The next Friday

It was about three o’clock when David rolled into Chesterville in his Focus, having finished up the last of the finals about an hour earlier. He didn’t admit it to himself, but the fact that he and Amanda had called each other on that Tuesday and decided to meet on Friday rather than Saturday was the main reason why he’d been working late into the nights judging his students’ tests and essays all throughout the week, so as to ensure that all he had to do when the last class was through that day was to hop into his car and drive to Chesterville for a nice time rummaging through the archives with Amanda.

Amanda, it turned out when David met her outside her workplace, was casually attired in a white t-shirt which revealed to David once and for all that her breasts were more than a handful, and a pair of tight denims which did almost as good a job of showing off the appealing shape of her legs as the cut-offs she’d been wearing when they first met, while her blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her glasses rested halfway down her nose.

“Hi,” Amanda greeted David, finding herself admiring how he looked as he stood before her in his baggy khaki chinos and with his white shirt unbuttoned so that the equally white t-shirt that he was wearing underneath it was showing, and she felt quite nervous and a bit awkward about being in his presence as she stretched out her hand to greet him.

“Hello,” David shook Amanda’s hand, trying his best to ignore the tingle going up his arm from the feel of her skin against his.

“So,” Amanda broke the short silence which had followed their greeting, “should we head inside?”

“Yeah…” David replied, feeling quite sheepish over not having thought of anything to say as they had stood in front of each other. Still, at least he had remembered to let go off her hand.

The county archives were located below ground level, which was very proper for an archive, and was of the sort of dimly lit and slightly gloomy variety that David had become accustomed to during his college days.

Through her diligent work since her hiring, Amanda had it so that there was now only one room remaining which was still suffering her predecessor’s poor efforts and that was the one that the two of them would be working their way through.

The room consisted of an island of filing cabinets in the centre and shelves filled to the brim with books and boxes running along the walls, and the whole thing looked much less like a mess than David had first pictured it when Amanda had told him of her work situation.

“Is it okay if we start with you giving me a hand for a couple of hours before I show you a few things that might interest you?” Amanda asked him as they stood side by side just inside the doorway.

“Sure.”

“Thanks,” Amanda smiled at him again, “So, you’ll be working your way through those cabinets, which should be a proper mess. You’ll have to go through each folder, and then pick it out and tell me about it when you find something that isn’t where it should be. I’m guessing that that’ll be about every other folder or something like that.” Amanda informed David of his job for the day.

“Right, and where will you be in all this?” David asked.

“Working my way through the shelves,” Amanda explained, “that’s what I’ve been doing for a while now, and it’s interesting how it’s just a giant mess of just about everything that might end up in an archive.”

“I really can’t thank you enough for helping me out with this,” Amanda said as she took the lid of a box and began to work her way through its contents.

“It’s my pleasure,” David replied, before busying himself with helping her out.

Over the next hour, David came to fully understand how the task of organizing the archive so that it would actually work like an archive should was such a time-consuming job: when he found a folder which wasn’t were it was supposed to be, he first had to look up in which room it was supposed to be, then go there and find the correct cabinet, open that, flip his way through the folders until he found the two folders nearest in their designated sequence as the one in his hands, and then return to where he had started off before finding another misplaced folder a few moments later and having to do the whole thing all over again.

Eventually though, he got to hear Amanda’s excited voice as she told him “David, I think I’ve found something that you’ll want to see.”