Winners Don't Have Bad Days (Watty 2020 Winner, Romance)

29. #Late, February 2018

Mike crawled out of the couch's embrace. His knees cracked, his back and neck threatened to never move again. The game controller fell to the floor, but he didn't stoop to pick it up. I'll never do this again for as long as I shall live.

He was a tin man without lube and without heart, rusting away deep in the forest. That's what a night of killing and mutilating teens does to someone on the wrong side of twenty-five. A wince crept on his face: he was not winning at it exactly. The kids had better reflexes, better gear, and garbage mouths. Old age and treachery could only go so far to counter that.

Never again.

If he had the energy, he could have showered and dressed in time for work, but he was so drained that he just bumped into furniture crossing from room to room, picking things up, dropping them, forgetting what he was up to. 

The thought of pulling the sweater off and confronting the bloat dropped him onto his bed for a good five minutes, exhausted. He squeezed his dry, overstrained eyes shut, counting to ten. He'll live. He won't enjoy it for the next little while, but he'll live.

About the only productive task he had accomplished was brushing his teeth.

***

Carol intercepted him at the entrance to the library. "You're fifteen minutes late, Michael. And it wasn't because you spent too much time on making yourself presentable."

Mike dug his fingernails into the unshaven cheek. "I'm sorry. Daya's left. It won't happen again."

Carol slipped into the commander-in-chief mode. "You're on the sorting duty today. Find Alyssa in the dungeon, send her upstairs. I wanted to train her to man the front desk regardless. Unless you're here to ask for personal time off?"

Mike shook his head mournfully. "No point. She's left left. To Ontario. I don't have the address, and she won't reply to my texts."

"Well." Carol knitted her brows together. "Sorting duty it is. And quickly, quickly, before the visitors decide I run a funeral home, not a public library."

"Thank you. I'll be all right tomorrow."

Carol harrumphed. "We'll see. Off with you. I'll call Alyssa to warn her to expect a fellow employee before she sees your mine and dials 911."

Mike managed a chuckle. The mirror didn't flatter him, but it didn't reflect a dangerous reprobate back at him either. Just a worn visage with sad bags under reddened eyes, exactly what you would expect after a sleepless night. "You have my word, Carol. I'll be on time tomorrow and presentable."

The staff nicknamed the sub-level where the books dropped down from the return shoots a dungeon for obvious reasons. It was also where they brought in the books trucked in from the other library branches. The job was to sort through the piles, place the books on the carts to go back on the shelves, or into the color-coded plastic crates for return to their home branches.

If one didn't mind the absence of windows—and Mike didn't want windows with their bright light and the view of Daya's Hill—the dungeon was the coziest place in the building, dry and warm, with the calming buzz of the halogen lamps overhead and books, books everywhere. They spilled from the shoot's apron, peeked out of their crates, and shifted precariously whenever one moved a filled cart.

In the middle of this organized and beautiful chaos, Mike found a bony maiden. She had one sandy strand pinned with a stubby pencil. The rest of them ran wild from under a moss-green velvet headband and onto a fitted top with a Death Note character. She was checking off the slips on the holds against the list with another pencil. The third one was sticking out of the back pocket of her crushed velvet skirt.