Chapter 2: The Blackout Temptation
That evening, the weight of the unspoken hung around Marie’s neck like a lead apron. Her children’s chatter about school and soccer practice seemed to come from another room, through a fog. “Mom, are you listening?” her daughter asked, waving a hand in front of her face. Marie blinked, forcing a smile. “Of course, honey. The goal. That’s wonderful.” Her mind was elsewhere, trapped in the memory of a crowded stockroom and the invisible charge that had pulsed in the air when Malik Johnson lifted a box.
Later, as she and her husband, Luc, cleared the dinner plates, he asked his customary question. “So, how was your day? Anything interesting happen at the kingdom of quiet?” He said it with affection, a little joke between them.
“Nothing special,” Marie said, the lie smooth and practiced on her tongue. She turned to the sink, running water over a plate to hide her face. “The usual. Reshelving. A few research queries. Nothing at all.” The words tasted like ash. She was cataloging a sin that hadn’t even happened, filing it under ‘Guilty Thoughts.’
In bed that night, with Luc breathing softly beside her, sleep was a distant country. She lay rigid on her back, staring at the faint crack in the ceiling she knew by heart. Her mind, however, was a riot of unwanted cinema. It replayed the way Malik’s t-shirt had stretched across his back, the precise definition of his shoulders, the effortless power in his movement as he’d placed the heavy box on the high shelf. A deep, unfamiliar warmth pooled low in her abdomen, a slow, molten ache that both shamed and thrilled her. She turned onto her side, pressing her thighs together, as if she could physically stifle the sensation. It didn’t work. The phantom image of him, his size, his quiet, contained strength, refused to fade.
The next morning, she arrived at the library armed with a fierce, brittle determination. She would be the consummate professional. She would not think about him. She buried herself in an inventory of the Slavic literature section, her fingers flying over the keyboard, her focus absolute.
It was a doomed campaign. He was a force of nature in her orderly world, impossible to ignore. From the main floor, through the window into the atrium, she saw him in the loading bay, heaving crates of new books from a truck. His arms, bare now in a grey tank top, were thick with corded muscle, the sunlight catching on the sweat that glistened on his skin. Another time, she passed the open door of a study room he was setting up for an event, watching as he moved a heavy oak table by himself, the muscles in his legs and back straining beautifully. He saw her each time. Each time, he offered that same polite, almost formal nod. “Morning, Marie.” “Afternoon, Mrs. Dubois.” His respect was a wall, and it maddened her even as it should have reassured her.
At lunch, she sat in the staff room with a cluster of other women—Betty from Circulation, Lin from Archives, and Sarah from Children’s. The talk meandered through overdue fines, teenage children’s dramas, and the universal fatigue of married life. Then Lin, her eyes gleaming, leaned forward.
“So, the new guy in Handling,” she began, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “Malik. Good lord.”
A ripple of laughter and murmured agreement went around the table. Sarah fanned herself theatrically. “I nearly walked into a doorframe yesterday just watching him carry those encyclopedias. It’s not fair.”
“If I were ten years younger and single,” Betty sighed, taking a bite of her salad. “I’d be finding every reason to need something from the basement.”
Marie kept her eyes on her yogurt, stirring it slowly. “He’s very efficient,” she said, her voice neutral.
“Efficient isn’t the word I’d use,” Lin chuckled. Then she smirked, looking around. “Okay, I have to ask. It’s the elephant in the room. Or, maybe not an elephant…” She paused for effect. “A man built like that… do you think everything is… proportional?”
The table erupted in a burst of giggles and half-scandalized exclamations. “Lin!” Sarah gasped, but she was grinning.
“Come on, we’re all thinking it! He’s a giant. It stands to reason.”
Marie felt a flush creep up from her chest to her throat. The slow warmth from the night before rekindled deep in her belly, a direct, visceral reaction to the crude speculation. She took a sip of water, her hand unsteady.
It was Betty who delivered the final, devastating piece of intelligence. She lowered her voice even further. “You know Marla, the evening cleaner? Well, she told me last week she accidentally walked into the men’s locker room near closing time. He was just coming out of the shower. Towel around his waist, but… not quite enough.” Betty’s eyes were wide. “She said she almost dropped her mop bucket. She swore to me it was… it was like a horse. I mean, substantially above average. Her word.”
A stunned silence fell over the group. The crunch of a potato chip sounded obscenely loud. Marie’s mouth had gone completely dry. Each woman was momentarily locked in her own private visualization, the gossip now furnished with a terrifying, thrilling credibility. Marie’s mind, treacherous and vivid, supplied the image: steam, taut wet skin, the white towel, the formidable, heavy suggestion beneath it.
The conversation fractured quickly after that, as if they’d all glimpsed something too hot to hold. They drifted back to work, to the safety of invoices and patron complaints. Marie returned to her sorting station in the back room, her fingers mechanically placing books on the cart. But her mind was a riot.
Would she be tempted? The question pulsed in time with her heartbeat. The thought alone was a betrayal. She was thirty-seven. A mother. She loved Luc. They had a life, a history, a family. Malik was a boy, a student, a fleeting presence. Twelve years her junior. It was ridiculous. It was grotesque.
She repeated these facts like a mantra, stacking the virtues of her life like bricks against a rising tide. But the other voice, the one that had warmed in the darkness of her bedroom, whispered of something else. It whispered of the sheer, awesome physicality of him. It wondered what it would feel like to have that power focused on her, to be overwhelmed by it, to have those large, capable hands on her skin. The cleaning lady’s words echoed: like a horse.
She finished sorting the cart, her movements precise and automatic. The chapter of her day was closing, the routine reasserting itself. But the library’s silence now felt different. It wasn’t peaceful. It was anticipatory, humming with a potential she both feared and, in a dark, secret part of herself, longed to see rupture. She loved her husband. She repeated it one more time, a fragile shield against the image of Malik Johnson that refused to be shelved.