Auden surveys the room—empty, save for St. Sebastian—and then walks toward him and the recalcitrant computer.
“How can I help?” Auden says, as if last Monday never happened and they were starting fresh, trying this whole thing again from scratch. “Is it not working properly?”
“It won’t turn on,” St. Sebastian says, too blank with surprise to do anything but answer the question.
Auden nods, once, and then strips off his coat and folds it neatly over the chair. It’s nothing really, something polite people do in public every day, and yet the sight of Auden disrobing with such purpose, draping his coat over the chair with such care, has St. Sebastian flushing.
Auden comes over and gracefully kneels under the long table that houses the library’s six public computers, and begins working, p
