Safeguard
by Quinn D.K.
Summary: When young librarian
Rowan finds a letter hidden in a book, his curiosity gets the better of him. He
tracks down the owner: an ex-Navy SEAL living alone near the woods. Grant is
the rugged man of anyone's dreams, but he's sullen and withdrawn -- a damaged
hero struggling with the loss of his hearing.
Sensing a man in need of company, Rowan starts learning sign language to
communicate with him, and an unconventional friendship forms. But their
differences may be too vast to overcome... even as an intense, forbidden
attraction simmers behind every stolen glance and signed word.
Chapter 1: Lost and Found
"Ow."
Rowan banged his left knee against the return bin and spilled the stack of
mystery novels he'd been clutching to his chest. Perfect. Not only was he a
dead tired librarian, he was a clumsy one too.
"Who put the return bin out here?"
Nobody answered him, of course, because he was only one of two employees left
to see the library's night shift to its end. The other was Neil, a senior
librarian. Rowan more
often than not found him face down on his desk around this hour.
Rowan stared at the mess of books on the carpeted floor and sighed. The teens
from the neighboring school had probably shoved the bin into the middle of
the floor. Is this what kids did for fun now? Didn't they know they could watch
porn on their phones?
After gathering up the mystery novels,
Rowan pushed the bin back into its rightful place. Through the intake slot he
noticed a lone book had been deposited inside.
"The Time Traveler's Wife," he grinned. One of his somewhat guilty pleasures.
This
copy was worn and dog-eared, the cover nearly coming off its spine. He brought
it back to the circulation desk to fill out a repair request form just as a
folded
paper fluttered from the pages and landed at his feet.
A letter?
Rowan's slender, delicate face gathered into a smirk. Patrons had left worse
things in books, such as the strip of bacon that had
thoughtfully been used to bookmark a Harry
Potter last year. As a newbie librarian, he
wasn't yet hardened to the trials of public service, but he couldn't
imagine seeing anything stranger than that.
Before his green Converse shoes could step on it, Rowan scooped up the fallen
paper and unfolded it. It wasn't so much a letter as a short note, unaddressed,
and composed with strong, purposeful handwriting.
Tatiana,
I'm not ready. Don't think I'll ever be
ready. Just stop asking.
I'll always love you. I'm sorry.
Grant
Rowan brushed the mousy brown bangs off his forehead as his smirk curved into a
frown. This wasn't
exactly a list of groceries, he'd seriously infringed upon someone's privacy. A
couple's privacy...
"Yet that didn't stop you from looking."
He snapped the rubber band he kept around his wrist. Talking
to
himself
had
become quite the embarrassing compulsion, honed from countless
nights of copy
cataloging and straightening up shelves.
Rowan scanned the book's bar code. The system displayed the name of the patron
who
had last borrowed it: WOLFE, GRANT.
A hard pit formed in his stomach. If Grant borrowed The Time
Traveler's Wife, that meant Tatiana - whoever and wherever she was -
never saw
the note he'd written for her. Guilt struck him low in the stomach, followed by
a flood of questions. Her feelings may
have been spared but didn't she still have the right to know? Had this note
been shoved into a book by mistake or in the false hope that whatever feelings
inspired it would dissolve into nothing? Out of sight, out of mind?
'I'll always love you. I'm sorry.'
The immediacy laced into every word made Rowan's chest tighten.
"This is is none of your business," he
scolded himself.
Rowan placed The Time Traveler's Wife
on the intake cart where one of the
student pages would shelve it the next morning. He slipped the note itself into
a blank envelope and searched for the lost items bin under the desk. He
noted with a trace amount of irony that it was nowhere to be found. Throwing
the note away or leaving it sitting around didn't seem right either. If he was
never meant to read Grant's words, he
certainly didn't want to turn it into a point of gossip with the entire branch.
As a child, his mom had always warned him about kids with sticky fingers. Not
one to rock the boat, Rowan managed to live his entire 27 years without ever
knowingly stealing from another person.
Turning the envelope over and over in his hands, he wondered how morally
upright it would be to take it home with him. It was almost like taking home
someone else's bad dream.
"Just for safekeeping," he muttered. "Just until I figure out what to do with
it."
Rowan eyed the clock. Half an hour until closing.
It was only a piece of paper. No monetary value, just a serious declaration of
emotions that he had no right to see. He'd bring it back to his next shift, of
course.
He hoped by then the lost
items bin would be found.
"Grant Wolfe," Neil read off the computer screen. "Hell of a name. Sounds like
he should be raiding ancient temples in Peru."
Rowan sat opposite of the senior librarian's desk, nodding along as he fidgeted
with the Iron Man bobble head beside the stapler and pencil tray. It might have
seemed odd for any man pushing 60 to have accrued a set of Avengers
knickknacks,
but it made sense for Neil, who had an almost manically youthful energy to him.
"His record doesn't indicate anything étrange,"
Neil
continued.
"Toronto
resident, adult patron. Blah blah blah. This account
is so ordinary it should be writing articles about the latest thing millennials
have killed."
"Age?" Rowan didn't know why he wanted to know, but it seemed like a thoughtful
thing to ask.
"Date of birth puts him at 32."
Iron Man bobble-bobble-bobbled his huge head.
Neil lowered his glasses. "Why the sudden interest in this Mr. Wolfe?"
"He, um, left a personal possession in a book he returned last night."
Neil's brows, bushy and dark silver, bunched up on his forehead. "And this
is why you came into my office with all the gravity a young man who just
witnessed a murder?"
"I didn't look that serious."
"Care for a mirror?"
"He left behind a very, very personal note, which I happened to read. I didn't
know if it was appropriate to get in touch with the patron to let him
know I had it."
"Is the note urgent? Life or death? The Joker's got all of Gotham's orphans
trapped in a school bus full of dynamite?"
"Not urgent in that way, but..." He trailed off, unsure of the words he
needed, unable to communicate the vague but pressing nature of what he'd read.
Neil watched him carefully. These silent gaps hadn't been unusual during their
working relationship; Rowan often found himself at a loss for words during
difficult conversations. It was by no means a knock against the boy's
intelligence. Neil was part of the committee that hired him to their small
neighborhood library branch. He'd seen Rowan's grades - they were bursting
with so many uninterrupted 'A's it looked like the transcript was screaming.
No, Rowan's silences were more of a social affliction. The young man was
inside his head so often that when it came voicing his thoughts to another
person, they
butted up against roadblocks that took a little longer than average to be
removed.
"Allow me," Neil gently chided, "Perhaps this Grant Wolfe caught your attention
while you were on circulation duty but you were too shy to-"
"No, Neil."
"Because you tend to be a little quiet around certain men in the library.
Usually
the tall and handsome ones-"
"Neil!" Rowan's face flared a bright emergency red. "I never saw this man at
all."
"Also, I don't recall you speaking of any gentleman callers at all lately. Am I
not allowed to be worried? "
"Oh my god, I'm actually gonna have to throw your own Iron Man bobble head at
you."
"I'm sorry. I'm doing that thing you hate. What do you call it?"
"Prying."
"So it's not a meetcute you're reeling from. It's a crisis of conscience."
This is what they both referred to as landing
the
plane - when one of them helped the other reach a conclusion. More
often than not, it was Neil doing the landing.
"There's nothing in the library policy that says you can't contact a patron to
let them know their forgetful ass left something in a returned item. I would
leave out the part about you being a nosy little jerk and reading it, though."
"I think I'll be a little more diplomatic than that."
"Diplomatic?" Neil sighed at the ceiling. "Youth truly is wasted on the young."
"My next day shift is Saturday, I guess I can do it then."
"Hmm. Hold that thought," Neil raised a finger and squinted at his screen.
"There's a laundry list of admin notes attached to Grant's record. I must have
missed them."
"You might have been too busy accusing me of gawking at all the tall handsome
men to have noticed."
"That's an accusation rooted in fact, my boy."
Rowan tamped down the very sudden and very real ache of sadness that always
clutched him when the subject of men came up. Though he had no time to date, he
told himself it was a waste of time, and thus he did not care. And yet he
couldn't deny the accuracy of Neil's words... particularly how awkward and
short of breath he became around a certain kind of man.
Once, a long time ago, he was different. Outgoing. Free. But the person he used
to be had been locked away in a chamber he'd long since lost the map to.
"So," Neil said, startling Rowan from his thoughts, "Grant's record indicates
the phone number he used to register for a library card no longer works. A
couple of letters have already been mailed out to request an updated number but
he hasn't been answering."
Hrmph. That dashed Rowan's plan to call him.
"Here's the strangest part: just yesterday he submitted a request to use our
Home Library Services."
"You mean our home delivery program?" Rowan thought he'd misheard - those
services were used almost exclusively by senior citizens.
"His application is on hold. Looks like he forgot to tick any of the option
boxes for eligibility."
"What would those be?"
"Age, illness, or disability. Attention to detail isn't this fellow's strong
suit."
Rowan breathed out with a little more force than normal. Grant being possibly
sick or disabled put his note to Tatiana in a new and bracingly uncomfortable
light.
"What happens with his account, then?"
"We can't accept Grant into the program until we verify his eligibility. And we
can't do that until we speak with him or a caregiver. And we can't do that-"
"-until we have a phone number," Rowan finished. "But is there nothing we can
do until then? We can't let his application just sit in the system."
"The initiative has to start with the patron."
"But there might be an issue or a circumstance we're not aware of. Maybe he's
not able to use the phone or his caregiver gave the wrong number or, or..."
He stopped when he noticed Neil's eyes on him, intelligent and searching.
"You want to give him back that note, don't you?"
A deep breath. He knows me too well.
Rowan forced himself to push through the discomfort. "I know what it's like to
put something off. To feel it fester and grow until you can't take it back or
repair the damage. I know what it's like to see your entire life derail because
of something as small and inconsequential as a series of words you could never
bring yourself to say. I can't let that happen to anyone. Not even a stranger."
Neil, usually so full of quips and comebacks, let the silence sit between them
like a fog that needed a moment to lift. He returned to his computer screen.
"I used to work in Home Library Services. There was the rare occasion, in the
case of lapsed communication, when someone on staff would need to visit the
patron at their home to verify their eligibility."
Rowan's slim chest puffed out. "Do you think this constitutes a rare occasion?
In your incredibly professional opinion?"
"Ah, suddenly I'm incredibly
professional!"
Rowan smiled and twisted the Iron Man figure into a heroic pose. "I think Tony
Stark would agree."
"All I need to do is call the department head and request to put one of my own
staff on this application. They're always backlogged over there. They'd
appreciate it, trust me."
"You would do that?"
"Hell, if I'm gonna abuse my seniority it might as well be for a good cause."
Neil printed out Grant's record, complete with his address, and held it aloft
with a knowing grin. "But this is all up to you, my boy. Say yes and the case
is yours."
A flash of doubt rippled through him. Rowan could only see himself navigating
such a delicate situation with the grace and subtlety of a spooked hippo.
"I would need to visit him in person?"
"You would. And I hope you realize this investigation will actually require you
to talk."
"Yes, that crossed my mind."
"You might even need to, egad, make eye contact with someone."
"Neil."
"Is it a yes?"
I could try, Rowan almost offered. And
rather unexpectedly, the voice of Yoda invaded his mind.
Do or do not. There is no try.
Put in those terms, his choice seemed clear. Stay on course as a junior
librarian toiling away on never-ending night shifts or maybe, possibly going
outside his comfort zone to make a difference for someone who might need it.
"Yes," he exhaled and took the printout right from Neil's hand. "I'll do it."
"And you'll talk?"
"I'll talk his ears off."
Neil smiled at his protege. He took a flick at Iron Man and made it nod in
agreement. "Tony Stark would be so proud."
Rowan was starting to get a little scared.
The rhythmic grind of the library delivery van's wheels on the road helped him
shut out his chattering thoughts, but didn't do much to dissuade his anxiety.
A bright Saturday morning like this was usually spent working his one and only
day shift at the library, but now he was heading into a completely uncharted
area of Toronto (to him, anyway) to talk to a total stranger. Who had no idea
that he was coming.
Yep. Just a little scared.
Grant Wolfe's address placed him off Crothers Woods, which a quick Google
search told him was one of the city's 'hidden gems'. The pictures were
pleasantly beautiful and that's what made it so strange. A downtown kid all his
life, Rowan never realized Toronto was home to something so quaint and rural
looking.
"Just hope I still get cell reception out here," he muttered at the steering
wheel.
Beyond the windshield were trees upon trees, green with scarlet and gold licks
at the blue sky. The residential road he'd been driving on opened up to reveal
a small bungalow home sitting by itself at the end of the street. 112 Tyre
Lane. Grant Wolfe's address.
Rowan pulled into the empty driveway and adjusted the rear view mirror onto his
face. He noted his eyes, the color of the sea, inquisitive and wide and
(surprisingly) only somewhat panicked. Summer had come and gone in a flash but
you couldn't see it on his face - which was still pale as snow. He looked as
out of place as he felt.
Gradually he left the comfort of the delivery van and faced the bungalow. It
looked very much like a home: golden squares of windows, red brick, and a
rustic yet immaculate porch.
Rowan steadied his breath as he walked up the porch steps. He knew why he was
here. He'd come all this way. No use turning back now.
Before he even had the chance to knock, a nearby sound interrupted. A dull
thwack. Silence. Another thwack. More silence. Yet another thwack! Kind of
like... like...
Wood being chopped?
It seemed to come from behind the bungalow, perhaps the backyard. He retraced
his steps back to the driveway and around the side of the building. Nothing
fenced in the property, it was simply a wide clearing of grass that led into
the forest.
The first thing Rowan saw as he rounded the corner to the backyard was a man,
barechested. He was facing the woods, an axe in hand and a pile of split wood
at his feet. Rowan could only see the broadness of his shoulders and the sweat
dancing down the deep olive tan of his extraordinary back muscles.
His first thought was that this couldn't possibly be Grant, couldn't be the man
struck with illness or a disability who needed the services of their delivery
program. It was similarly difficult to imagine this man kicking back to read The Time Traveler's Wife of all things.
Maybe he was Grant's caregiver or a... very resourceful brother.
Rowan cleared his throat. "Excuse me, sir?"
A moment passed and the man raised the axe skyward. Though he was nowhere near
it, Rowan took a step back. With one smooth and studied motion, the man brought
the axe down and split a chunk of wood with that familiar dull thwack.
Impressive, but he'd made no effort to acknowledge Rowan's question.
"Sir? I'm sorry to bother you. Does a Grant Wolfe live here?"
Rowan tried very hard not to notice the man's sweat dripping into the low waist
of his jeans. The man stood panting, muscles clenching and relaxing, clenching
and relaxing. He raked his fingers through his hair, which was damp and dark as
the night sky.
Puzzled, Rowan moved a cautious step forward. He didn't understand why he was
receiving the silent treatment, he hadn't said anything rude. He was certainly
speaking loud enough to be heard.
"Sir, please, am I at the right address?"
He moved closer, raising a friendly hand and even waving it to grab his
attention. Then movement, finally. The man's head turned a quarter inch, enough
for Rowan to finally be seen in his peripheral vision.
After what seemed like an impossibly long and awkward pause, the man turned
around and fixed Rowan with the most intense grey eyes he'd ever seen. His
bare, hairy torso was slick with sweat and heaving with the physical effort of
the wood chopping.
"Hello," Rowan pushed out. His entire body quivered. Nerves? Excitement? Even
desire? He couldn't tell which was which. He just knew they were all there.
"I'm looking for Grant Wolfe. Does he live here? Can you tell me where he is?"
The man's eyes lowered to Rowan's lips as he talked. The intensity of his gaze
sharpened, as if he were following along to a story only he could read. Then he
nodded and tapped his chest a couple of times.
Grant, he mouthed without saying
anything.
"Oh, okay. Hi, I'm Rowan Watson from the Toronto Public Library. I'm here to
talk to you about your application to our home delivery program."
The silence returned.
He stared up at Grant, his entire being engulfed by his presence. This man was
damn tall, six-foot-five at the very least. Though much of it was obscured by
the dark forest of his beard, his face was sculpted and ruddy, with a strong
nose and firm lips. His torso was almost too much to take in at once, so Rowan
processed it in stolen glimpses: the swell of his furry pecs, a stomach he
could do his laundry on, and an enticing, damp line of hair that divided his
abs and disappeared into the wilderness of his tight jeans. He looked very much
like a man of the woods, sawdust and dirt clinging to his wet skin.
And he needed books delivered to him?
Grant's attention had been at Rowan's lips again, and when he continued to say
nothing, the young librarian tried a second time. Nerves made the words come
faster than he could control. "I'm from the Toronto Public Library, and I need
to verify a few details about your Home Library Services application to
determine your eligibility and..."
Still no reaction. When Rowan started a third attempt, Grant interrupted.
"I can speechread." His voice was deep and booming, like a tree trunk hitting
the forest ground. Rowan felt the vibrations right in his chest. But there was
a halting, careful quality to it. "You need to speak
slower." He gestured one hand over his arm and trailed it up to his perfectly
sculpted bicep. "Slower."
It all clicked together. 'Speechreading'. Then the gesture - Slower. That was American Sign Language.
He's deaf, Rowan finally realized. Or hard of hearing. Oh my god, you idiot. You
couldn't have figured that out before? And he's a patron! Who you were ogling!
The audience watching the movie about your life is throwing popcorn at the
screen right now.
"I'm so sorry. I didn't know."
"That's okay." Grant then fingerspelled the letters O and K.
"I know... a little signing. I took a class once." Rowan tried to sign learn and little and signing but his movements were hesitant and
slow. That class had been years ago and it was for beginners. His brain was now
full of comparatively useless things: the Dewey Decimal system, circulation
policies, and where all the Jojo Moyes books were shelved.
Grant watched him try and seemed to understand, though his face portrayed no
emotion. He extended an arm toward his bungalow. "Do you want to sit?"
"Sure. Thank you," Rowan exhaled, grateful that the attention was no longer on
his terrible signing. His face was boiling hot, he could only imagine how
anxious he must have looked. As they headed toward the house, Grant's back
muscles glistening in the sunlight, Rowan found himself desperately trying to
recall the sign for Help.
Something told him he'd need it.
End of Chapter 1
To Be Continued
Thanks for reading the start of Rowan and Grant's adventures! Please send all
comments and feedback to: neworderinthesun@gmail.com
Or support me on Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/QuinnDK