Inter-Library Loan

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Chapter One

Oliver Hopkins isn't autistic, his mother always said, he's just shy. He only recently found out that he was also asexual, which at the age of 54 came as no surprise. He hadn't known there was a name for it until the campy intern asked him if he was and Oliver went and looked it up.

"You can't say campy Olly." his best friend Tanya told him. "Just call him by his name."

Names weren't something Oliver was good at remembering and no matter how much he racked his brain, he couldn't remember what the intern, who wore pink chinos with green boat shoes and whose hair was dyed a bright shade of fuchsia, was called. Campy kept going through his head no matter how much he tried to stop it.

"So I'm asexual," he told Tanya as they shared their mid-morning break over Diet Pepsi in his office.

"Yeah, that seems right." She stated, even less surprised than he was. Their conversation then turned to how her sons were doing as it almost always did. Tanya had become Oliver's best friend over 30 years ago when they both started working at the college library, two weeks apart. It was about a week after she started that Tanya started talking to him.

Shy was one thing Oliver would never call Tanya. She was direct and honest. All those years ago, she approached him at his desk when she saw him drinking his Diet Pepsi. "Can I have one?" She asked. And he shared with her. Every day that week he shared with her from the case he kept at his feet. On Friday she brought in a new case. From that point on, they were friends and Tanya told it like it was.

He liked that. Too many people avoided saying what they meant, which just made life confusing. Not Tanya. It was her directness that enabled her to move up to Library Director after only 15 years. Oliver, on the other hand, stayed in inter-library loans from the very beginning. It was a detail-oriented task, where he didn't need to interact with any patrons and that suited his "shyness" perfectly.

"I don't think of you as shy," Tanya told him a year or so after their friendship blossomed. "You're reserved. Why waste conversation when you don't have to."

When her dad fell that time, and she needed to take him to the hospital, she told Oliver to watch her boys for her. Oliver did what he was told. When the boys wouldn't settle down, overcome with fear for their grandfather and the newness that Oliver brought into the house, he pulled out a well-worn copy of The Hobbit from his book bag and started to read to them, the only thing he could think of at the time. As he slowly read the first paragraph, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat; it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.", settle down they did. Curling up on the arm of the chair and in his lap, sweet-smelling heads rested on his shoulder and chest as the story began.

In the many years since, he'd read every one of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy to them, per their request, along with many more of his favorite fantasy and sci-fi novels. Dungeons and Dragons lessons were intermingled into those years as well. Culminating in epic, hours-long quests played out the second Saturday of every other month since.

'You've turned them into nerds!" Tanya would tease in the beginning. But she saw what most people didn't about Oliver. He was calm, he didn't judge and his sense of humor, quiet and even as it was, was just what they needed.

Once, when they were mid-battle, back when the boys were teenagers, all elbows, knees, towering well over 6'5" each and bottomless hunger, they surprised him with their loyalty. He'd gone off to use the bathroom and as he was washing his hands he heard one of their friends, one of the many that wandered through their house often enough, say "That guy's a weirdo."A few of the other friends giggled and snorted in solidarity with him.

"No." Dexter, the younger though taller of the two brothers quietly stated.

"That's Oliver" His shorter but wider older brother Deklin followed up."He's the coolest mother-fucker you'll ever know."

"And he's our friend, our mom's best friend," Dex added. That shut down any other noises anyone else ever even thought to make about Oliver and the Dungeon and Dragon battles in the years since. Both boys weren't into sports, though their high school's football and basketball coaches wished with all their might that they were.

"That's your influence, Oliver," Tanya explained over their mid-afternoon Diet Pepsi. "They get that quiet even-keel from you." Her laughter shook her to her core as she finally spat out "You know I have none of those things"

Oliver found that funny so he said, as he always did when he found something funny "That's funny." That was almost the extent of his humor response. Though from time to time he was known to let out a dusty chuckle from deep within his round chest.

Tanya and the boys weren't Oliver's only friends. There was also C.Paul, the celebrated author of the "Ooliver Dragoon" series. Though they had never met, their correspondence, via interlibrary loan requests, hadn't once stopped in the 25 years since the first one from her had plopped onto Oliver's desk.

What began as queries for books relating to dragon etymology, to swords through the centuries, and even, Oliver's all-time favorite, to jerkin patterns and creation, had become a meeting of similarly oriented brains, or so Oliver thought. He would tuck a note into the book requested to point out a chapter that might be of interest or highlight another tome that could be of more help. And C. Paul would answer with a thank you, ask Oliver about his life, his day, what he was reading and so it developed.

She never spoke of herself, and she never brought in or picked up the bi-weekly requests either. A graduate student, who changed every year or so, took care of those tasks. And though Oliver asked her about her life, C. Paul never once let anything but the weather, assessment of the books he was reading, or notes about the requests fall from her pen.

It was through sheer luck that Oliver found out that C. Paul was a she and an author. He'd been walking past the used book store on the corner a block or so from his house when he'd seen the author's photo on the back cover of the first book she'd written in the series, Ooliver, Me Dragoon. He of course bought the book, because how many C. Pauls could there be who've written a book about dragons, and also requested books about dragons from Oliver. Only one that he knew of.

"Is he named after me?" he's asked her in a note tucked into a book about fell running in Scotland, which had information that informed the epic 6th book of the series Ooliver and Me Oon the Run. "Of course." she'd succinctly replied then asked how blue the sky was today and what he thought about the book Snow, by Orhan Pamuk that he was reading.

Though proud and happy for this honorific she'd bestowed, he told no one. Not even Tanya and the boys knew though they had of course read through the entire series with him. It never even occurred to Oliver that life as he knew it, was about to change when the very last correspondence from C. Paul arrived on his desk that late January day.

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