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I get in and shut the door. The warmth is still in my chest. It stays there the whole way home and all the way into bed. I lie in the dark with his cum drying on my thighs, sore in all the right places, and I’m nowhere near sleep. I’m not angry at the county anymore either, not since we fucked the anger away.

He is not banned.

Chapter 4

Wednesday morning, he’s waiting on the steps for me at the library, and the phone is ringing when I get the door open.

It’s Phyllis Grubb from the sheriff’s office. She wants to know what the library’s hours are. Phyllis has never called this library in her life. Oh, this is going to be good.

“Tuesday through Saturday, ten to six,” I say. “You know that, Phyllis.”

“I’m confirming.” I can hear her writing it down. “And the library was open last night?”

“The library was closed last night.”

“That’s what I heard.” She lets that sit. “Jassor told Ed at the Spar and Chain, and Ed told me, and I told Birdie, and Birdie told Doris, and now I’m telling you that I know, so nobody has to pretend. They can smell it. Forty times better than us.”

“It was on the rug,” I say. “Between the stacks and the returns cart. Do you want the details? I have them, and I’m not shy.”

“I’ve got a pool,” Phyllis says. That’s a no.

“Of course you do. On what?”

“You. Fran says the county gave you three minutes last night but you took eleven. The council has to vote on the county’s offer, so there’s going to be a town meeting, and you’re going to get up and talk at it. The pool is whether you can keep it under three.” Paper rustles. “Everybody in town bet over except one person.”

“Who bet under?”

“Elsie Whitaker. Twenty dollars.” She pauses. “She said you’d surprise everybody, and then walked out. I don’t know what that woman knows.”

I hang up before I laugh. Yorrel is at his favorite table with his eyes down, pretending he wasn’t listening, but his ears are forward and telling on him. The whole town knows what we did last night, and I haven’t even had my coffee yet. I’d be mortified if I had the energy.

“That was Phyllis, from the sheriff’s office,” I say. “There’s a pool on whether I can say my piece at the town meeting in under three minutes.”

“Under three minutes.” His ears go all the way forward, and he smiles. “Phyllis has not heard you on a ladder.”

He looks delighted. He’s got reason to be.

Fran comes at noon with the stark accounting. She lays a piece of hardware-store letterhead on the desk in front of me. It has columns of numbers that list what the town has to spend on everything. Then it shows income. That number is smaller. I knew the town couldn’t afford all of it, and my stomach drops anyway. Hell.

“The council’s calling a town meeting at the grange for the seventeenth of November,” she says. “The whole town gets a say, and then the council votes on the county’s offer.”

“I know. Phyllis told me about it and the betting pool. I want the meeting here. Not at the grange.”

“Paige.”

“If you’re voting on the library, you’re going to vote in the library. There are two hundred folding chairs in the grange basement, and I’ve got a fit orc boyfriend with friends who I can sweet-talk into helping bring them over. Hell, Jassor’s nearly as big as Korrag, and he can carry forty at a time.” I take my glasses off and put them on top of my head. “If the town’s going to close the library, they can do it sitting in it.”

Fran looks at me for a while. “This isn’t how it’s usually done.”

“I know. Do it anyway.”

She sighs and writes library on her letterhead. Then she gets the look, and I know what’s coming before she opens her mouth.

“Paige, honey, for the meeting—”

“Don’t say dial it down.”

“I wasn’t going to say dial.”