Page 6 of The Librarians
It’s not as if patrons never do, but usually she shuts it down right away.In this instance, though, she might not mind. He’s good-looking in a slightly dorky way, which is exactly up her alley. And his gaze feels kind.
“Would you like some cookies?” she asks, pointing to a couple of sealed packets on the perforated picnic table.
He takes one packet. “I’m Perry, by the way.”
“Astrid.”
“That’s an Old Norse name, isn’t it?”
Astrid tenses. People being knowledgeable about Old Norse anything makes her nervous. “Yes.”
She hopes he can hear the disinclination in her voice—she’s not interested in being an accessory to his Viking fascination.
“I spent two semesters in Sweden, first when I was in school, and then again in uni. Do you speak Swedish by any chance?”
A very reasonable question, given that they’d had a fairly lengthy conversation earlier in the day with her speaking in a Swedish accent.
The day is mild; it can’t be more than sixty-eight degrees. Astrid, however, feels as if she’s chosen to sit on this thermoplastic-coated metal bench when it’s one hundred and eight in the shade.
It had happened once before, at a party in grad school. Someone came up to her and started speaking in Swedish. She was surrounded by her fellow library science students, her skin on fire with desperation. Thanks to the two shots of tequila already in her, she ground out, “I prefer to speak English when I’m Stateside.”
The Swedish student shrugged and walked off. And Astrid has zero recollection of the rest of the night.
But today there’s no one else within hearing range. And the man opposite her…
“Do you live in Austin,” she asks, “or are you passing through?”
“I don’t live here. I’m just here on business—for a short while.”
“I don’t speak Swedish.”
He’s taken aback. “Oh, I apo—”
She holds up her hand—she realizes belatedly that she was still speaking in a Swedish accent. These days, it’s not as easy to switch back. “And I don’tspeak Norwegian, Danish, or any other Nordic languages. I don’t speak any language other than English.”
He blinks. Does he hear her new accent? Her real accent, the one she grew up with, as American as Jell-O salad and interstate highways?
“I’m sorry if you wished to practice your Swedish. I’m just an American from flyover country. I’ve some Swedish ancestors, but that’s about it.”
“Oh,” he says.
The hush that follows feels like a thousand paper cuts. She doesn’t know why she told the truth. It doesn’t even feel like she made any major decisions at all. She was just too tired to act out the same old charade for yet another person, a transient who will soon be gone from her life.
Maybe she should have made the effort. The perplexity and reproof she hears in the awkward silence—that’s why she could never own up to her little hoax, isn’t it?
“Actually”—he laughs a little—“I wanted to speak to you not to practice my Swedish but because you have lovely eyes. And you were very patient with all my silly questions earlier.”
It becomes her turn to say “Oh,” unable to follow it up with another word.
“I am, in fact, profoundly relieved that I don’t have to speak Swedish—I’m absolutely rubbish at it.” He again laughs a little—does he laugh when he’s embarrassed?—and clears his throat. “I hope it’s not unseemly, but now I want to know why you were maybe pretending to be Swedish. Can I—ah—um—buy you a drink when you get off work?”
This feels like a dream sequence fromInception. Are the placid neighborhoods around the library going to rise up and fold in on themselves? “You want to go out with someone like me—someone fucked-up?”
He shrugs. “It’s the twenty-first century. Everybody is fucked-up. Maybe there’s a chance that we’re fucked-up in ways that are mutually comprehensible.”
He fidgets a little as he waits for her response, and the hopefulness in his gaze causes an abrupt swell of tears in her eyes.
“Thank you,” she says thickly.
