Kiss Her Once for Me (14)

I am still crying in an empty aisle at nine in the morning.

“I guess you’re my only friend now,” I tell the footstool next to me. “You won’t abandon me at Christmas like my mother, will you?”

Incidentally, the two-foot-tall stool does not respond to my pathetic question. A well-adjusted individual wouldn’t be talking to inanimate objects in public, but I am medium adjusted at best, so I continue. “If Linds was your mom,” I tell the footstool, “you would be crying in a bookstore, too.”

I turn back to the shelves, searching for Fun Home. Because nothing says “wallow in your feelings of family dysfunction” quite like Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir. I spot the bright green spine and reach for it, and… someone else reaches for it at the same time.

There was no one in the aisle, and then suddenly, a person. My arm brushes someone else’s arm, my hand brushes someone else’s hand. A hand with long fingers, dark knuckles, squared-off nails. It’s the kind of rugged hand I instantly itch to draw.

I freeze. The owner of the other hand freezes. Two hands suspended in front of the spine of Fun Home. My eyes follow the hand to its surprisingly delicate wristbone, to the peekaboo of tattoos beneath a khaki sleeve, then all the way up to the face of this stranger.

The face that is way too close. I register an intense pair of brown eyes behind hip Warby Parker frames, prominent cheekbones, a smattering of freckles on light brown skin, a full mouth with a little white scar like an apostrophe through their upper lip. And then I’m taking a massive step backward to put socially acceptable space between us, but the fucking footstool catches my heel, and I begin to topple over. The stranger moves quickly and grabs the wrist of my coat to keep me upright.

I’m briefly grateful for the help, until I remember the crying and the talking-to-a-footstool and the statistical likelihood that this stranger witnessed both of these things. Then, my anxiety feels like a knot of tangled Christmas lights inside my chest.

I flinch away. “Uh… sorry.”

The stranger seems, for the moment, entirely unfazed by my socially awkward behavior. They reach for the copy of Fun Home, then slowly turn to face me. “Are you okay?” they ask in a surprisingly loud voice for such a sensitive question. Their voice booms like a drum in the empty aisle, but it’s also coarse and low, like sandpaper on untreated wood.

“Completely fine,” I croak.

They arch a black eyebrow at me. “Are you sure? Because you’re crying in a bookstore on Christmas Eve.”

“I—I wasn’t crying.”

They arch a second eyebrow, creating a look of surprise on what I’m beginning to notice is a rather attractive face. “You know I can see you, right? There are still tears in your eyes.” They gesture to my friend. “And you told this footstool you’re crying.”

“What footstool?” I ask in a ridiculous attempt at self-preservation. I even sort of shift my body, as if blocking the footstool will somehow erase my humiliation from this stranger’s memory.

“That footstool.” They point around me. “The one you just tripped over.”

“I wasn’t talking to a footstool.” The anxiety is causing unprecedented amounts of verbal idiocy, and I wait for this person to slowly back away from me. Instead, they bite the corner of their mouth, pinning a smile in place.

“Huh. I guess I must’ve misheard,” they say with a shrug. “Someone the next aisle over must have been talking to a footstool about their shitty mom.”

I nod. “I’ve heard it’s a common situation at this particular bookstore.”

At that, they burst out laughing. They’re laughing at me, and it’s not a particularly flattering laugh. It contains some combination of honking and snorting, and it’s so loud, I’m pretty sure it can be heard all the way on the fourth floor. But the sound of this atrocious laugh is enough to loosen the tangled anxiety in my chest by a smidge, enough so that I’m able to take full stock of this other person.

They look like nineties Keanu Reeves mixed with nineties Leonardo DiCaprio, but with the subtlest hint of curves beneath their clothes. Their hair is black, shaved on one side and long on the other, so it flops over their forehead. They’re wearing heavy work boots, loose-fitting jeans, and a flannel beneath a khaki jacket—none of which is appropriate attire for the snow in the forecast. They have wide shoulders, muscular thighs, and an easy-limbed indifference I could never channel no matter how hard I tried. There’s something solid about them. Grounded. Fixed. They are also tall—at five foot ten, I don’t have to look up to meet people’s eyes often, and I find it disorienting now.

“Do you work here?” I ask, because they have the look of someone who could lift a forty-pound box of books while simultaneously scolding you for mispronouncing Sartre, some kind of hot bookstore fantasy.

“Nope,” they say, flashing me the cover of Fun Home tucked under their arm. “I just had the typical Christmas urge to read a depressing graphic novel about a lesbian.”

“Did you… um…?” I swallow. “I mean, did you just come down this aisle because you saw me crying?”

The stranger smiles then, a quarter-moon curling only one edge of their mouth. “I thought you said you weren’t crying?”

The heat creeps up my cheeks because pretty people with freckles make me oh-so-stupid.