the journal of r. cooper

Someone asked for them to “literally bump into each other.”

I have no idea when this was from. 2015 maybe?

“Oh my god.” Jeremy was literally on the ground on his ass. He had fallen onto his ass through sheer force of his own distracted clumsiness and the impact of the solid wall he must have run into. “Oh my god oh my god. Shit.” And that was his coffee on the ground and on his pants and on his books. His expensive-ass fucking textbooks, now covered in the expensive-ass fucking latte he treated himself to after a long, busy day.

A hyphen with ass at the end was his favorite sort of compound. Actually anything with ass at the end was his favorite kind of anything.

He jerked up to his knees and leaned over, using his T-shirt to mop up some of the damage. Of course, he was still wearing his T-shirt and that meant a cold, gross drive home in the evening fog, but whatever. These books cost $300.

“No, no, ducklings. You need to be dry so I can read you.” Jeremy clucked his tongue and then realized in horror that this was the sound his mother had made when he’d been little and she’d wiped rainwater out of his face with her hand. He froze for a moment, and sat back, then realized this was not the time to be reconsidering his life because latte. Seeping into his pants. He was going to smell like souring milk for the rest of the day. That was not good. He’d made a special appointment at the university’s library to go into the basement to look through the old letters and journals from the area the librarians hadn’t officially archived yet. This was not a good impression to make, even by Jeremy’s standard of semi-disastrous first impressions.

“It’s great. No, really. They will absolutely believe that I take excellent care of books and can be trusted with valuable things when they see this,” Jeremy told the books, as well the collection of motion somewhere to the side of him. He was vaguely aware the motion was person-shaped and larger than him, and in some sort of violet-gray color combination his mind was trying to process while also helping him pat his books dry. “The turning into my mother thing, well that is unexpected. Not entirely, they say everyone turns into their parents. That’s anecdotal, but even anecdotal evidence is some sort of evidence. Besides, in a certain respect, we are our parents. Genetically. We’ve got the same sort of muscles in our face, hands, the same body types, with the tendency to move the same way. Add that to environment and it’s only natural we would pick up our parents’ mannerisms.”

He became aware that his words were, in fact, not aimed at his books at all, but rather at the wall he’d bumped into—run nearly full speed into, to be honest—and which had knocked him back on his ass. Which, ow, his ass kind of hurt now that he thought about it. Pavement was hard.

The wall was not a wall, obviously, but rather a person, a tall, sturdy-ish white person with facial hair and a sweater that looked like a cloud. A light purple and gray cloud with large gray buttons up the front, buttoned crookedly. Which Jeremy noticed, because the man, it was a man in that sweater, a handsome man maybe a handful of years older than Jeremy, had knelt down to look, or help. He curled one–large, dry, capable–hand around Jeremy’s wrist and tugged his hand away from the book, then pulled a handkerchief from the back pocket of his black jeans.

A handkerchief. Jeremy sat back onto his thighs to watch the guy expertly push the excess liquid from the book and then blot the rest with his handkerchief. He did the same to the second book before bending down to blow on the damp, malformed pages.

“They won’t be the same, but they should still be legible once they dry, and resellable, if you needed.”

“Three hundred bucks and I might get twenty for them if I’m lucky,” Jeremy responded, slowly, blinking hard as if he had rain in his eyes although the late afternoon sun was out and glorious. It struck his book-rescuer from the side, making him look not unlike the subject of a Caravaggio painting in a pastel cardigan.

“This was my fault, I’m sorry,” his rescuer continued as he picked up Jeremy now-empty paper cup and then the lid and set them upright on the ground. He glanced up and then seemed to freeze when he saw Jeremy staring at him.

“I bumped into you,” Jeremy clarified, looking over that solid, solid body that he’d run into. “Honestly, I don’t know how I didn’t see you.” He licked his lips, but the man looked down at himself, to his sweater maybe, then frowned.

“Anyway,” he said, which was a dismissal, definitely, and Jeremy huffed a little to hear it. “No one inside is going to care that you spilled on your textbooks. Put them in your bag and you’ll be fine.”

“Says you.” Jeremy smoothed a hand over his wet jeans and grimaced. “Do you even know what I’m going to be doing in there? The scraps of old, delicate paper I specially asked to touch?” The guy’s eyes widened behind his hipster glasses. His eyes were kind of a green, made lighter by the black frames of the glasses. This guy had an interesting sense of color. Jeremy was wearing a cheap T-shirt in a strange shade of dull blue but he looked good in it. “These are like, artifacts I’m going to be touching, just for a chance to look at the casual language in old letters between friends, hopefully chance upon some locality-specific expressions. Now I’m a mess because I didn’t see the hot man right in front of me. And do you know who is supposed to be in there to oversee me today? Do you even know?” Jeremy ran his hands through his hair and stuck out his lower lip. “I need more coffee for this. Maybe I can get black and dump in sugar and an ice cube and sneak it….”

He trailed off because that was a serious expression of disapproval on the man’s face.

“You’re right. I can’t be trusted today.” Jeremy sighed again and poked at his books. They wouldn’t dry right inside his book bag, but it would have to do. “Uh, your handkerchief?” he remembered. “You carry one of those? That’s cool. I’d say it’s a hipster affectation, but you actually used it. And oh, it was in your back pocket. Was it hanky code? Now there’s a fascinating language. The language of fashion should be studied as much as oral and written language I think. I don’t know what it means, if it was hanky code. It looks like a plain white hanky, and glasses aside, you don’t look like a hipster. I am willing to believe you genuinely keep and use a handkerchief, and I ruined it.”

Coffee had already turned it brown. Jeremy reached for it. “I can clean it, get it back to you. This is my fault after al….” He trailed off for the second time when he looked up and met the man’s stunned stare. His mouth was open, the lips just parted as if Jeremy had taken his breath away—or freaked him out with all his talking, or angered him with the hanky code thing.

“It was my fault,” the man said again, in a hushed voice like this was a secret. “I stopped to look at the display out front.”

Jeremy angled his head to one side. “You mean the tulips, or the plaque about the sugar barons who donated the money for the building?” He’d read that plaque many times too, usually because of the outraged history major graffiti under the plaque about the crimes of those sugar barons.

The man closed his mouth while continuing to study Jeremy with his mint, maybe sea foam, green eyes. “Both,” he said at last.

Jeremy grinned. “It’s got a different angry fact underneath it every time I come to this building.”

The man might have smiled. His lips ticked up for a moment. “You come here a lot?”

The local history annex building, while still large, was attached to the back end of the huge, huge university library, and didn’t get as much foot traffic.

Jeremy shrugged. “Thesis. And the building is quieter. But today is special.” He leaned in, because why not after they had already made a mess together. “Today I am going to meet the Beast.”

“The Beast?” the guy asked, speaking in the same whisper as Jeremy.

“They called him in specifically to keep an eye on me, and anything I might find,” Jeremy confessed. “I volunteered, um, aggressively, to go through some of the old letters and journals yet to be archived. They asked the infamous librarian from Barrett Library—you’ve never heard of him? Weird. He terrifies the students. Anyway. Either they don’t trust me or they have some legal issues, I’m not sure which one. It might be a toss up. But I can be trusted, I swear. This was an accident.”

The man blinked at him, once, then twice, then glanced away and rubbed the back of his neck.

“I don’t want him to think badly of me,” Jeremy finished. “Which is why the milk on my pants is going to suck.”

The guy’s face, which, for a somewhat awkward nerd, was really, really good looking, did a strange thing, as if he didn’t know what to say to that. “I’m sure you can explain,” he said at last. “He can’t be that bad.”

“Oh, he can.” Jeremy nodded, then wrinkled his nose. “But I get it. Those are valuable books in there, and in the Barrett Library. I was just really looking forward to this and I don’t want to get kicked out.”

“Really looking forward to it?” he was asked in a warm, startled tone, but then the guy abruptly scooted back. He picked up Jeremy’s books and handed them over before standing up. He held out one hand—god, he had nice hands, well-constructed and neat—to help Jeremy to his feet.

Maybe it was the old-fashioned sweater or the hanky influencing him, but Jeremy nearly swooned at the gesture. He didn’t want to let go, but made himself, because he was weird and hyper, but not a creep.

The guy offered him a quick smile as he bent back to down to grab the empty cup and toss it in the nearest trash can. “Just wash your hands and you should be fine.”

Jeremy snorted. “Yeah. Uh. I talk a lot. Like a lot. I don’t mind, normally, but I know what kind of first impression I make. But thank you. You’re very nice for a brick wall.”

That got him another long stare, even softly parted lips for a moment, before the man tossed his head and pulled in a breath. “Come on,” he said at last, and threw the ruined handkerchief away.

Jeremy made a small noise for the expense, then, for one of the few times in his life, had the sensation that someone was faster than he was. “Come on?” he repeated, not following at all. He was still holding his wet textbooks.

The man glanced at them, then took them from him and began to walk. “We can dry them better inside, and you don’t want to be late.” Jeremy trailed after him, goggling. It probably wasn’t a good look for him but he couldn’t seem to stop. The man paused again at the doors, where he gestured to a sign. “Drinks are not allowed inside anyway.”

“Right,” Jeremy agreed faintly, only just stopping before he ran into the guy’s back again. “Sorry.” He would do it again, though.

That got him a look over one broad shoulder, as if the man guessed that. “Just be careful.”

“Yes. Of course,” Jeremy repeated blankly, brightly, all kinds of enchanted all of the sudden. “Who are you?”

The made the man turn all the way around. He ducked his head. “Benjamin Barrett. From the Barrett Library,” he added quietly, pointedly, then opened the doors while Jeremy stood there, staring. It was difficult to follow with his foot in his mouth, after all.