidge.
Poking your head inside revealed a smartly decorated home. With the early hour of the day, the lights were off, letting sunlight filter in from the open backdoors. Peering down the hallway, you found yourself surprised by how much the foyer had changed between tenants. When the Joneses had been living on Sweetpea Lane, they had decorated their home lovingly, with splatters of mismatched color. These smatterings had betrayed the young ages of their children, whose artwork and crafts all ended up on the walls in some way. Now, it was minimalist in a manner that looked showroom ready, and was mostly sad shades of brown and white. Gone were the streaks of bright crayon, the walls were a fresh coat of boring eggshell white. There were dull shelves with framed pictures in them. In the distance, a television played, volume set just low enough for you to not parse what was being said. The chandelier in the foyer looked like it was installed in the sixties, or perhaps slightly later, and the doorframe possessed an unusual arch shape. Off to the side of the entry was a table, where a key bowl sat in wait, cupping a few spare mints. They were mixed with the car keys, from which a Texas-shaped keychain hung.
“Hello?” Your voice echoed back at you off the boring eggshell walls. “Your door was open. That’s dangerous. A weirdo could walk in.”
Silence stretched awkwardly, like a cat perching itself where it was unwanted. In that quiet, you lingered, listening as though the walls themselves might whisper. As the moment filled with nothing, you felt the hair on the back of your neck begin to stand. Your body started to register a nauseating truth: Something was wrong. Again, you called into the home, and again, there was nothing but the distant, voiceless television. People don’t just walk out of their houses with the doors unlocked, certainly not new neighbors with new keys to new front doors.
With your ears so strained, it was no wonder you jolted when a noise finally broke the silence. “Hey! In here,” came the grunt, to the left, not very far at all.
A series of images flooded your mind’s eye: An elderly neighbor, not bound to be a neighbor for much longer, on the floor. A heart attack, a featureless doctor says. Forgotten by their family, the people in the pictures, left for dead on Sweetpea Lane. Heartless. Panic jolted your nervous system the same way a car could be jumped into ignition. Past the door frame, you entered the house, then you moved beyond the shelves with pictures of people you didn’t know. Beyond all this perfect lack of warmth, you entered the living room.
In the room on the left you discovered a man, his blond hair clipped short, struggling with a bookshelf. Surprise parted for resilience when you saw it was toppling over onto him, and he was pushing back, but not making any headway on the situation. Cookies forgotten on the coffee table, you hurriedly helped your neighbor push the shelf back with a heave.
“Okay,” the man next to you strained. “Okay, push.” On command, you did, putting all your strength into your arms. How weighty it was surprised you; the wood seemed thick from just a glance, but now that you were fighting it, the shelf seemed weighted. Part of you suspected it had originally been part of the wall, which it was settling back against slowly as the both of you set it right. Who decided to remove it was anyone’s guess. It could have easily been the Joneses, you supposed, when it was right side up. Empty, it stood as if it were a titan, at home in the living room.
Heaving still by the blond man’s side, you looked up at him; a familiar profile greeted you. Expression set in monotony, a bland springtime tone of voice. Wiping sweat from his brow, he peered down at you through a blurry gaze the color of a fungus infection. Recognition lit them up. “Does trouble follow you?” you teased.
“I should be asking you that.” The man who had brought your now thriving rosebushes ladybugs squinted.
Inhaling deep, you mused lightly on the annoyance painting his tone before replying. “You alright, smart-mouth?”
“It’s Ethan.” He palmed his eyes, closing them as he gulped in air. “My name’s Ethan. Thought I was a goner there.”
“I think that only happens in cartoons like Looney Tunes, doesn’t it? But more importantly, why’s it so heavy?” The thick wood released a clunky sounding thunk-thunk when you rapped upon it. “It’s definitely a hazard if it’s not bolted to the wall, I bet.”
“Yeah,” Ethan said emphatically. “That’s how I got stuck.” On the sill, sitting in wait, rested a power drill. Next to it, a box of nails, long as fingers. You spied them just then, turning to look at the tools then back at Ethan. “Just… tipped over onto me.” A short, heavy sigh fell out of him “Shit, that was close.”
With your gaze settled on him, you tilted your head in consideration. “Good thing your door was unlocked, Wile E.”
“Ethan,” he reminded you bluntly. “Yeah, about that. I’m expecting company soon.”
In another corner of the house, the television spoke. It droned on about something or other. Something about the walla made the house feel empty, and in turn, you considered his use of the word company. Not some term for spouse or partner or a housemate of some kind— company. Someone who would not be staying. It struck you immediately that this man was not simply spooked from the shelf falling on him. The fact it had fallen and he seemingly lived alone made it more dangerous.
“Well, before I head out then,” you started simply, turning away from your new neighbor to retrieve your goods, “these are a house warming gift.” Holding out the plate, where a pile of cookies waited to be devoured, you put on your best impression of a salesman’s smile. “Welcome to the neighborhood! The Darlings are your other neighbors, and across the street is—”
“Jack and Rose Fanshawe, I know. They’ve got a son named John, don’t they?” Ethan interrupted you easily.
Discerning what response was socially correct felt as easy as pushing a boulder twice your size up a mountain. You could not tell if you were creeped out or impressed. “Sure do. Didn’t know they let you cheat at meeting your neighbors these days, by the way.”
“The landlord gave me a run down,” Ethan explained very plainly. “I try to remember names, if I can help it.”
With a hum, you tittered, “Got a word for that personality trait?”
“Cautious.” He nearly interrupted you, how quickly he replied. “I’m cautious.”
“Maybe.”
“And you’re nosy.”
“I might be! So, does that mean you already know my name, Ethan?”
“Yeah. Mrs. Nosy.”
“It’s actually Ms.!”
Ethan’s scrupulous gaze fell to the plate of cookies you were still offering, held out almost like a peace offering now. “Well, Ms. Nosy… What would you have done if I were diabetic?”
“Are you?”
“No.”
“Then I guess we’ll never know, will we?”
Leaving the plate on the coffee table, you moved to take your leave from the house formerly owned by the Joneses, now owned by Ethan, who gave you ladybugs. In the frame of the foyer, where the front door was still open, you lingered long enough to blink at him. The man with eyes the color of tree fungus stared back. Within his unyielding gaze, something compelled you to say, “You know, you should put some books on that shelf.”
“I don’t read a lot these days,” Ethan rebutted. “Wouldn’t know where to start,” he finished, as if wiping his hands of the whole ordeal.
“Good thing I’m a librarian who can help you with that.”
Amusement huffed out of him, short and to the point. You’d have mistaken it for a scoff if not for the fact it was so soft. “I figured you were the gardener.”
“I do double duty,” you joked. “Sometimes, I’m even the janitor, if you can believe it. So I’m basically the perfect person to show you around the place. Come by sometime, Ethan. I have to thank you for the ladybugs still, after all.”
His expression splintered as you turned to leave, a sight you caught momentarily. Despite how short the glance had been, it branded itself into your brain. The way his brows had knit together in confusion, the way his blue eyes went cloudy with something dark, and the stony setting of his jaw. On your way out of the house, you were greeted by the sight of that black truck from weeks ago pulling into the driveway. It didn’t matter very much, though; what you really considered was how likely Ethan was to come by.
The Joneses had been perfectly lovely neighbors. When they’d moved in, you had only been living in your house for a few months, and there were just three of them. They were looking for a family house, a forever home, somewhere to raise their children and raise them well. It was the kids who broke the fence, and it was you and their parents who simply didn’t bother to fix it. Through the missing panel, their eldest had crafted a number of traditions. First, it was trick or treating in the backyard. Then, it was Elf on the Shelf updates. Her brother was born in February, but that did not deter her from giving you a Valentine’s Day card. In the summer, she would heckle you for ice pops. A few years later, she introduced her baby brother to these traditions, and then you had two children trick or treating through the broken fence between your house and theirs.
For any number of reasons, the fence had not been repaired between the Joneses moving out, and Ethan moving in. What had once been a portal for children to appear in, was now a peek into a grown man’s backyard. As the weeks slipped past, you worked, you waited, but most damningly, you watched. Not by choice, but certainly, you made no attempt to look away, either. It started small: In the mornings, Ethan left for, you assumed, work. He got into that small white car, dressed in a button down and slacks, then drove off around the time you locked your door. When you came home, his car was normally parked in the driveway, and the lights were on in his house. Not noticing your neighbors’ routines was hard when you simply left the house and returned around the same time.
But it was that portal between backyards you peeked through. There, you saw his unkempt grass and you saw the sliding glass doors leading into his home. Near those doors was a table. Occasionally, he had a guest: A tall man shaped like a bear, dressed in all black to match his black truck. They’d sit at the table, pouring over papers as if they were architects constructing a building. Sometimes, they’d drink together. Much less commonly, they laughed together.
Over time, he took to new habits. One of them was his mail checking schedule, which managed to line up with yours. At the cluster box up the lane, you would rub elbows on Tuesdays. It was rare Ethan acknowledged you with more than a polite nod and half-smile. Perhaps he was shy; perhaps he was already sick of you. It seemed just as likely that he had no idea what to do about the situation.
Once, you’d said, “Settling in alright?” The sun was a great orange ball hanging in the middle of the sky, just over the horizon. The world was golden. Dying sunlight spread across his square features as he leveled you with an observational glance.
Ethan replied, “You could say that. Trying to get used to the nosy neighbor, these days.”
Leaning back from trying to peek at his mail, you scoffed. “Well! No one likes a nosy neighbor.”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
“Good thing that’s not me,” you joked.
Mostly, he got junk mail. Mixed in with that, however, there was a chance of a large, thick envelope. He would walk back to his house quicker those days, you noticed.
Standing next to one another at the mailbox was often the only part of the week you interacted with your new neighbor. For several weeks, rolling well into the end of spring, he never acknowledged the library. It was always a short, neighborly conversation, wherein your peeking never came up. Perhaps he had no idea. In truth, you suspected if he did, Ethan would have boarded up the fence. As it were, he paid it no mind.
It wasn’t until the grass was starting to grow crunchy from the heat of the sun that your new neighbor acknowledged the library. Although you hadn’t seen him walk in, his arrival was announced amongst the staff with interest. Babbling Brooks was not a bustling town which got new residents often, though it saw a few tourists a year, thanks to its position on the map. (Tourists love a sea-side town.) Word of a fresh face always spread quickly; Ethan was as social as a koala.
But your coworker that shift had been right, because when someone gently placed Gun Survivalist: A Heavy Firearms Manual for Field Combat Situations by Joseph Kendo on the checkout desk between the hours of six and eight in the evening, the hand that had been holding it was attached to the be-jacketed arm of your new neighbor. Glancing up at him, you remembered he had spent the morning on his porch, coffee in hand, hair mussy from sleep and eyes still crusty while he adjusted to the sunlight. The same hand on the book before you had reached under his shirt to scratch at the skin of his belly, which looked flat and well-shaped to your curious stare. Ethan offered you a short, curt half-smile; one of those tight, thin-lipped smiles men who didn’t truly want to acknowledge you gave.
“Just this?” you asked simply, smiling despite yourself.
“Seems heavy enough,” he quipped.
“I’d say. Library card?”
Sliding his ID across the desk, Ethan said, “Sign me up, bookaroo.”
“Don’t call me that,” you told him. Needing proof of his residency seemed ridiculous when your houses were side by side, and so you just didn’t bother. “Give me two seconds and you’ll be ready to read. What brought you in tonight?”
“Gun Survivalist by Joseph Kendo,” he said flatly.
“You know what I mean,” you challenged, typing away. The screen was lit up bright white-blue with a series of inputs to be made.
“I can’t find it to order online,” Ethan explained, patiently waiting. “But the website said you had it in. Actually, I was kind of surprised.”
“We’ve got a lot of gun safety stuff,” you mused lightly. “I read most of it when I first got here.”
“Not a native, then.” His words were wrapped in a sigh. “How long ago was that?”
“Couple years,” you said, tilting your head as you recalled. With a few clicks, you sent the info to print. A mechanical series of clicks and stutters were then spat out by the machine at your back. “Might be closer to five, now.”
“That’s a long time,” he replied simply, like he was forced to. Small talk was either agonizing to him, or it was a box he tried to keep himself locked in. Both of these things seemed likely.
Unable to keep your interest from piquing, you reached for the blandest question you could. “What kind of coffee do you like?”
“Uh. What?” Ethan’s posture smoothed itself out, as if he had to physically look at your question. Even the whites of his eyes seemed to grow brighter.
“Coffee. What kind do you like?”
He blinked. “I drink decaf.”
“And is that your preference?”
“No. No, it’s, uh. It’s not.” Then, he made room for the real topic. “Why the interest in guns?
“Why your interest in guns?” Behind you, Ethan’s library card was printing. Looking back up at him, you ignored it for the moment. The lights in the library were bright enough to show a few of his veins beneath the skin of his cheeks, white as the petals of calla lilies. With his pale hair, his pale skin, and his pale eyes, he nearly resembled a corpse. Something like curiosity curled in your gut at the thought. “Oh, don’t tell me,” you continued. “You’re cautious.”
“You’re a quick learner, Ms. Nosy.” It’d been weeks since you’d met him. Hours upon hours since that moment in his living room, since that nickname, since he branded himself cautious. It was hard to read his expression, but something told you he was taking note of this exchange. “Does that help with guns?”
“I think you’d know,” you said, brows raising. Just then, the printer finished. Thus, Ethan Woods was a member of the Babbling Brooks Public Library. Handing it off to him, you grinned. “Then again, everyone starts somewhere. Maybe just not heavy firearms?”
“I know how to shoot a gun,” Ethan retorted while you checked the book out. Before passing it over, you took a short second out to scribble a note on a spare scrap of paper, slipped it into the pages, then held it out for him with a smile. Suspicion bled from his face as Ethan took the book, and he was barely out the door when he had the note in his hand.
So, you had written, what kind of job keeps you too busy for a library?
The next day, he returned the book. To your surprise, he had scrawled beneath your note, in short inky strokes, Systems engineering. I basically do everything to keep the system up.
In the next book he checked out, a manual on home security, you slipped another note between the pages. And what kind of coffee do you actually like?
His reply was only slightly longer, a little more relaxed looking in penmanship. Gotta say dark roast is what I miss the most. I’d drink it like water back at my old job.
Where was that?
He replied with the mother-lode: Los Angeles. Mostly cybersecurity, at a company in Silicon Beach. The commute from my apartment to my job was terrible, and they put me on systems, too. Just doing systems is a lot more relaxing for me these days. I don’t like stress.
I’ve been a librarian since I moved here, you told him through a book-passed note. Been in that same house since then, too! Come to think of it, the fence was broken all the way back then… Anyhoot, I have no idea what systems engineering is.
To that, he said, Wait, that long? It’s been broken that long? And all I do is engineer the systems then keep them up. Way less involved than cybersecurity. Basically, everyone had to know of me in that company, if they needed something. Just another coding monkey at my current job.
Sounds totally up your alley, Ethan. You really like self-defense manuals, huh? Any recommendations for a woman living alone, hm—??
Just get a home security system. Do you not have one yet?
Well, no. I don’t know anyone who can install it for me!
I can. Day and time. I’ll be there.