Page 43 of Keeping Secrets

"Boo," someone yelled from the back. Travis ignored him.

"Okay, who came first? Beethoven or Bach?"

He kept up the rapidfire questions, then took a break between rounds. After chugging a glass of water, he made a second mocktail for Keely. He had noticed her first one go empty early in the first round. He thought about making the same drink again, something that he knew she would like, but instead he decided to take a chance on something new. The surprise and delight on her face had been the best part of the night so far, and he wanted to see that again.

Working quickly, he grabbed a simple syrup that he had made using a mix of warming spices and blended it with a local ginger ale. He garnished the drink with three fresh cranberries and a curl of orange zest.

When he presented the drink to Keely, the look on her face was everything he had hoped for. She held his eyes for a long moment while she took a drink. The air between them was charged, and there was no need for words.

It was a moment so intense that he almost - almost - didn’t notice the other people at the table. Chloe’s knowing smile, Nick’s glowering glare, Ali’s raised eyebrows. Studiously ignoring the three of them, he winked at Keely and retook his place at Scot’s side.

"Round two!" He repeated himself twice, raising his voice to a shout before the bar quieted.

He worked his way through the questions that Scot had crafted, and it was a close race between three teams. In the end, though, Ali and Keely took the lead. Nick contributed a single answer to a baseball question and Chloe answered a couple as well, but the win really belonged to the librarian and her assistant in equal measure.

"And the Pretty Pelicans take the win!" he shouted. Chloe squealed and pulled all three of her teammates into a hug.

Travis watched them with a smile. For the first time in a long time, his heart sped with joy instead of anxiety. The smile on Keely’s face was the highlight of his whole night.

Reluctantly, he looked away and crouched down next to Scot. "What’s the prize for tonight?"

"You decide. You did good, kid." The rare praise from his boss lifted Travis’s mood even further. He grabbed an old menu and used a sharpie to scrawl four cheeseburgers with sweet potato fries. That was what Keely ordered nine times out of ten.

He walked through the crowd and presented her with the prize. She read his hasty scrawl and looked up at him, her eyes bright.

"Doesn’t trivia night have famously crappy prizes?" she asked quietly.

"Trivia night is under new management," he said with a wink. "Anyway, you earned it."

"No arguments here." She smiled and turned to show her teammates their gift certificate.

That night, Travis slept soundly. All the way past dawn without a single nightmare.

CHAPTER 14

‘Dank’ wasn’t the right word for the library basement, because it was climate controlled, but of all the words that Keely could think of, that one came closest to describing how she felt about the place.

The walls were cement gray, the fluorescent lighting was harsh, and being underground gave her an itchy, unsettled feeling. She had never felt in danger of relapse since moving to Pelican Point, but too many hours in the library basement sure seemed to push her in that direction.

She loved books. She’d thought that she would love working with books… but packaging books, printing shipping labels for other library branches, and wrapping new books in crinkly plastic were all activities that made her want to pull her hair out after about five minutes.

Eventually, she discovered that playing an audiobook while she did menial tasks kept her sane, at least for a while. Sometimes she would call her parents and catch up while she went through putting stickers in new books. Or she would talk to her sponsor as she sorted through a box of donations. Today, she was listening to a podcast about baking while intermittently texting with Travis.

She wondered if she was letting him off too easy, if she should’ve pressed for more answers when he apologized, but she knew plenty about keeping trauma close to the chest. She figured that, whatever was going on with him, he would tell her when and if he was ready. Pushing him wouldn’t help anything. It felt a bit strange to be texting with him again, but not a bad kind of strange. Each new message set off butterflies in her stomach, and she tried to just enjoy the sensation instead of overanalyzing it.

Finally, finally, she finished the menial tasks that she had been assigned and hefted a box of books in both arms to carry them back up the stairs and into the library.

"Done already?" Melissa asked.

"Yep, just need to shelve them."

"You rock. After you do that, would you come man the desk?"

"For sure." She put the books on a cart and wheeled them off through the shelves.

Shelving books was a task that she actually enjoyed. The only problem there was keeping herself from getting lost in the stacks and spending her working hours looking through the books instead of actually working.

Although, she mused as she took yet another cookbook off the shelf, wasn’t familiarizing herself with as many books as possible part of her job?

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