You had come to the library on a Sunday because your apartment was too warm and because Nolan had told you the whole ninth floor was closed except for the fiction stacks and would be empty. He was right about both. The reading chair you had picked was velvet. Red. Low back. The book in your lap was a hardcover with a broken spine that someone else had checked out and returned in bad shape. You had taken your glasses off to rub the bridge of your nose.
When you put the glasses back on, the world was smaller than it had been. Different frames. Round. Lighter on your face. The nosepiece did not sit where your old ones had. You looked at the page. The words were the same. The hand holding the page was not. The nails on it were longer than yours had ever been, and the ring finger had a small stone in it that caught the reading lamp.
Your shirt was not your shirt. Where it had been ribbed was different and where it had ended was different. Off the shoulder now on one side and knit heavy in a color you would not have chosen. The chest under it had come forward against the front of the sweater. Your legs were crossed and bare below the knee where the jeans had been. There was a denim skirt in their place. You reached up. There was hair against your ear and along your neck and down your back.
You smelled the old paper of the room. That had been there every Sunday for a year. That had not changed. What had changed was that you knew now the color of the sweater was called burnt sienna, which was not a word you had known before. You did not know how you knew it. You looked at the earring in the reflection of your glasses. Red stone. Gold. You had never bought either.
You heard a chair scrape three aisles over. Footsteps came down the row and stopped at the mouth of your alcove. Nolan. He looked at you the way he did not look at his roommate. He looked at the book still open on your lap. He looked at the chair itself, because he had seen you sit in it every Sunday for a year, and the person sitting in it now was somebody else. He waited a second to speak.
Nolan waited a second to speak.
"Sorry," he said. "I was looking for someone. He always sits in that chair."
You closed the book on your finger to hold the page. You did not look away from him.
"He said you might come by," you said. "He had to go."
Nolan did not answer right away. He looked at the row of spines behind your head. He looked at the chair. He looked at your legs where they crossed at the knee. Then he stepped into the alcove.
"What are you reading?" he said.
You held the book up. He read the title upside down and nodded like he had read it too.
The alcove was one of the study nooks between shelves, closed on three sides by tall shelves of hardcovers. The gate at the entrance was propped open with a rubber wedge. You could not see the reading room from where you sat. The reading room could not see you.
"Move over," he said.
You moved over. He sat. The velvet took his weight next to yours. His thigh met your thigh through the denim of the skirt. He did not move his leg.
He turned his head toward you. He looked at your mouth. Then he looked at the book.
"That book," he said, "is not the one he told me about."
"No," you said. "It is not."
He set the book on the floor by the leg of the chair. He put his hand on your knee. He waited a second to see if you would take it off. You did not. He slid the hand up under the denim to the top of your thigh and held it there.
You put your free hand on his shoulder. You leaned in first. He met you. His mouth was warm from tea. The glasses on your face bumped against his and he took them off carefully with one hand and set them on the arm of the chair.
He did not undress you all at once. He got the sweater down off both shoulders. He got the neckline down under your chest. The chair creaked. You climbed over onto his lap and let the skirt ride up. Your knees fit on either side of his hips against the arms of the chair.
He undid his own belt without looking. He watched your face while he did it. He said nothing. You lifted onto your knees and reached down between the two of you and put him where you wanted him.
You sank onto him slowly. The velvet was rough under your knees through the stockings — you did not remember when you had put on stockings but they were there now. He held still while you took him. He held his breath. You held his eyes.
He started to move first. Slow. His hands were at your hips over the top of the denim, then under it, then flat against the skin of your low back. The chair rocked back once against the shelf and the shelf did not move because it was bolted to the floor.
He got faster after a minute. He pulled you down harder onto him. His forehead came against your collarbone. The earring on your right ear caught on his hair and you did not stop to fix it. The chair creaked in a pattern that matched the rhythm of it. You leaned back against the arms and let him meet you upward.
He shifted. He hooked an arm behind your low back and lifted you and turned and laid you down on the seat of the chair with your head on the arm. He came down over you and pushed back in and the angle changed and you closed your eyes.
You came under him with your fingers in the low neck of his shirt and both heels crossed over the small of his back. He kept moving through it. His pace broke a minute later. He pulled out and finished on the front of the skirt and on the corner of the book he had set on the floor. Neither of you noticed until afterward.
He held there breathing against your temple. Then he sat back on the far arm of the chair and put his palm flat over his eyes for a second. You sat up. You fixed the sweater back onto both shoulders.
He picked up the book. He looked at the corner of it. Then he looked at you again, at the reading lamp catching the earring, and did not say anything.
You put your glasses back on. The library had gone the color of the reading lamp. The Sunday closing chime rang once from three floors down. The book was still open to the page you had held with your finger.