This was kind of an exercise. The basic idea is that every individual has different parts of their personality, and sometimes the parts don't all fit together neatly. I just exaggerated that a little, but hopefully "Dierdre" feels real...
As a result, this was a bear to categorize! All characters are consenting adults. Fair warning: there's some masochism but BDSM themes don't dominate (BA-dum-dum).
+++ RIGHT +++
Dierdre was thinking about stereotypes. She wasn't sure why, exactly, but people had some pretty bizarre ideas about her profession. They believed--or maybe just liked to imagine?--that young, pretty librarians dressed severely to hide or suppress perverted, hypersexual natures. Of course, she'd known plenty of examples over the past decade, and they didn't tend to be any more or less sexual than snybody else. Oh, they weren't prudes. On the contrary, they were perfectly comfortable reading and talking about overtly sexual topics, even that infamous BDSM-themed novel that had been popular amongst their patrons. But they did tend to hold themselves a little aloof in those conversations, smugly proud of the fact that porn needn't affect them on anything but an intellectual level.
Regardless, it amused her to note how much evidence there was that the BELIEF was real. The sheer volume of pornography on the topic suggested to her that men fantasized about librarians the way women fantasized about firemen: tongue-in-cheek, perhaps, but still popular. She suspected that many of the men with a librarian fetish never actually set foot in a library. Doubtless dreary reality would pollute the fantasy.
Still, sometimes exceptions proved the rule. Take herself, for example. She actually DID dress fairly severely, preferring wool skirts and her long hair invariably pinned up. She DID tend towards projecting a practical formality that some interpreted as stern. And goodness knows, she had a lot to hide. If the Board knew her better, she probably wouldn't be allowed to VOLUNTEER, let alone to run a little small town library.
That would be a shame. She really loved it here. A century or so ago, it had been one of the nicer family homes in the town: walnut wainscotting, molded plaster ceilings, stained glass tramsoms... even those "door and a half" entrances designed to accommodate hoop skirts. Her office used to be a butler's pantry, facing the old dining room where the computers now were. It was surprisingly cozy. The shelves that covered one wall all the way up to the twelve-foot ceilings used to be filled with... well, she didn't know, but imagined tureens, plate stands, that sort of thing... were now filled with her books. That is, NOT the library's. A personal research space was a welcome perq, and one thing they didn't lack was room. She kept it locked, of course. There was a second key at the front desk, just in case, but nobody had any reason to use it.
The patrons were generally fine. There were a few favorites who were worth talking to, and the more banal didn't ask for much of her. She was politely welcoming, but didn't encourage too much familiarity. She really was committed to serving the community, and providing a safe space, but she didn't have to be their friends to do that.
That didn't mean she was disinterested. She was actually fascinated by people, and wanted to know what motivated them, what went on below the surface. What secrets were imperfectly kept. She simply didn't choose to reciprocate. Besides, this way, she stayed objective. It made her a better observer.
In her position, there were PLENTY of ways to satisfy her curiosity. A few might have crossed a few ethical lines, but she made sure everything she did was technically legal. People would be surprised how much an intelligent, motivated person could piece together with surface details. Naturally, she could track what books people checked out. Combining a few hints of insider information with a well-chosen, seemingly neutral question or two nudged people into sharing a little more than they realized. Frankly, just LISTENING yielded surprising amounts of information. She usually kept music playing softly in the background: people whispered in a silent room, but even a little ambient noise subconsciously suggested it was 'safe' to speak normally.
There were cameras, of course. A few obvious closed-circuit cameras were positioned strategically at entrances, in the main rooms, etc., but those hadn't worked in years. They didn't need to: just knowing they were there constrained patrons' behavior sufficiently -- and she'd adopted a philosophical approach to theft. If someone needed to own a book that badly... well, it was one more way she served the community. She'd installed a few newer, more discrete ones, watching the darker corners where people might go with the expectation that they weren't being observed. Those feeds linked to the computer in her office. Usually, they didn't yield much: watching teenagers groping each other bored her. She'd note who was snogging whom in her notebook, but otherwise ignored them.
As a result, she knew quite a lot about what went on in the town, both in reality and in people's imaginations. Only rarely would she act on what she knew. After all, using the information wasn't the point: HAVING it was. She'd twice called the police with anonymous tips, but the only common result was that she might be a little nicer to some patrons than others -- never in a way that would reveal that she knew things she shouldn't. For example, she'd once surprised a married woman kissing a man other than her husband in one of the back corners. Mortified, the woman had approached her later that day, clearly ready to plead with her to keep what she'd seen to herself, promise it would never happen again, etc., etc. However, Dierdre also knew how the husband talked about his wife -- and to whom he'd been talking. So, she cut the woman off. "Good for you, dear," she'd said, patting the woman on the elbow and going back to work.
The computers were another source, but here she was on shakier ground. For example, she could legally access browser histories. Ethically, she was required to keep such information confidential, which she did. But the idea that she would actively CHECK histories, just out of curiosity... that would have raised a few eyebrows. Plus... well, the library was a public, child-friendly place, so of course pretty strict safeguards had been installed on the computers, limiting which sites one could access. But she'd purposefully 'forgotten' to install the safeguards on one particular computer -- one she could see from the desk in her office.
That's how she'd discovered one more exception that proved the rule. One patron clearly did have a pronounced librarian kink. With a little careful snooping, Dierdre had figured out he'd been writing pretty graphic stories along that theme, featuring a heroine that looked quite a bit like Dierdre herself.
