of listening to knit, knit, purl or knit a stitch, slip a stitch, the repetition was burned into my brain and I’d dreamed about cable cast-offs and rib stitches.
I was ten books in when I came across it and an angry growl slipped out.
“Everything okay?” Simon, one of the authors, asked.
“Yeah, yeah. Sorry.” I waved off his concern but inside I was seething.
This was the fourth book in the last month that had been returned defaced.
I scanned the bar code, and like the others, it hadn’t been checked out. Unfortunately, this happened sometimes. People walked out with books without properly checking them out. Sometimes they were returned, other times they were just gone. It was hell on our budget when we needed to replace stolen copies. Luckily, it didn’t happen frequently but it happened.
This was different.
This bit my ass.
This infuriated me beyond belief.
Some asshole had taken Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden and scribbled on the pages. I thumbed through the book and found more blacked-out passages. There were also notes in red pen in the margins.
Vile. Disgusting. Evil. Lesbian.
My blood boiled and I flipped back to the title page.
Godless heathens be warned.
What the hell did that mean? Be warned? Hell to the no.
I set the book aside and finished the stack of check-ins as the Writers’ Club finished. The hour had passed by in a blur, my mind unable to stop thinking about why someone would think it was okay to destroy a book. Why someone thought they had the right to be judgmental in any way one could judge. It was wrong, it was vile, it was disgusting and evil. And frankly, it said a lot about the person who called up God’s name and used it in judgment.
After I delivered a round of half-hearted goodbyes to the authors, I noticed Simon hadn’t left. This wasn’t unusual—he often stayed behind to walk me to my car, especially in the winter months when it was dark by the time their meeting was over. But sometimes he stayed in the spring and summer even though it was still light out. He was a nice guy. Geeky. But nice.
“What’s wrong, Hadley?” he asked as he stopped in front of the circulation desk. “And before you tell me nothing, you’ve been huffing and sighing for the last thirty minutes. Not to mention your face is bright red.”
As I mentioned, Simon was a nice guy. He also wrote erotic romance under a female pen name. Not that he’d told me this, but I’d overheard the club discussing one of his novels. Which, being the nosy person I was, meant I’d gone home, looked him up, and bought one of his books. It was good, so good I was sucked into the plot. Therefore when I read the first scorching hot sex scene, it conjured up about a million new fantasies about Brady and I forgot the nice guy, geek guy, Simon, had written those words. And when it finally hit me, I turned my tablet off and couldn’t finish the book. The next time I saw him, I blushed red and hid in my office the whole meeting.
That was a year ago, and thankfully I could now face him without remembering he either had an active imagination or an extremely adventurous sex life, one in which he tied his partner to the bed and did insanely hot things to her. Either way, I didn’t want to know.
But he’d understand why I was angry about a book being ruined.
“Someone vandalized Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden.”
I handed him the book and started to close down the computer. Approximately two-point-five seconds later, I heard him make a disgruntled sound.
“Fucking asshole.” Then he muttered, “Excuse my language.”
“No need. I agree. That’s the fourth book in a month,” I told him.
“Seriously?”
“The first was Lolita, and as much as I disagree with censorship or books being ruined, that book has always been controversial and always will be. But The Handmaid’s Tale? I don’t get. I didn’t see the book but I heard every page had “vulgar” written across it. Thirteen Reasons Why had “going to hell” written on the pages. Now this one.”
“What does, “be warned,” mean?” he asked.
“No clue and I don’t care.”
“Hadley. You should care,” he gently warned.
“No, I shouldn’t. Whoever wrote that, their opinion is meaningless to me. The only thing I care about is stopping this person from removing any more books from this library.”
“Had—”
“Nope. No more talk about judgmental pricks,” I told him and