Page 7 of His

“If you see him, then you can talk to him again. How about that?”

“How about you butt out of my beeswax?”

I crumpled the paper and stuffed it into my back pocket.

“Sure, I’ll butt out. So you’re going to keep it?”

“Shut up.”

“Shutting up!” Jules grinned and took the carton of discard books from me. “Shutting up right... now!”

Later I came into the back room to find Jules staring at the television in the break room. With a pile of old textbooks in my arms, I came and stood in front of her.

“Get out of the way!” Jules kicked out with her foot and knocked a textbook off the top of my stack.

“Earth to Jules, we work in a library. What are you doing watching TV?”

“You’ll never guess who got murdered,” she said.

“The president,” I said.

“No.”

“Your mom.”

“No. Jesus, Kat, that’s insensitive. What if my momwasmurdered?”

“Who, then?” I let the pile of textbooks slump to the table near me and turned to the television screen. If our boss wasn’t around, I guess a bit of TV wouldn’t hurt.

“That guy that comes in every couple weeks,” Jules said, motioning to the screen where a police captain was being interviewed.

“That’s really specific.”

“The professor who reads the shitty John Grisham knockoffs. You know, the one with the creepy look.”

“No way.” The screen switched over to a shot of the man with the mustache. I’d seen him just a few days earlier. He’d been checking out a book. Idly, I wondered if his family would bring back the book to the library.

“Way,” Jules said.

“Someone murdered him?”

“Well, he’s missing, anyway.”

“So he’s not murdered.”

“Oh, sure, he ran away to Costa Rica and left his wife and kid and six figure job. Yeah, right. Trust me, he was murdered. God, you have such a boring mind.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who was murdered before.”

“Well, now you do,” Jules said, turning off the TV just as Sheryl rounded the corner, her face stuck in that perpetually pissed-off look that some bosses have. “And now he’s dead. Back to work, slacker.”

Gav

I told him not to move when I shaved his mustache off. He moved. Then the tablecloth was bloody. He didn’t start to scream until I began to shave a little deeper.

It was beautiful.

The begging, too, that was delicious to hear. It drove the shadow away. The blood spilled and made a mess, but it had to happen. He’d hurt his wife, and now he was being hurt. It made a kind of sense, didn’t it? And I did so love to hear him beg.

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