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The library was lamplit, warm and lovely, a long room with floor-to-ceiling shelves, a rolling ladder, a fire turned low, and one deep leather armchair. In the armchair sat a woman in a silver butterfly mask, bare feet tucked under her, a green velvet dress pooled around her legs and a battered paperback in her hand.
She looked up over the top of it. “You’re not a murder victim,” she said. “Good. I was expecting one.”
“Sorry. Wrong room?”
“Blue ribbon. Right room.” She patted the footstool by her chair. “Sit. I’m thirty-eight and I’ve read this chapter four times. I’d rather talk to you.”
So I sat. And we talked, and she was funny, sharp, a bit self-mocking, a woman who had spent a long time being the sensible one at parties. She’d come up here to read. She’d said yes to the quiet. She’d stayed because somebody she hadn’t expected to like might walk through the door.
“I don’t want a performance,” she said, tracing the spine of her book. “I want somebody who’ll sit with me, and maybe, if it feels right, do the other thing. No rush. No audience.”
Through the soft green velvet I could see the shape of her thigh. The firelight shone in her eyes. She put the book on the arm of the chair and held out her hand, palm up.
“So,” she said. “What would you like to do, highwayman?”
→ I stay on the footstool and keep talking
→ I ask what she’d like to do that she’s never done in a library