Page 4 of Checking Out the Librarian

She raised her left hand, middle-finger extended, then ate another bite and flipped more pages.

Jonathan returned to his sadly dull Caesar chicken wrap and stared at his phone screen. He really should not have this app open at work. He shouldn’t scroll back through the recent messages. He absolutely shouldn’t study the time stamps and fixate on what BatsandBalls wrote, and what he didn’t write, to try to anticipate how this evening was going to unfold, but he didn’t want to make a mistake.

He paused on one of their many previous messages.

BatsAndBalls

I made roasted miso broccoli tonight. It came out pretty well

Jonathan had first stopped on the other man’s profile because of the photo of him leaping in a sunny field, almost like a jeté from a surprisingly large body, but the fact that he liked to cook, demonstrated by the way he sent photos of homemade food, had convinced Jonathan to suggest meeting.

He’d also learned that while the photo definitely showed a white guy, no way to miss the blond hair on those legs, BatsAndBalls was deeply invested in Asian food ingredients. Hopefully he didn’t have an Asian boy toy fetish, because Jonathan would nope out of that.

Axel1998

I like every ingredient in that. I imagine I’d like the dish, too.

BatsAndBalls

I would shre with you

Share, I mean

Sorry I can’t type at night,too tired. Rough week. But I believe in sharing. It’s my professional mantra.

A lot of people, including him, would think scrolling through broccoli-cooking discussions that he’d already read multiple times would be boring, and yet here he was, unable to stop his thumb. The information specialist part of his training caused him to wonder what it was about the iEros interface that triggered mini-dopamine hits and kept him scrolling, despite the number of times he’d already read this conversation.

Neither his New York City friends nor his skating friends, and certainly not any of Axel1998‘s former hookups from this app, would believe the man in that artsy thirst-trap profile photo would talk so much about a member of the brassica food group.

He’d chosen his name for iEros when he was skating, and his profile picture was from that era, too.

While the artsy lighting remained timeless, his body had softened a teeny-tiny bit even though his life had improved in a lot of ways, not least being that he earned a steady paycheck from a job he liked, lived in one place with zero roommates, and no longer let other people control him. Less prominent abs were a reasonable trade for a life without weight checks and a fitness coach.

A therapist would undoubtedly encourage him to remind himself that he was much happier now, and it was friends like Lily and real control over his life that gave him happiness. Abs did not give happiness. He didn’t have to be perfect. He could be himself.

He kept scrolling.

Axel1998

I tried to make a salade niçoise, because I had good Spanish tuna in the cupboard and I was feeling lazy. It mostly succeeded.

BatsandBalls

What’s your hard-boiled egg technique?

Axel1998

Pistols at dawn? I hate peeling them.

His own replies made him cringe, but the totality of the messages made him confident the other guy was a foodie, so dinner at Le Poivre would work at that level, even if in-person chat proved to be more difficult than composing on-line conversation.

If it was awkward, at least they’d be a hundred miles apart and never bump into each other again.

Throughout the four months he’d lived in Eugene, he’d scrupulously kept his hookups in Portland. The bigger city obviously had more age-appropriate gay men, and as a children’s librarian, he was in a public-facing job. He didn’t need to be cautious per se, because Eugene was a wonderful and welcoming university town, he just tried to be.

It would be nice to not have to drive an hour and half when he wanted to get his flirt on, though. He wasn’t in love with driving. Finishing his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in New York City had meant living in expensive yet crappy apartments, but whatever he wanted had been right there, no car required.

Because his old-school Korean father had approved of paying for rent, but not therapy, Jonathan had shared a cheap place which he avoided for anything but sleeping and hygiene in order to convert the savings into time sitting with a nice lady in a cozy chair on the Upper West Side talking about stuff.