"The Library" - A Short Story

The Library

Jen messed up my whole life, she was amazing. Not in the kind of way that people moon over another person just because they are kind of pretty or buff or just smile at them. She could leave you in stunned silence just by smiling.
The day I met her, I was in the library. My mother was always telling me that I could meet nice girls in the library and telling me to go to the library and torturing me to meet a nice girl. I didn't want to meet a nice girl, I wanted to get in to med school, save some lives, drive a BMW.

I study all the time and the literature section of an engineering school is a very quite, very private place. No distractions.
My school is a quiet one, except for Thursday through Saturday nights when everyone is blowing off the stress of trying to slit each others throats to impress the professors. The library is old with a huge circular central atrium that rises through the dark wood and wrought iron to a stunning stained glass expanse that I never would have noticed if it weren't for Jen. That day we met my eyes weren't drawn up. Instead they traced the patrician lines of the carpeting as I made my way to the cubby I had claimed my Freshmen year and had held unchallenged until the moment I found her there.

She was in my cubby, curled up in jeans and a blanket. In her delicate hands was a pristine copy of Crime and Punishment.

She didn't even glance up at me as she said, “Hi, you can’t sit here anymore.”

All I could get out was, “Wha, why, huh?”

Her fingers traced the line of her neck and rested on her collar bone as she turned her eyes to mine.

“Your brain is getting too full of the wrong things,” she said.

She gathered up the tails of her blanket and placed her sandled feet on the ground. Her fingertips guided my chin up so that I was looking in her eyes again. They swallowed me and I followed her out and down the hill and up to her room.

Her place was cozy, warm, dark. Her cat was fluffy, gray and white, and softer than down.

She stood me in the middle of her room and rested her hand on my cheek and spoke to me.

She said, “I have been watching you all year, I am in every one of your classes, and you haven’t looked at me once. You don’t see anyone else.”

Jen unwound herself from her blanket and pressed her naked torso against me.

I stumbled and fell into her couch.

She followed and brushed my lips with her neck, she smelled like morning.

Her body slid up mine and then down and I saw the glint of steel from the needle of the syringe that lay with the surgical tubing on the table next to the couch.

The buttons of my shirt slid apart to the play of her fingers. She pulled me forward to her and her warmth comforted me.
She drew my shirt back and down away from me. She grasped my arm and then the tubing cut off the circulation.

Her gaze drew me in again and she dipped her chin, questioning.

I nodded and she messed up my whole life, she is amazing.

fin


If you choose to review, and I hope that you do, please do not hesitate to give me any criticism that comes to mind. Thanks, Steve