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I’m the librarian who just let her orc lick her pussy with Birdie Halloran forty feet away.

He’s sitting back in my chair with his mouth wet, grinning at me. His ears come forward.

“Birdie did not hear a thing,” he says.

“Shut up.”

He wipes his mouth, stands, and goes out into the reading room like nothing happened.

“Good evening, Birdie,” he says, going by.

“Good evening,” Birdie says, and doesn’t look up from her book.

After I’m dressed, I go out to the front desk with half a pencil still in my hand. The other half is under my desk somewhere.

Birdie hands me the western she walked out with last week. She looks at my office door for exactly as long as it takes to make her point, and then she looks at the pencil.

“Hours still the same?” she says.

“Same as they’ve been.”

She takes the next book she wants off the returns cart, puts it in her purse, and goes. I’ll check it out to her after. I always do. My face burns until the door shuts behind her.

When I turn, Yorrel has the duke book open at the far table.

“Read it to me,” he says. “Not for the story. For your voice.”

I toss the rest of the pencil in the trash, lock the front door, and go to him.

Chapter 5

Fran comes into the library the Wednesday before the town meeting. She pulls a chair over to my desk and sits down.

“The town can afford the building,” she says. “The council will vote for that. The county’s giving it away, and nobody on the council wants to lose a part of our history.”

“Good.”

I wait for the bad news, and it doesn’t take long.

“The town can’t afford you.”

I don’t say anything, so she keeps talking.

“Most of what the county spends on this place is you, Paige. Your salary and your insurance. The whole town doesn’t have that kind of money, and what it does have goes to roads.”

“What about the program?” I ask.

She takes her glasses off. “We can keep the lights on. We can keep the books. Birdie’s already got volunteers to open it two mornings a week. What we can’t do is pay a librarian.”

“So it’s a room with books in it.”

“It’s a room with books in it, and it stays open. That’s more than the county was offering.” She puts a folded sheet of paper on my desk. “Birdie’s petition is at a hundred and forty-one.”

A hundred forty-one names, and it still isn’t enough.

She’s right, and I hate that she’s right. I’ve done the math myself. Hell.

When she’s gone, Yorrel is at his favorite table again. He heard all of it, and he doesn’t look up, and he doesn’t say anything. That’s the right call. I’d have cried if he had.