Book Lovers(47)

I nod. “She just made things better.” I can still smell her lemon-lavender scent, feel her arms around me, hear her voice—Let it out, sweet girl. Just one look and those five words, and it would all come spilling out. I do my best for Libby, but I’ve never had that kind of tenderness that slips past defenses.

When I look up, Charlie isn’t watching me so much as reading me, his eyes traveling back and forth over my face like he can translate each line and shadow into words. Like he can see me scrambling for a segue.

He clears his throat and hands me one. “I read some romance novels as a kid.”

My relief at the topic change rapidly morphs into something else, and Charlie laughs. “You couldn’t possibly look more evil right now, Stephens.”

“This is my delighted face,” I say. “Did they teach you anything helpful?”

He murmurs, “I could never share that information with a colleague.”

I roll my eyes. “So that would be a no.”

“Is that how you got into books? Your mom’s love of romance?”

I shake my head. “For me, it was this shop. Freeman Books.”

Charlie nods. “I know it.”

“We lived over it,” I explain. “Mrs. Freeman used to run all these programs, things that were free with the purchase of a book, and it made it easier for our mom to justify spending money. I was never stressed out there, you know? I’d forget about everything. It felt like I could go anywhere, do anything.”

“A good bookstore,” Charlie says, “is like an airport where you don’t have to take your shoes off.”

“In fact,” I say, “it’s discouraged.”

“Sometimes I think Goode Books could use a sign about it,” he replies. “It’s the reason I never tell customers to make themselves at home.”

“Right, because then the shoes and bras go flying, and the Marvin Gaye starts playing at top volume.”

“For every kernel of information you offer, Stephens,” he says, “there are a hundred new questions. And yet I still don’t know how you got into agenting.”

“Mrs. Freeman made these shelf-talker cards for us to fill out,” I explain. “Book Lovers Recommend, they said—that’s what she called us, her little book lovers. So I guess I started to think about books more critically.”

The crevice under his lip turns into an outright crevasse. “So you started leaving scathing reviews?”

“I got super stingy with my recommendations,” I reply. “And then I started just changing things as I read; fixing endings if Libby didn’t like how they played out, or if all the main characters were boys, I’d add a girl with strawberry blond hair.”

“So you were a child editor,” Charlie says.

“That’s what I wanted to do. I started working at the shop in high school and stayed there all through undergrad, saving up for Emerson’s publishing program. Then my mom died, and I became Libby’s legal guardian, so I had to put it off. A couple of years later, Mrs. Freeman passed away too, and her son had to cut half the staff to make ends meet. I managed to get an admin job at a literary agency, and the rest is history.”

There was more to it, of course. The year of balancing two jobs, napping in the hours between shifts. The knack I discovered for talking down panicking authors when their agents were out of office. The eventual bestselling novels I’d pulled out of the slush pile and forwarded to my bosses.

The offer to come on as a junior agent, and the list of cons I wrote out: I’d have to leave my waitressing gig; working on commission was risky; there was a chance I’d land us in the exact hole I’d been digging us out of since Mom’s death.

And then, in both the pro and con columns: now that I’d had a taste of working with books, how could I ever be happy with anything else?

“I gave myself three years,” I tell Charlie, “and a dollar amount I’d need to make, and if I didn’t reach it, I promised I’d quit and look for something salaried.”

“How early did you make your deadline?”

I feel my smile curve involuntarily. “Eight months.”

His lips curve too. Smiling with knives. “Of course you did,” he murmurs. Our eyes lock for a beat. “What about editing?”

I feel the dent in my chin before I’ve even lied. The first few years, I checked job listings compulsively. Once I even went to an interview. But I was about to push through a huge sale, and I was terrified to be locked into a lower salary with an entry-level position. Three days before my second interview, I canceled it.

“I’m good at agenting,” I reply. “What about you? How’d you end up in publishing?”

He scrubs one hand up the back of his salt-and-pepper curls. “I had a lot of problems in school when I was small,” he says. “Couldn’t focus. Things didn’t click. Got held back.”

I try to rein in my surprise.

“You don’t have to do that,” he says, amused.

“Do what?”

“The Shiny, Polite Nora thing,” he says. “If you’re aghast at my failure, then just be aghast. I can take it.”

“It’s not that,” I say. “You just put off this . . . academic vibe. I would’ve expected you to be, like, a Rhodes scholar, with a tattoo of the Bodleian Library on your ass.”