Page 197 of Checking Out the Librarian

“I wouldn’t know.” A dull ache that he should have grown past made him look across the kitchen at the clock while Jonathan fiddled with the second pin. It was getting close to seven and they had a drive. If they were going to do this.

“You didn’t go?” He flipped the second side of Connor’s collar now, almost finished.

“Had a weekend tournament in Corvallis with my travel team.” He flexed his fingers on Jonathan’s waist and fought against pulling him across the space between them. Jonathan was fiddling with the pin, and Connor wouldn’t interrupt his easily annoyed little cat.

“I could have skipped playing. Mom and Dad wanted me to, and I’d already committed to the university months before, but I didn’t want to lead someone on. I guess I didn’t want to make anyone feel bad about themselves, like why wasn’t Connor into me, that sort of thing.”

He could have kissed a date. Girls had always been nice to him, and it would have been easy to close his eyes and kiss someone, even if he’d known it wouldn’t have been right. But all he’d really wanted was to wear a tux and boutonniere, and he would have felt sleazy asking someone only as an excuse to dress up.

Jonathan stood on tiptoe and brushed his lips to the spot on Connor’s neck below his ear. “You’re so kind,” he whispered.

“Did you go to yours?” It was so long ago, it didn’t matter what they’d each done, but being back at home had made Connor hungry for details of Jonathan’s life before Eugene.

Jonathan pulled away, letting his hands trail down Connor’s shoulders arms to reach his wrists before he answered. “It was Pasadena in 2016, so it was not unheard of for snippy gay boys to go with their carefully curated posse. Even though I did the home school for athletes, I went to the one at the big public high school.”

“Did you have fun?” He heard the yearning in his voice. Home made him stupidly nostalgic.

He deserved the way Jonathan rolled his eyes. “We were four queer eighteen-year-old virgins wearing personally expressive formal wear, what do you think? Brave enough to attend, but I recall patrolling the edge of the dance floor was our main activity until the lock-in ended and we could go to In-N-Out Burger.”

“Oh.” Now the main question he had was going to sound shallow. “What is personally expressive formal wear, and do you have photos?”

Jonathan looked up at him through his long, dark eyelashes, almost as long as Cashew’s, and let his lips curl. “I did get my first blowjob that night.”

“Of course you did.” He shouldn’t be annoyed.

They’d had lives before meeting each other, both of them, but he wasn’t sure if he was frowning because someone else had once had his mouth on Jonathan, or like a stupid competitive motherfucker, because he hadn’t managed to get a blow job until college.

“Hey.” Jonathan’s smile transformed to something that hid his teeth but showed that pillowy lower lip in its full glossy glory. He tossed his head, letting his hair float momentarily in the air, before gazing up through those sinful eyelashes.

“It would be purrrr-fect if you went to prom with me.”

“What?” He pictured Jonathan in a tuxedo jacket, shawl collar, but no shirt. His gleaming skin instead of white fabric.

“Prom? Yay or neigh-eigh?” Jonathan’s whinny wasn’t bad, Connor recognized it as horse sounds, but he didn’t understand. It was only River Days.

“Go with me tonight? How can you paws-ibly say no?” Jonathan curled both hands in front of his chest like he was imitating a bunny rabbit. “Let’s hop off to prom together.”

“You—it’s—what do you mean?”

“Let’s pretend it’s your prom.” Jonathan tapped on the end of Connor’s nose. “We can use our imaginations. Or at least yours. Will there be dancing?”

Connor nodded. Once again, Jonathan knocked the words out of him.

“We both look and smell far better than we did at eighteen, I guarantee that.” He laid his fingers on the pride pin at Connor’s collar. “We have our trendy gay boutonnieres. We can hold hands across the center console, sneak booze in the parking lot, and then dance to…what? What sort of music do they play at River Days?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t on the prom committee.”

“That’s the spirit.” Jonathan held out his hand. “Give me your keys. I’ll come pick you up, since I asked you.”

Jonathan kept giving him his fantasies.

He could trust him with the squishy bits that he hadn’t ever shared with anyone, the goofy dreams, the silliness, and Jonathan would roll with it. Would in fact hop around like a rabbit, make a joke, and then make it happen.

Jonathan didn’t just like that part of him, he enjoyed whatever Connor said.

“Let’s do it. Let’s go to prom.”

It was twenty-minutes of winding two-lane roads and cranked up Pink Pony Club sing-alongs in between warnings to watch for deer. Because Jonathan liked to use two hands on the wheel, they only occasionally held hands across the console, but Connor was flying. Then they parked in a back row of the fairground lot and emerged into the perfect night.