The Story Guy (Novella) Read Online Free PDF Page B

left.
    No wit, no sense, no breath.
    GearTattoo: Insomnia? Shelving the vampire books during a library night shift?
    I am crazy, but instead of picking up the baton of a sweet and thinky exchange, I focus on neon-pink paragraphs.
    lieberries: Or fantasizing about the way this guy I met up with kissed me—so much I can’t sleep.
    Yikes .
    GearTattoo: Ah. Did you know that your mouth, your skin, is so soft? All week, every time I’ve thought about it, my hands feel like they’re buzzing. I love your hair. I love that it’s short and so when I put my fingers through it, I can feel your whole nape bust out in goose pimples.
    Predictably, goose bumps explode over the entire length of my spine.
    lieberries: You taste so good. You smell so good.
    I backspace over as many letters as I keep. I am shaking.
    GearTattoo: On Fridays, the cafeteria where I work brings in this farm-to-table caterer that serves all local food and on Friday, she had this … I don’t know what to call it, like a tart, maybe. There was half a sticky plum on a sweet and salty cookie and when I bit into it, it was you. I couldn’t concentrate the rest of the afternoon.
    I am certain no one has pitched quite that level of woo in my direction, ever. I am breathing in shallow pants, and my face is burning and tight. And there is a throb. The kind that kicks straight up through the middle.
    lieberries: Why aren’t you sleeping?
    GearTattoo: I don’t ever sleep very much.
    lieberries: So you’re an insomniac, too?
    GearTattoo: No—I could sleep, but it’s complicated. I have a second-shift thing that I do.
    Thing? A job?
    lieberries: But “it’s complicated” means you’re not going to talk about it?
    It’s taking a long time for Brian to chime back and I can hear my heartbeat in my ears.
    GearTattoo: I’m sorry.
    It’s starting to look like Justin is right. Story guy. But I’m a librarian. I can work from the outside in.
    lieberries: So you’ve done this before. Who was your first?
    GearTattoo: I can’t … I’m not a one-night-stand guy. I’m not wired to enjoy that. It seems weird, I know, because what we did isn’t that far away on the map from a one-night stand. There is always this moment, when you take a woman home just to take a woman home, some moment right before it could get awesome but you don’t know yet if it will, that you, or maybe not you, but me, gets all still inside. Quiet. And for me, that moment always seems like it lasts forever. And it’s enough time for me to live some kind of life from that moment to the end of time and back again. With this woman I’ve taken home or gone home with, with my one-night stand, someone who isn’t mine, but for that one crazy long heartbeat, I want to be mine.
    Now it’s my turn to move my hands away from my keyboard. Because what letters could I line up, in their tidy and codified rows, that mean enough against his confession? I’ve felt the same as he writes here; it lights up a part of my brain I didn’t think anyone else completely understood. I mean, already, our long minutes of “kissingonly” have stopped time for me, made every moment since about how he held my face and neck under the pergola, how his mouth moved along mine, how the small breeze worked its way between us and felt so cool because our bodies were so hot.
    And I understand, too, the impulse to protect myself from regret by finding a way to step away from this feeling. The problem is that stepping away from Brian, leaving him standing under that pergola on Wednesday, is no longer enough to leave behind how he made me feel in that hour. I could leave him there, we could part as strangers, but God , I know that I would look for him. He would live in my peripheral vision, a ghost nudging me to turn and look behind me, only to find a spot that is emptier than empty.
    GearTattoo: Carrie? Jesus, I hope I didn’t freak you out. I totally freaked you out, right?
    lieberries: No. I was just thinking that what you