Brennan took in the brown curls, the freckles, and once again it niggled at the back of his brain that he’d seen the kid before—spoken to him, even. The memory was barely evading his grasp, like a dream slipping away as the morning alarm went off.
As soon as Brennan turned on the scrutiny, the boy straightened up and took a step back, pink spreading over his cheeks. “Gosh, here you are trying to work and I’m prattling on aboutTwilightand distracting you.”
“No, it’s okay,” Brennan caught himself saying, then shut his mouth with an audible click.
Really, he shouldn’t be encouraging this—distraction. He had work to do, questions to answer, and none of that would be helped by an (admittedly cute) boy talking to him aboutTwilight. No, no, nope.
While Brennan debated how to politely tell the boy to leave him aloneuntil he figured out whether he was at risk of snapping and murdering someone, the rhythmic sound of high-heeled footsteps approached.
A girl with a pencil skirt, heels, massive dangling earrings, and blue hair came to a stop and leaned around the edges of the bookshelves.
“Cole, we have a homesick freshman situation in 202B and I’m really not equipped for these things like you are,” she said.
The boy—Cole, though the name didn’t answer the tugging question of familiarity—straightened, whirled around with the energy ofBrennan who?,and gave the girl his full attention.
“Don’t worry about it, I’ll get it. Will you put on the kettle? I’ll be down in a minute.”
The girl nodded with relief and strode back the way she came.
And that was when Brennan realized why Cole was so fucking familiar.
“You’re the Hot Library Blanket Guy!” Brennan said. Then he wanted to sink into the ground and let the earth reclaim him.
Cole winced and then put on a tight, polite smile. “I think technically the adjective used in the Sturbridge U memes group is ‘cute,’ but… yep. That’s, uh, that’s me.”
Brennan was mortified, but heat didn’t flood to his cheeks like normal. Did he even blush anymore? His pen was still in his hand, the notebook in his lap. He jotted his question down.
Cole’s eyes—brown, Brennan noted—flitted between Brennan and the notebook. His lips pinched inward. He smoothed his shirt, and the smell of roasted espresso wafted toward Brennan.
“Sorry,” Brennan said. “I’m easily distracted. I just—” He paused, unsure. “We talked once. I knew I recognized you somehow. It was a while ago, I don’t know if you even—”
“I remember,” Cole said. He gathered the books he’d set aside and propped them on his hip. “Of course I do. But, look, let me let you get back to your thing. Blanket duty calls.”
And as quickly as he’d pulled Brennan out of Serbian mythology, Cole left him to it.
He stayed in his corner in the stacks for a while longer, trying to delve back into Bulgarian folklore, but found his attention drifting while he read the same sentence over and over again.
Because Cole said heremembered,in a tone like,obviously,like hestayed up at night talking to his friends about what a loser this guy was from this one random library encounter. He’d never be able to return to the library again. He’d end up wasting away in front of his computer in his room and would die as he lived, alone and ashamed.
Brennan closed the book, cutting offthatstream of thought.
Dr. Morris would call this catastrophizing. Cole probably didn’t think about that night half as hard as Brennan was right then.
It had been such a small thing, really.
It was last semester, not long before everything happened in March and Brennan had forfeited the semester in favor of therapy. He had been sitting at the library, as he tended to do, and he was depressed, as he tended to be. He buried himself in homework—a giant essay for his History of Capitalism class. Not exactly acalmingtopic. He’d been working himself up to a frenzy, typing fueled by rage and what he could now call his deep-seated emotional regulation issues. He could recognizenowafter months of therapy that he was refusing to process his emotions, but at the time he’d thought he was justthatinvigorated by the atrocities of late-stage capitalism.
So when someone had leaned a hip against the desk he’d been working on and said, “I don’t know about you, but typing that angry usually means you need a break, a snack, a nap, or some combination of the three,” Brennan had barely pulled away from his essay before he broke like a dam.
Cole wasn’t Cole yet, just the Cute Library Blanket Guy—a campus celebrity from the university’s Facebook meme group who helped random students through various crises with blankets, stuffed animals, stress toys, and warm beverages. He was a library aide, but he’d turned into something of a campus urban legend.
He’d taken Brennan’s little breakdown in stride, took him to a storage room that had been done up as best as a library storage closet could be: besides the boxes of paper and office supplies that circled the small space, there was a shag rug on the floor, a few of the cozier, egg-shaped chairs stolen from the downstairs study lounge, and a crate serving as a table that held an electric kettle.
“What, you just have this back here?” Brennan had asked.
Cute Library Blanket Guy opened a tin from one of the shelves and said, “Tea or hot chocolate?”
The tin was full of assorted tea bags and drink mixes, and the guy was looking through them thoughtfully.
