Page 25 of The C*ck Down the Block

“Right. So.” He tapped on his computer and brought up something on his screen, but from my angle across the desk from him, I couldn’t see what. “What’s this I see about a nomination?”

Gah. Had Lulu forwarded that onto Karter too? The traitor. I had almost forgotten about the award with all the other craziness of the past few days. I didn’t have the room in my brain to worry about everything, and nervousness about accepting an award was no longer number one on my list of anxieties. Maybe like, number five, and that was five too many.

“Yes, I’ve been nominated as the Young Adult Romance Writers Librarian of the Year.”

Karter’s head jerked back far enough he gave himself a double chin, and I did not miss the look of disgust. “Please tell me we do not have books about teens having,” he looked around as if he expected the CIA to be listening in on us, “ess eee ex.”

Good grief. How was this man actually a librarian? I clenched my teeth, holding in my tirade. He wasn’t the only librarian I knew who thought the whole romance genre was mommy porn. He was a literary snob, and I wanted to slap him in the face with every book my favorite romance authors had ever written.

“That’s not typically what young adult romance books are about.” The fact that I had to school him about an entire section of our collection boggled the mind. How the hell had he gotten the promotion to branch manager? “Think more like the deliciously giddy feelings the first time you fall in love, which is even more fun when there are dragons and epic battles against evil, dystopian societies to thwart, or the patriarchy to dismantle, all while still going to high school.”

He still looked at me like I’d sprouted a second head made out of penises. “Right, well, perhaps we should beef up the classics for our youth population, maybe some more mysteries, and—”

“Manga? Yes, I’ll look into that. I’ve also applied for a technology grant that will give us some new money to upgrade the gaming system this fall.” He probably didn’t even know we had video games. This evaluation was not worth my time.

“It always looks good to the board when we get a new grant. Excellent job.”

Yeah. Because I applied for the grant to look good for the board. Eyeroll. “Yes, thank you.”

“You’re not planning on going to this awards ceremony, are you?”

I may be freaking out about it, but, yeah, I was. “Yes. I was hoping the library might help fund the travel. The conference is in Texas.”

“You can certainly use your vacation days for that, but I don’t think it would look proper to fund a trip to, for, uh, I’m not sure there are funds for something like that.”

The way he was fumbling all over himself because he was uncomfortable about books written by, for, and about women was one of the things that would have me forever thinking of him as Creepy Karter. In fact, I think I’d look into trademarking that. “No? They did fund two librarians’ tickets and travel to the Sci-Fi and Fantasy con. I’m not sure how this would be any different except that I’d be representing us as an award nominee and not just an attendee.”

I may need to stay civil because Karter was my supervisor, but I wasn’t about to let a slight like that go. I knew I was an excellent librarian, had, in fact, increased the amount of participation in teens since I’d started here, and had done an excellent job promoting literacy, in part, because I did promote popular fiction like romance. I deserved that nomination, dammit, and the library and its board should be proud of this recognition and not try to sweep it under the rug like old, repressed, fuddy-duddies.

I had another word I wanted to call people like Karter, but I was a professional librarian and thus, had an excellent vocabulary that was filled with lots of ‘F’ words that were appropriate for the workplace.

Karter busied himself with searching for something on his computer again. “I’ll look into it.”

“Great.”

“The rest of the evaluation is all pretty standard, and you’ve rated highly in all categories of course. If you’ll just take a look and then sign at the bottom, we’ll get everything all finished and filed away.”

Coward.

“Glad to hear it.” I took a quick perusal, but I’d done enough of these to know pretty much exactly what my performance was. I signed quickly and handed him back the papers. “If we’re all done, I’ve got some programming to work on before my desk duty starts.”

“Just one last thing, I thought you might like to know that the library website went a bit bonkers with hits over the weekend, specifically the page that lists our staff. Your profile was clicked on four-hundred and ninety-two times, according to IT. Looks like your date I saw in the paper yesterday is bringing in some new patrons.”

Funny how I had some heartburn coming on even though I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, six hours ago. “Huh. That’s... interesting.”

I literally didn’t know what else to say. Not sure where all my bravado just went. Here bravado, come here girl, bravado, where are you girl?

“I think I hear my phone ringing.” I turned and scooted across the office space back to my desk as fast as I possibly could. The second I sat down, I popped open Google, grabbed a screenshot of my profile pic on the library’s website and did a reverse image search.

Yep, sure the Thornminster Library page came up. But so did four-thousand nine-hundred and seventy-two other results. Oh blurgh. I was going to throw up.

Some of the very few pictures I’d posted on FaceSpace were next. No wonder I was getting friend requests left and right. Then there was the picture of Chris and I in the paper, which had apparently been picked up by several celebrity gossip sites.

Good god, I was in the tabloids. The headlines weren’t as bad as I thought they’d be. A few couldn’t help but play to society’s disdain for larger bodies, but I knew better than to care what stupid people thought. It was pretty damn clear though that at least two-thirds of the internet were shipping the two of us hard.

They couldn’t see we were just friends, and that meant, crap, my mother would be too. Quickly, I grabbed my phone out of my bag and popped open the messenger app. Yep, there it was.

Hi, sweetie, just a quick note from the airport. You should have said you and that nice Kingman boy were together! How exciting. Be sure to use lots of lube as I’m sure he’s rather large. Sending you two a little something fun I found in Thailand. Talk again in a few weeks!

---