I sat down at a table on the second floor of the library and waited for Fletch. I was early because I wanted to watch him enter the library the way he had watched me enter the theater on our last date.

He walked through the doors and I studied him as he strode around the main floor, looking for me. I could have texted him at any time to let him know where I was, but I didn’t. I wanted to watch him walk around.

It was no wonder that Natalie and I thought he was a big-time music producer. His whole aura said that he was someone to take notice of. His hair was auburn and cut short in the back and left long on the top in a way that was a little less than cutting edge style. Like he didn’t need to follow trends. He could do whatever he wanted.

His most noticeable feature was his mouth. In particular, his teeth. That was why his smile had been so notable the first time I’d met him. His teeth were white, strong, and very rectangular. When he spoke, flicking his tongue against those perfect teeth, his words seemed crisp, tantalizing, and almost like the words themselves took on a life of their own. It wasn’t just memorable, it was mesmerizing.

Above that smile, he had gray eyes with red winglike eyebrows that gave the impression that he was part mythical creature. I decided he looked as if he were half human and half phoenix as he spotted me and got aboard the escalator.

He approached the table, and said casually, “A library date? I was anticipating an empty alley. Maybe you’d have a backpack with a few cans of spray paint.”

“What makes you think I would do such a thing?” I asked, sounding scandalized. The truth was, I vandalized stuff all the time. That was actually what our date in the library was supposed to be about, introducing him slowly to my world. I had planned to work my way up to talking about graffiti. How did he know already?

As he sat down across from me, he had that ridiculous smile plastered across his face again. I felt the drawstrings on the layers of my reserve grow slack when I should have been mad that he knew my secret.

“What are we doing here?” he asked casually. “Are we going to look for my favorite book?”

“We certainly wouldn’t be here to look for my favorite book,” I joked paradoxically. “Look at this.” I pushed a hardback toward him.

He looked at it the way a person who reads looks at a book. He looked at the cover, taking a moment to absorb the art, then turned it over and read the back.

“Does it look interesting to you?” I asked, licking the center of my top lip in anticipation.

“It’s a book about a girl who fell down a well,” he said levelly.

I shook my head playfully. “You are not looking at it correctly. What the book is about is a side note in this story.” I opened the back of the book to those precious blank pages at the end. Inside the book, was a letter. I showed him the handwritten words.

“Oh?” he said, reaching forward and taking the book from me. He read the letter silently, his eyes dashing across the page. When he was finished, he looked up at me. “That was pure beauty. Did you write this?”

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

I shook my head. “I found that book here one afternoon when I was very bored. Have you ever been bored?”

“Of course.”

“No, I mean, have you ever been bored for years? Like lethargy is the essence of your soul? Like movement is a lie because it will never get you anywhere? You’re dying a slow death and when you do die, nothing that was once a part of you will remain?”

Fletch looked at me cautiously.

“One day,” I continued, “while feeling this way, I was in this library and I found that letter written at the end of that book. It changed me. I decided I didn’t want the marker of my life to be on a tombstone in a cemetery no one ever visited. Instead, I wanted marks of my existence to be everywhere… on everything.”

“Really?” he said longingly, pondering my face. “What do you write?”

“Something I want everyone to read. Sometimes I draw. My art isn’t as good as my writing. Sometimes I spray paint. What gave me away? You asked me if I had spray paint in my bag when you got here.”

“You have paint on the bottoms of your shoes. It looked like spray paint. I saw it because you had your feet propped up on a chair as I came up.”

I put my foot on my knee and examined the paint stains. “I can see I’m going to need to be more careful.”

He leaned forward. “Why are you telling me this? I thought you never told your dates about yourself?”

“I don’t usually. I wonder why I’m doing this…” I said, lifting my eyes to look across at him with my most beguiling expression.

He hesitated before he spoke. The hesitation pleased me. “I think I know why.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. Most people probably wouldn’t understand you defacing the inside of a bus or an electrical box. Have you had bad experiences confessing to it? Suddenly a man isn’t so charmed by your beauty because he can only think about how defacing public property is probably a symptom of mental illness.”

I was appalled, but I refrained from reacting. Slowly, I said, “Have I answered all your questions about me then? Do you understand now why men like me and why they can’t have me?”

“You have not answered a tenth of my questions,” he replied, peering at me from under his red eyebrows. Even though he had said that line about mental illness, it was clear he did not share that feeling. “Were you planning on writing in these books?” he asked, indicating the pile of books next to me.

“I was only going to place post-it notes.”

“Cool. Show me.”

I took a book off the top of the stack. It was a romance novel that looked to be on the erotic side. My post-its were the shape of faceless pink teddy bears. I got out a sharpie and wrote on the top note, “Do you like being licked?” I tore it off and put it in the middle of the book, without any edges sticking out, and showed it to him.

He laughed so suddenly, he snorted. “Really?”

I nodded. “Don’t be so surprised. This is tame.”

“So if you came here by yourself, how many of those post-its would you use?”

“Maybe half a pad.”

“And is this the only library where you do this?”

“No. I’ll go to libraries all over the city. Sometimes, I’ll go to libraries in colleges or universities.”

“And it makes you feel alive?” he asked.

I picked up the next book. It was a fantasy novel. On the teddy bear, I wrote, “Do you fantasize about walking?”

“Pretty snarky,” Fletch commented when he looked at it.

I offered him the pen. “Do you want to give it a try?”

He accepted the pad of teddy bears and selected the next book from the stack. It was a murder mystery. “I suppose it would be obvious to write, ‘It was the butler.’”

“Are you going to write the obvious thing?”

He scribbled something and showed me the note before he put it inside the book. It read, “It was the investigator. No one suspects the investigator.”

“Brilliant.”