Free Bearing It All (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance) by Lynn Red

approached the front desk.
    “Hi,” he said. He’s an attractive guy, I guess, but about ten years too young to be my type.
    “Hey Quigley,” I said. I was finishing some filing, and he was just standing in front of the desk fidgeting. “What’s up?” I asked, turning from my computer to him.
    “Hey, uh,” he scratched one side of his ginger-haired head, then the other. “I was wondering, uh...”
    Please don’t ask me out again, please don’t ask me out again, I thought.
    “I was wondering, like...” He started habitually scratching his pronounced nose, very slowly. Imagine a wizard stroking his beard in thought, but instead of slowly stroking a beard, the wizard slowly scratched his nose. He’s a hyena, and hyenas scratch, but never this much. Either he was currently having a poison ivy problem, or he was going to ask me an embarrassing question.
    Oh God he’s going to ask me out again and I’m going to accidentally say yes. Why do I always manage to do that? You’d think I’d learn like one lesson ever in my life. Don’t go out with college kids unless you’re ready to pay for dinner and a lot of beer.
    “Look, Miss Larue, I was wondering, why doesn’t the library have any videogames?” he asked.
    I wasn’t listening though. I’d gotten myself so keyed up for an embarrassing date offer that I guess I wasn’t going to let all that mental preparation go to waste.
    “Quigley,” I said, “you’re a very nice guy and I’m sure you’re a lot of fun to be around. I respect your dad a great deal, and I hope he’s doing well, but I just can’t go out with you. I made it a rule not to date... wait a second,” I said. “What?”
    He was blushing so furiously I thought he might have actually caught on fire from the inside. “I... er... videogames?”
    “Oh God,” I said, laughing. “You weren’t asking me out.”
    I could have absolutely died. “Okay!” I said, letting out a slow whistle. “Right, so, fine, that was about as awkward as anything could possibly be. What are you actually asking me? Videogames?”
    “Yeah,” he said. “Uh, I mean, you got like books in here, right? And some movies? So like... why no videogames?”
    I could have kissed the kid for not trying to hit on me. It’s hard to explain but after two years behind this desk, I’ve trained myself to react to being the “young, pretty one” in the room. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t think of myself as either of those things, but college guys don’t really seem to notice.
    When something that wasn’t that happened, I tended to get a little flabbergasted. Luckily, I was rarely ever caught off guard. Certainly not like this.
    All I could do was chuckle. “Well,” I said. “I mean, we have books because it’s a library, and we’ve got a bunch of movies because there are film classes. And film classes need movies to get taught.”
    He held up a copy of Cobra , a Sylvester Stallone action movie from the early 80s. On the front, there was Sly with no shirt, and that sneer he always had on movie covers. “The film class uses this?”
    “I... well, no probably not,” I said. “But I’m gonna guess that you can guess why there aren’t any videogames here.”
    Quigley shrugged. “There’s a class in the English department about analyzing videogame stories.”
    I took a deep breath and sighed a little more irritably than I meant to sigh. “Of course there is. Seems like there’s a class for pretty much everything. How about that weird one in the Biology department about... you’re really serious about this videogame thing, aren’t you?”
    Suddenly I kinda wished Quigley was here to hit on me. At least I’m equipped to handle clumsy advances. Instead, he just crossed his arms. “They’re just as valid as anything else,” he said very sternly.
    “I like Super Mario Bros.,” I said, grasping at anything to say to relate in some way to this alien life form that was present in front of me. “Is