Page 5 of Owl’s Cherished Mate

“Appreciated. We run a very strict no-profanity policy here. I’ll let you off with a warning this time.” I winked.

As our eyes held, my owl locked in on her completely. I should have looked away. I should have walked back to the desk and finished closing up.

“Everything okay?” I asked instead.

Softness shifted through her expression, but it was gone half a heartbeat later, and a wall seemed to go up. “Yeah,” she said. “Fine. Just... life stuff.”

“Life stuff.” I repeated it like I was considering the phrase. “That covers a lot of ground.”

“It does.” She glanced back at her phone, then flipped it face down on the table. “It’s nothing. Sorry again about the outburst.”

“Don’t worry about it. The books will recover.”

She almost smiled again.

I noticed.

Giving her a small nod, I walked back to the front desk. My owl was restless now, pushing against me, wanting me to turn around and go back to her. To ask more questions. To sit down across from her and find out what had put that look on her face and made her curse like that.

I didn’t.

Instead, I made the closing announcement—“Library closes in five minutes”—and began the rest of my routine. She packed up her laptop, zipped her bag, and stood. As she passed the front desk on her way out, she paused.

“Thanks,” she said. “For the laugh. I needed it.”

“Anytime.”

She pushed through the door and was gone.

I stood there a moment longer than I needed to, staring after her, feeling my owl settle back down with a low, satisfied rumble—like he’d been waiting for that exchange and was pleased it had finally happened.

I shook my head and went back to locking up.

It was nothing. A brief conversation with a person. The kind of thing that happened every day in a library.

Except it didn’t.

Not like that, and not to me. I didn’t make jokes with strangers, or check on people, and I didn’t stand at the front desk replaying a thirty-second conversation like it meant something way more than it did.

My owl ruffled his feathers.

I told him to shut up and turned off the main lights before heading to the parking lot.

3

BONNIE

The librarian had amber eyes.

That was the thought stuck in my head as I drove home from the library, which was ridiculous. I had a hundred things to worry about, and the color of a stranger’s eyes shouldn’t have made the list. But there it was, lodged in my brain alongside the grocery list, the electric bill, and the fact that Lawson was probably starved.

He’d made me almost laugh, though.

That was the thing I kept circling back to. Not a real laugh—I wasn’t sure I remembered what those felt like—but close enough that my face had done something it hadn’t in weeks.

A poetry section filing a complaint?

Who says that?