Just One Touch

Chapter 1

Rose's phone had been buzzing repeatedly, incessantly even, for the past thirty minutes. A playlist of party music was blaring through her headphones drowning out the liminal noise in the library, but even that didn't stop the buzzing of her phone from irritating her. Rose was lounging lazily in one of her favorite corners in the University's Main Library with the same classic literature book that she had been 'reading' for months in hand and her feet propped up on the wood beam below the table in front of her. The smell of old books and peppermint from the oil diffuser sitting on the reception desk downstairs filled her nose as she stared at the book in front of her. The book in question was the 18th-century Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. She has read this book several times at this point and honestly wasn't really paying attention to the words anymore. Instead, her focus was on a small piece of paper that was tucked between the pages.

For months now she has been having a back-and-forth conversation with someone in the margins of the book. It started at some point in mid-June, when a stranger simply responded to her annotations analyzing Jim Hawkins as a Hero. Now it has just become a game of letting them try and guess what she looks like and who she is. Of course, when the conversation started drifting away from the topic of the book the stranger had kindly started putting a scrap of paper into the pages of the book so that neither of them ruined the beauty of the book with a side conversation. Written on the paper today was one simple question...

Do you dance?

It was this question that had left her sitting here for fifteen minutes deciding how much to give away. She did dance, a lot in fact. She still took Hip-hop lessons at a studio a few blocks from her apartment every Saturday. Not to mention she is a dancer at Club Succubus, Club S for short, on the weekends. She loved the way it made her body feel and it was a good break from translating Greek and Latin literature for her degree. Besides, she was born to dance, even now she could feel her power hum beneath her skin. Yet, she wasn't sure how much she should tell the stranger.

Her phone fell silent for a few seconds before the buzzing began again with yet another call. She sighed figuring she should probably hurry before Ami calls the cops and reports her missing. Taking the pen from between her teeth she quickly wrote her answer below the question:

Yes, better than most. Why? Would you like to dance with me?

Tucking the paper back into the book she pushed it onto the shelf and pulled off her headphones. Sighing she put all of her various papers and belongings that were sprawled onto the desk in front of her back into her backpack. She planned to take her sweet time before answering the phone. Ami knows better than to call her so much while she's at the library. After getting all packed up she lifted herself out of the chair and swung her bag around her shoulders. Only after she had pushed in her chair did she pick her phone off the table and answer it.

"FINALLY! You are awful at picking up your phone! What if I was being followed or kidnapped and you just refused to answer my call!?" Ami's voice still sounded just as musical as always, even with the yelling. Rose propped the phone up between her shoulder and her ear as she smiled at her friend's usual drama, "Relax Ami, you know if someone kidnapped you I'd hunt them down to the ends of the Earth and make them wish they were never born..." Which is more true than I'm sure she thinks it is, "...Besides, you know I'm at the library. I almost never answer the phone while I'm here." Rose could hear Ami's whistle even as she pulled her phone from her face to check how long she had until the bus came to the stop outside of the Library, "Oooooh still flirting with the handsome stranger? It's been like, what, three months? Are you ever gonna meet him in person?" A scoff fell from Rose's mouth, "How do you know he's handsome? We've only seen their handwriting. How do you even know it's a man?"