Was there a thing in this world that you would not do for love?

Silly question, really.

Arlen often found himself asking it, anyways.

It was hard, most days, when all he wanted to do was talk to people, all he wanted was to make a difference, or an impact or—

He just wanted to be noticed.

There was little, Arlen could admit, that he would not do if it meant that he would be welcomed into the ever-moving, fickle sort of creature that was the goalpost of acceptance. He was always too much of one thing or another, always too little of others.

He was never just right, not for anything, and he craved that, yearned for that feeling, so he chased it in the only way he knew how and found love that cut like shrapnel in the arms of people who didn’t wish him well.

He was only barely 18 when he fell into his first relationship, and gods—he had been naive. Bright-eyed, open-hearted—he had tripped over himself for a chance at being held, being known by someone other than the monsters under his bed and the voices in his mind.

He had experienced, in that, what he suspected love was as a verb—an action, something you could do and undo with a note of carelessness that he had never made acquaintance with until then.

Fairy tale love, and books, the little librarian had decided, suited him much better. So he had hidden away in the pages of them, lost to the world like an astronaut,

Far from earth, but happier for it. He didn’t need humanity any more than it seemed to need him.

… Or so he told himself.

When he was 20, he fell in love again. He cursed himself for it even then, and doubly so now; he hadn’t needed hindsight to see that it wouldn’t end well but, oh, what was he if not a romantic? And those shelves he had been lost in spoke of unlikely happiness found in even the worst of places.

Love, Arlen decided, was not for him. And it had only taken another broken heart to teach him that. He didn’t ever want to pick himself up off the ground like that, didn’t want to suffer the shame of it.

But life had different plans. She was not so easily swayed by the word “no” as one might think she ought to be.

Arlen Halibert was falling in love again, with red hair and hazel eyes, with sarcasm and soft smiles, and even the cynicism that made the librarian ache for everything that one must have suffered to reach such an opinion of the planet, of oneself.

Perhaps it was all a bad idea. Perhaps he was only setting himself up for another failure, another shortcoming, another lonely night, lying ruined and broken in his own sheets, wondering if he was just made wrong.

But third time’s a charm, right?

And maybe, just maybe—this time he would end up with something magical.