Book Lovers(35)

“Who?”

Libby flips me off. I loudly kiss the side of her head on my way to the door with my laptop bag. “Don’t go anywhere from Once in a Lifetime without me!” she screams.

I cut myself off before Not sure those places even exist can spew out of me. For the first time in months, we feel like the us of a different time—fully connected, fully present—and the last thing I want is some uncontrollable variable messing things up. “Promise,” I say.





10





AFTER PAYING FOR my iced Americano at Mug + Shot, I ask the chipper barista with the septum piercing for the Wi-Fi password.

“Oh!” She gestures to a wooden sign behind her reading, Let’s unplug! “No Wi-Fi here. Sorry.”

“Wait,” I say, “really?”

She beams. “Yep.”

I glance around. No laptops in sight. Everyone here looks like they came straight from climbing Everest or doing drugs in a Coachella yurt.

“Is there a library or something?” I ask.

She nods. “A few blocks down. No Wi-Fi there yet either—supposed to get it in the fall. For now they’ve got desktops you can use.”

“Is there anywhere in town with Wi-Fi?” I ask.

“The bookstore just got it,” she admits, quietly, like she’s hoping the words don’t trigger a stampede of coffee drinkers who would very much like to be un-unplugged.

I thank her and emerge into the sticky heat, sweat gathering in my armpits and cleavage as I trek toward the bookstore. When I step inside, it feels like I’ve just wandered into a maze, all the breezes, wind chimes, and bird chatter going quiet at once, that warm cedar-and-sunned-paper smell folding around me.

I sip my ice-cold drink and bask in the double-barreled serotonin coursing through me. Is there anything better than iced coffee and a bookstore on a sunny day? I mean, aside from hot coffee and a bookstore on a rainy day.

The shelves are built at wild angles that make me feel like I’m sliding off the edge of the planet. As a kid, I would’ve loved the whimsy of it—a fun house made of books. As an adult, I’m mostly concerned with staying upright.

On the left, a low, rounded doorway is cut into one of the shelves, its frame carved with the words Children’s Books.

I bend to peer through it to a soft blue-green mural, like something out of Madeline, words swirling across it: Discover new worlds! Off the other side of the main room, an average-sized doorway leads to the Used and Rare Book Room.

This main room isn’t exactly brimming with crisp new spines. As far as I can tell, there’s very little method to this store’s organization. New books mixed with old, paperbacks with hardcovers, and fantasy next to nonfiction, a not-so-fine layer of dust laid over most of it.

Once, I bet this place was a town jewel where people shopped for holiday presents and preteens gossiped over Frappuccinos. Now it’s another small-business graveyard.

I follow the labyrinthine shelves deeper into the store, past a doorway to the world’s most depressing “café” (a couple of card tables and some folding chairs), and around a corner, and I freeze for a millisecond, midstep, one foot hovering in the air.

Seeing the man hunched over his laptop behind the register, an unimpressed furrow in his brow, is like waking up from a nightmare where you’re falling off a cliff, only to realize your house has been scooped up by a tornado while you slept.

This is the problem with small towns: one minor lapse in judgment and you can’t go a mile without running into it.

All I want to do is turn and hightail it, but I can’t let myself do it. I won’t let one slipup, or any man, start governing my decisions. The whole reason to avoid workplace entanglements is to protect against this scenario. Besides, the entanglement was avoided. Mostly.

I square my shoulders and rise my chin. In that moment, for the very first time, I wonder if I might have a guardian angel, because directly across from me, on the local bestsellers shelf, sits a face-out stack of Once in a Lifetime.

I grab a copy and march up to the counter.

Charlie’s gaze doesn’t lift from his laptop until I’ve smacked the book onto the gouged mahogany.

His golden-brown eyes slowly rise. “Well. If it isn’t the woman who ‘isn’t stalking me.’?”

I grind out, “If it isn’t the man who ‘didn’t try to ravish me in the middle of a hurricane.’?”

His sip of coffee goes spewing back into his mug, and he glances toward the tragic café. “I certainly hope my high school principal was ready to hear that.”

I lean sideways to peer through the doorway. At one of the card tables, a stooped, gray-haired woman is watching The Sopranos on a tablet with only one earbud in. “Another one of your exes?”

That downward tick in the corner of his mouth. “I can tell you’re pleased with yourself when your eyes go all predatory like that.”

“And I can tell you are when you do that lip-twitch thing.”

“It’s called a smile, Stephens. They’re common here.”

“And by ‘here,’ you must mean Sunshine Falls, because you definitely aren’t referring to the five-foot radius of your electric fence.”

“Have to keep the locals away somehow.” His eyes drop to the book. “Finally biting the bullet and reading the whole thing?” he says dryly.