Page 17

“Whatever word you were going to use instead. Just don’t.”

She picks up her paper, and on her way out, she pats Yorrel on the arm, and his ears come forward.

I hear through the grapevine that by two o’clock, Birdie has a signature sheet on the potluck table at the grange. It says KEEP THE LIBRARY OPEN across the top. There are fourteen names under it, and the first one is hers. I could have hugged her. Nobody hugs Birdie, but I could have.

Later, when my work is done, I bring the duke book to his table. He doesn’t open it. He slides a legal pad from my desk across the table to me instead.

“In my clan, a thing that is said every night is a history, and somebody keeps it. You have kept eleven thousand things for other people. I would like to see you keep one of mine.”

For once in my life, I don’t know what to say. I pick up the pen, and he begins.

He doesn’t begin the way I would. He puts his hands on the table and looks at nothing, and his voice drops into the register that rings the glass. He starts three hundred years ago, in a valley on another planet that I’ll never see. Emberhold is the high country east of Stormbreak, and the winters there last six months. The hall has one fire and sixty people around it. Every night for three hundred years, one of those people has stood up and said what happened that day, so it would not be lost.

I write fast, because he doesn’t slow down. He gives me the first keeper’s name. My hand cramps by the second page, and I keep going. On the third page, I make him say a line again, and it comes out the same, word for word. The table hums under my wrist while he talks. He’s not saying anything sexy, but by page five, I’m wet from nothing but his voice. He’s telling me about the winter the river froze solid, and I’d like to pay attention instead of imagining him fucking me on this table. He tells me about the two moons, the big slow one and the small quick one. One night, they sat together over the snowline, and the whole hall went out to look and forgot to bank the fire.

After an hour, I have nine pages, and he stops.

“That’s the first year,” he says. “There are two hundred and ninety-nine more.”

My mouth pops open in shock. “You really know all three hundred?”

He gives me a sly smile. “I’ve been blessed with many impressive gifts.”

I flush as I remember how I thought the universe gave me a sexy idiot. There’s a world of difference between agreeable and dumb.

While I’m trying to decide if I should apologize for thinking he was an idiot, he takes my hand and turns it palm-up. He traces the lines on my hand, and I watch his finger, mesmerized, as he continues.

“The hole opened in the sky over your ocean a little more than twenty years ago. I was six. Ferrok, the keeper before me, stood at our fire and told sixty people about an ocean none of us had ever seen. That is the first telling I remember.”

“Nobody’s ever written this down. Any of it?”

“There is a human in Stormbreak Hold who writes down the elder’s words. My clan heard about it and wanted a keeper to go into the pilot program to see Earth and learn the words. I asked to be the one. There are three more keepers at the fire, so there is always someone to tell the day.” He locks eyes with me. “I did not know Earth would keep me.”

I look down at the written pages. My handwriting got worse as it went, and there’s ink on all four fingers of the hand he’s caressing. Nine pages of something that has never been on paper anywhere, and they’re sitting in a library the county is closing at the end of the year.

“Tomorrow, I want year two,” I say softly.

At six, I turn the lamps off one table at a time, and he doesn’t move to the door. He’s at the foot of the ladder.

I lock the front door last, and say, “We’re closed.”

“Yes. I waited.”

I put an extra sway in my hips, and when I’m close enough, he lifts me onto the second rung, facing the books. I know what he’s planning, and it makes my nipples ache.

“Hold on,” he says.

I grip the rail tightly. He puts his boot against the wheel so the ladder can’t roll, and he bunches my skirt up to my waist. My tights and panties are at my knees before I can blink. My ass is bare, and when his fingers find my pussy, I’m already dripping.

“How long have you been thinking about doing this?” I ask.

“Too long.”

The second rung puts me at exactly the right height for him, and he pushes his cock into me from behind. The stretch is faster this time, and it still empties my lungs. Then the ridge goes in, and I squeal. My pussy clenches around it like it’s never letting go.

“Shit,” I say. “Shit, fuck, okay.”

He fucks me slowly, with one hand on my hip and one on the rail beside mine. He’s so deep I feel him in places nobody has ever reached. The ladder creaks but doesn’t move. The hum comes up through the brass into both my hands and down my spine, and the glass in the doors sings with the lights off.