Book Lovers

5

MY PHONE BUZZES with an incoming email, and Charlie’s name is bolded across the screen. The words distracted by two gin martinis and a platinum blond shark flash across my mind like a casino’s neon sign, part thrill, part warning.

I don’t want my work email to get flagged, but there are so many excerpts of this book I can’t unread. I’m in a horror movie and I won’t be freed of this curse until I’ve inflicted it on someone else.

Technically, Charlie already has my phone number from my email signature; the question is whether to invite him to use it.

Pro: Maybe there’d be a natural opening to mention I’m in Sunshine Falls, thus lowering the risk of an awkward run-in.

Con: Do I really want my professional nemesis texting me Bigfoot erotica?

Pro: Yes I do. I’m curious by nature, and at least this way, the exchange of information is happening over private channels rather than professional ones.

I type out my phone number and hit send.

By then it’s time for my check-in call with Dusty, a twenty-minute conversation that might as well just be me playing jock jams and running circles around her, chanting her name. I throw the word genius out a half dozen times, and by the time we hang up, I’ve convinced her to turn in the first chunk of her next book — even if it’s rough — so her editor, Sharon, can get started while Dusty finishes writing.

Afterward, I rejoin Libby where she’s primping in the bathroom, curling her freshly pink hair into soft ringlets. “Let’s walk to dinner,” she says. “My neck is sore from that last cab ride. Also it made me pee myself.”

“I remember,” I say. “It made you pee me too.”

She glances over my outfit. “You sure you want to wear those shoes?”

I’ve paired my black backless sheath with black mules, my widest heels. She’s in a daisy-print sundress from the nineties and white sandals.

“If you offer to lend me your Crocs again, I’m going to sue you for emotional damages.”

She balks. “After that comment, you don’t deserve my Crocs.”

On the hike down the hillside, I attempt to hide my struggle, but based on Libby’s gleeful smirk, she definitely notices that my heels keep puncturing the grass and spiking me into place.

The sun has gone down, but it’s still oppressively hot, and the mosquito population is raging. I’m used to rats — most run away at the sight of a person, and the rest basically just hold out tiny hats to beg for bits of pizza. Mosquitoes are worse. I’ve got six new red welts by the time we reach the edge of the town square.

Libby hasn’t gotten bitten once. She bats her lashes. “I must be too sweet for them.”

“Or maybe you’re pregnant with the Antichrist and they recognize you as their queen.”

She nods thoughtfully. “I could use the excitement, I guess.” She pauses at the very empty crosswalk and scans the equally desolate city center, her mouth shrinking as she considers it. “Huh,” she says finally. “It’s . . . sleepier than I expected.”

“Sleepy is good, right?” I say, a bit too eagerly. “Sleepy means relaxing.”

“Right.” She sort of shakes herself, and her smile returns. “Exactly. That’s why we’re here.” She looks more quizzical than devastated when we pass the general-store-turned-pawnshop, and I make a big deal of pointing out Mug + Shot to distract her.

“It smelled amazing,” I insist. “We’ll have to go tomorrow.”

She brightens further, like she’s on a dimmer switch powered by my optimism. And if that’s the case, I’m prepared to be optimistic as hell.

Next, we pass a beauty parlor. (“Okay, definitely should’ve just gotten our hair cut here,” Libby says, though I silently disagree, based on the dripping-blood-style letters on the sign and the fact that they spell out Curl Up N Dye.) After a couple more empty storefronts, there’s a greasy-spoon diner, another dive bar, and a bookshop (which we pledge to return to, despite its dusty and lackluster window display). At the end of the block, there’s a big wooden building with rusty metal letters reading, mysteriously, POPPA SQUAT.

By then, Libby’s distracted by her phone, texting Brendan as she shuffles along beside me. She’s still smiling, but it’s a rigid expression, and it almost looks like she’s on the verge of tears. Her stomach is growling and her face is pink from the heat, and I can imagine her texts are something along the lines of Maybe this whole thing was a mistake, and a sudden desperation swells in me. I need to turn this around, fast, starting with finding food.

I stop abruptly beside the wooden building and peer into its tinted windows. Without looking up from her phone, Libby asks, “Are you spying on someone?”

“I’m looking into the window of Poppa Squat’s.”

Her eyes lift slowly. “What . . . the hell . . . is a poppa squat?”

“Well . . .” I point up at the sign. “It’s either a very large public bathroom or a bar and grill.”

“WHY?” Libby screams in a mix of delight and dismay, any remnant of her disappointment vanishing. “Why does that exist?!” She plasters herself against the dark window, trying to see in.

“I have no answers for you, Libby.” I sidestep to haul one of the heavy wooden doors open. “Sometimes the world is a cruel, mysterious place. Sometimes people become warped, twisted, so ill at a soul level that they would name a dining establishment—”

“Welcome to Poppa Squat!” a curly-haired waif of a hostess says. “How many are in your party?”

“Two, but we’re eating for five,” Libby says.

“Oh, congratulations!” the hostess says brightly, eyeing each of our stomachs whilst trying to perform an invisible math problem.

“I don’t even know this woman,” I say, tipping my head toward Libby. “She’s just been following me for three blocks.”

“Okay, rude,” my sister says. “It’s been much more than three blocks — it’s like you don’t even see me.”

The hostess seems uncertain.

I cough. “Two, please.”

She hesitantly waves toward the bar. “Well, our bar is full-service, but if you’d like a table . . .”

“The bar’s fine,” Libby assures her. The hostess hands us each a menu that’s about . . . oh, forty pages too long, and we slide onto pleather-topped stools, setting our purses on the sticky bar and scanning our surroundings in a silence driven by either shock or awe.

This place looks like a Cracker Barrel had a baby with a honky-tonk, and now that baby is a teenager who doesn’t shower enough and chews on his sweatshirt sleeves.

The floors and walls alike are dark, mismatched wooden planks, and the ceiling is corrugated metal. Pictures of local sports teams are framed alongside HOME IS WHERE THE FOOD IS needlepoints and glowing Coors signs. The bar runs along the left side of the restaurant, and in one corner a couple of pool tables are gathered, while in the corner opposite, a jukebox sits beside a shallow stage. There are more people in this one building than I’ve seen in the rest of Sunshine Falls combined, but still, the place manages to look desolate.

I flip open the menu and start to peruse. Easily thirty percent of the listed items are just various deep-fried things. You name it, Poppa Squat can fry it.

The bartender, a preternaturally gorgeous woman with thick, dark waves and a handful of constellation tattoos on her arms comes to stand in front of me, her hands braced against the bar. “What can I get you?”

Like the coffee shop/horse farm guy, she looks less like a bartender than like someone who would play a bartender on a sexy soap opera.

What’s in the water here?

“Dirty martini,” I tell her. “Gin.”

“Soda water and lime, please,” Libby says.

The bartender moves off, and I go back to skimming page five of the menu. I’ve made it to salads. Or at least that’s what they’re calling them, though if you put ranch dressing and Doritos on a bed of lettuce, I think you’re taking liberties with the word.

When the bartender returns, I try to order the Greek.

She winces. “You sure?”

“Not anymore.”

“We’re not known for our salads,” she explains.

“What are you known for?”

She waves a hand toward the glowing Coors Light sign behind her shoulder.

“What are you known for, with regard to food?” I clarify.

She says, “To be known isn’t necessarily to be admired.”

“What do you recommend,” Libby tries, “other than Coors?”

“The fries are good,” she says. “Burger’s okay.”

“Veggie burger?” I ask.

She purses her lips. “It won’t kill you.”

“Sounds perfect,” I say. “I’ll have one of those, and some fries.”

“Same,” Libby adds.

Despite her insistence that the burger won’t kill us, the bartender’s shrug reads, Your funeral, bitches!

Libby seems totally fine, happy even, but there’s still a kernel of anxiety in my gut, and I accidentally drink my entire martini before our food arrives. I’m tipsy enough that everything’s taking me longer than it should. Libby scarfs her burger down and hops up to use the bathroom before I’ve made a dent in mine.

My phone vibrates on the sticky counter, and I’m one hundred percent expecting it to be Charlie.

It’s a zillion times better.

Dusty has finally turned in part of her manuscript, and not a minute too soon — her editor goes out on maternity leave in a month.

Thank you all so much for your patience — I know this schedule hasn’t been ideal for you, but it means so much that you trust me enough to let me work in the way that serves me best. I have a complete first draft, but have only had a chance to clean and tighten this first bit. I hope to have several more chapters to you within the week, but hopefully this gives you an idea of what to expect.

I tap open the attached document, titled Frigid 1.0.

It starts with Chapter One. Always a good sign that an author hasn’t gone full Jack-Torrance-locked-up-with-his-typewriter-in-the-Overlook. I resist the urge to scroll through to the end, a tic I’ve had since I was a kid, when I realized there were too many books in the world and not enough time. I’ve always used it as a litmus test for whether I want to read a book or not, but given that this is a client’s work, I’m going be reading the whole thing no matter what.

So instead my eyes skim over the first line, and it hits like a gut punch.

They called her the Shark.

“What the fuck,” I say. An older man at the end of the bar jerks his head up from his watery soup and scowls. “Sorry,” I grumble, and train my eyes on the screen again.

They called her the Shark, but she didn’t mind. The name fit. For one thing, sharks could only swim forward. As a rule, Nadine Winters never looked back. Her life was predicated on rules, many of which served to ease her conscience.

If she looked back, she’d see the trail of blood. Moving forward, all there was to think about was hunger.

And Nadine Winters was hungry.

For a minute I’m actually hoping to discover that Nadine Winters is a literal shark. That Dusty has written the talking-animal story of Charlie Lastra’s nightmares. But four lines down, a word jumps out as if, rather than Times New Roman, it’s written in Curl Up N Dye’s bloodcurdling font.

AGENT.

Dusty’s main character, the Shark, is an agent.

I backtrack to the word right before it. Film.

Film agent. Not literary agent. The differentiation does nothing to loosen the knot in my chest, or to quiet the rush of blood in my ears.

Unlike me, Nadine Winters has jet-black hair and blunt bangs.

Like me, she only skips heels when she’s working out.

Unlike me, she takes Krav Maga every morning instead of virtual classes on her Peloton.

Like me, she orders a salad with goat cheese every time she eats out with a client and drinks her gin martinis dirty — never more than one. She hates any loss of control.

Like me, she never leaves the house without a full face of makeup and gets bimonthly manicures.

Like me, she sleeps with her phone next to her bed, sound turned to full volume.

Like me, she often forgets to say hello at the start of her conversations and skips goodbye at the end.

Like me, she has money but doesn’t enjoy spending it and would rather scroll through Net-A-Porter, filling up her cart for hours, then leave it that way until everything sells out.

Nadine didn’t enjoy most things, Dusty writes. Enjoyment was beside the point of life. As far as she could tell, staying alive was the point, and that required money and survival instincts.

My face burns hotter with every page.

The chapter ends with Nadine walking into the office right in time to see her two assistants giddily celebrating something. With a cutting glare, she says, “What?”

Her assistant announces she’s pregnant.

Nadine smiles like the shark she is, says congratulations, then goes into her office, where she starts thinking through all the reasons she should fire Stacey the pregnant assistant. She doesn’t approve of distractions, and that’s what pregnancy is.

Nadine doesn’t deviate from plans. She doesn’t make exceptions to rules. She lives life by a strict code, and there’s no room for anyone who doesn’t meet it.

In short, she is a puppy-kicking, kitten-hating, money-driven robot. (The puppy-kicking is implied, but give it a few more chapters, and it might become canon.)

As soon as I finish reading, I start over, trying to convince myself that Nadine — a woman who makes Miranda Priestly look like Snow White — isn’t me.

The third read through is the worst of all. Because this is when I accept that it’s good.

One chapter, ten pages, but it works.

I stand woozily and head toward the dark nook where the bathrooms are, rereading as I go. I need Libby now. I need someone who knows me, who loves me, to tell me this is all wrong.

I should’ve been looking where I was going.

I shouldn’t have worn such high heels, or had a martini on an empty stomach, or been reading a book that’s giving me a surreal out-of-body experience.

Because some combination of those poor decisions leads to me barreling into someone. And we’re not talking a casual Oh, I clipped you on the shoulder — how adorably clumsy I am! We’re talking “Holy shit! My nose!”

Which is what I hear in the moment that my ankles wobble, my balance is thrown off, and my gaze snaps up to a face belonging to none other than Charlie Lastra.

Right as I go down like a sack of potatoes.