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rest of the three-week contract, no problem.
    By ten-thirty, his brain was mush. There were so many numbers and codes to remember. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a delicate hand reach through the crowd with a cup of steaming coffee that had his name on the outer cardboard sleeve. He looked up to see the stunning Nadine smiling at him.
    “I thought you could use a pick-me-up,” she said.
    Never had he been so grateful. “Thanks.” He wanted desperately to follow that one word with something witty or enthusiastic but he couldn’t muster it. At noon, on his fifteen-minute break, he wanted to reciprocate but he couldn’t make it to the coffee shop and back unless he skipped lunch, and he was famished.
    In the staffroom, he got out his sandwich and crammed a corner into his mouth, feeling like a rabid dog. Once his blood sugar level was balanced and he had calmed down enough to not be dizzy from numbers and voids and answering all kinds of inane student questions, he realized that he should write her a note. But what could a lowly cashier say to the woman everyone at the bookstore thought of as the goddess.
    He wrote— You made my day. I am eternally thankful. David. He folded it in four and drew a happy face on the front. Before giving himself time to rethink the manliness—or lack thereof—of the smiley face, he marched into her department, saw her at her desk talking on the phone, quietly walked over to where she was sitting and slipped her the note. She signaled for him to stay.
    He only had another minute left but when a goddess asks you to stay, you stay. So he waited for her to get off the phone then told her, “I’m so sorry but my break is up and Hank will have my neck on the chopping block if I’m not up there on time.”
    “Well then, you’d better hustle,” she said.
    “Yeah,” David said, feeling incredibly shy. He didn’t know how to talk to women like Nadine, women whose flirtation and energy were effortless. Why had she singled him out with the coffee? The question permeated the back of his mind for the rest of the shift. There was the obvious explanation, of course. He had helped her achieve her goal. In the time he had worked in the basement with her, he had done a good job. Could it be that there was more to it?
    He was off at one in the afternoon and hurried to his first class, but as the professor waxed on, David found his mind returning again and again to Nadine Baxter. He didn’t like to admit it—especially to himself—but the cup of coffee she’d given him was the most action he’d gotten in a long time. Guys who don’t do well with girls in high school are supposed to thrive at university. That’s what his brother had said. But this was not David’s experience. If anything, high school proved superior because at least in high school he had a lot of friends who were girls from his year’s book club and extra-curricular activities. Since arriving at UMich on a full scholarship, he’d found himself in his dorm room alone a lot, surfing personals ads of tons of supposedly horny women, although the online community didn’t offer a lot of prospects. David concluded that he was just not compatible with most women.
    He tried to let go of the image of Nadine Baxter, dressed in her sexy form-fitting cream cardigan and black skirt with her hair tied back in a chignon. She was the perfect naughty librarian. On the surface, everything about her was professional and confident, but there was also a softness about her, an unspeakably feminine trait that had every young buck at the bookstore in knots whenever they found themselves in her vicinity counting and pricing the textbooks—whether they admitted to it or not. She controlled that operation and everyone knew it. Technically, the manager was in charge, but he had long since perceived that Nadine knew exactly how to whip a crew into shape and that she was far more successful at getting the bookstore lads to clear and shelve entire