Book Lovers

9

WHEN I WAS twelve, my mother was cast in a crime procedural. She hit it off with the showrunner. Before long, she was seeing him nightly.

Four episodes into filming, he reconciled with his estranged wife. Mom’s plucky young detective character was swiftly killed off, her body discovered in a meat locker.

I’d never seen Mom quite so distraught. We avoided whole swaths of the city afterward, dodging anyplace she might run into him, or be reminded of him, or of the job she’d lost.

After that, it was an easy decision for me to never fall in love.

For years, I stuck by it. Then I met Jakob.

He made the world open up around me, like there were colors I’d never seen, new levels of happiness I couldn’t have imagined.

Mom was ecstatic when I told her I was moving in with him. After everything she’d been through, she was still a romantic.

He’s going to take such good care of you, sweet girl, she said. He was a couple of years older than me and had a well-paying bartending job and a tiny apartment uptown.

A week later, I hugged Mom and Libby goodbye and schlepped my stuff to his place. Two weeks after that, Mom was gone.

The bills came due all at once. Rent, utilities, a credit card we’d opened in my name when things got particularly tight. Mom’s credit was shot, and I wanted to help pull my weight.

I’d been working at Freeman Books since I was sixteen, but I made minimum wage and could only manage part-time while I was in college, and someday, the student loans I’d taken out would come back to haunt me.

Mom’s actor friends did a fundraiser for us, announcing after the funeral that they’d raised over fifteen thousand dollars, and Libby cried happy tears, because she had no idea how little of a dent that would make.

She’d been on a fashion design kick and wanted to go to Parsons, and I debated dropping out of my English program to fund her tuition, though I’d already sunk tens of thousands into mine.

I moved out of Jakob’s place and back in with Libby.

I budgeted.

Scoured the internet for the cheapest, most filling meals.

Took on other jobs: tutoring, waitressing, outright writing classmates’ papers.

Jakob found out he’d gotten accepted into the Wyoming writing residency and left, and then there was the breakup, the utter desolation, the reminder of why the promise I’d made to myself years ago still mattered.

I stopped dating, mostly. First dates were allowed (dinner only), and though I’d never tell anyone, the reason was that I’d have one less meal to pay for. Two if I ordered enough to bring Libby leftovers.

Second dates were a no-go. That’s when the guilt kicked in — or the feelings did.

Libby playfully heckled me about how no one was good enough for a second date.

I let her. It would destroy me to hear what she thought of the truth.

She worked too. Without Mom’s income, we had to tighten our purse strings, but Libby never wanted to spend money on herself anyway.

Sometimes, after complaining to her about a particularly bad date, though, I’d come home from classes or a tutoring shift to find her already asleep in her room (I’d moved out into the living room, where Mom used to sleep, so she could have the bedroom to herself) and a bundle of sunflowers sitting in a vase beside the pullout couch.

If I were normal, I might’ve cried. Instead I’d sit there, clutching the vase, and just fucking shake. Like there were emotions deep in me, but too many layers of ash lay over them, deadening them to nothing but a tectonic murmur.

There is a spot in my foot I can’t feel. I stepped on a piece of glass and the nerves there are dead now. The doctor said they’d grow back, but it’s been years and that place is still numb.

That was how my heart had felt for years. Like all the cracks callused over.

That enabled me to focus on what mattered. I built a life for me and Libby, a home that no bank or ex-boyfriend could ever take from us.

I watched my friends in relationships make compromise after compromise, shrinking into themselves until they were nothing but a piece of a whole, until all their stories came from the past, and their career aspirations, their friends, and their apartments were replaced by our aspirations, our friends, our apartment. Half lives that could be taken from them without any warning.

By then I’d had all the practice in first dates that a person could get. I knew which red flags to watch for, the questions to ask. I’d seen my friends, coworkers, colleagues get ghosted, cheated on, bored in their relationships, and rudely awakened when partners turned out to be married or have gambling problems or be chronically unemployed. I saw casual hookups turn into miserably complicated half relationships.

I had standards and a life, and I wasn’t about to let some man destroy it like it was merely the paper banner he was meant to crash through as he entered the field.

So only once my career was on track did I start dating again, and this time I did it right. With caution, checklists, and carefully weighed decisions.

I did not kiss colleagues. I did not kiss people I knew next to nothing about. I did not kiss men I had no intention of dating, or men I was incompatible with. I didn’t let random bouts of lust call the shots.

Until Charlie Lastra.

It never happened.

I expected Libby to be giddy about my slipup. Instead, she’s as disapproving as I am.

“Your Professional Nemesis from New York does not count for number five, Sissy,” she says. “Couldn’t you have made out with, like, a rodeo clown with a heart of gold?”

“I was wearing entirely the wrong shoes for that,” I say.

“You could kiss a million Charlies back in the city. You’re supposed to be trying new things here. We both are.” She brandishes the eggy spatula in my direction. Growing up, our apartment was a yogurt-or-granola-bar-breakfast home, but now Libby’s a full English breakfast kind of gal, and there are already pancakes and veggie sausages stacked next to the egg pan.

I fell out of bed at nine after another restless night, took a run followed by a quick shower, then came down for breakfast. Libby’s been up for hours already. She loves morning now even more than she loved sleeping as a teenager. Even on weekends, she never sleeps past seven. Partly, I’m sure, because she can hear Bea’s high-pitched squeal or Tala’s little pounding feet from three miles and a dose of morphine away.

She always says the two of them are us, but body swapped.

Bea, the oldest, is sweet as cherry pie like Libby, but with my lankiness and ash-brown hair. Tala has her mother’s strawberry-gold hair and is destined to be no taller than five four, but like her Aunt Nono, she’s a brute: opinionated and determined to never follow any command without a thorough explanation.

“You’re the one who Parent-Trapped me with him,” I point out, pulling the spatula from Libby’s hand and ushering her toward a chair. “It never would’ve happened if you hadn’t ditched me.”

“Look, Nora, sometimes even mommies need alone time,” she says slowly. “Anyway, I thought you hated that guy.”

“I don’t hate him,” I say. “We’re just, like, opposing magnets, or something.”

“Opposing magnets are the ones that draw together.”

“Okay, then we’re magnets with the same polarity.”

“Two magnets with the same polarity would never make out against a door.”

“Unlike other magnets, which would definitely do that.” I carry over our loaded plates, flopping into the chair across from her. It’s already hellishly hot. We’ve got the windows open and the fans on, but it’s as misty as a low-rent sauna.

“It was a moment of weakness.” The memory of Charlie’s hands on my waist, his chest flattening me into the door, sears through me.

Libby arches an eyebrow. With her blunt pink bob, she’s closer to mastering my own Evil Eye, but her cheeks are still, ultimately, too soft to get the job done. “Lest you forget, Sissy, that type of man has not worked out for you in the past.”

Personally, I wouldn’t lump Charlie in with my exes. For one thing, none of them ever tried to ravage me outside. Also, they never lurched out of a kiss like I’d shoved a hot fire poker down their pants.

“I’m proud of you for going off book — I just wouldn’t have chosen a hard-core groping by Count von Lastra as The Move.”

I drop my face into my forearm, newly mortified. “This is all Nadine Winters’s fault.”

Libby’s brow pinches. “Who?”

“Oh, that’s right.” I lift my head. “In your desperation to see me barefoot and pregnant, you ran out before I could tell you.” I unlock my phone and open the email from Dusty, sliding it into Libby’s field of vision. She hunches as she reads, and I shovel food into my mouth as fast as I can so I can get my workday started.

Libby’s not a startlingly fast reader. She absorbs books like they’re bubble baths, whereas my job has forced me to treat them more like hot-and-fast showers.

Her mouth shrinks, tightening into a knot as she reads, until finally, she bursts into laughter. “Oh my god!” she cries. “It’s Nora Stephens fan fiction!”

“Can it really be called fan fiction if the author clearly isn’t a fan?” I say.

“Has she sent you more? Does it get smutty? Lots of fan fiction gets smutty.”

“Again,” I say, “not fan fiction.”

Libby cackles. “Maybe Dusty’s got a crush.”

“Or maybe she’s hiring a hit man as we speak.”

“I hope it gets smutty,” she says.

“Libby, if you had your way, every book would end with an earth-shattering orgasm.”

“Hey, why wait until the end?” she says. “Oh, right, because that’s where you start reading.” She pretends to dry heave at the thought.

I stand to rinse my plate. “Well, it’s been fun, but I’m off to track down Wi-Fi that doesn’t make me want to put my head through a wall.”

“I’ll meet you later,” she says. “First, I’m going to spend a few hours walking around naked, shouting cuss words. Then I’ll probably call home — want me to tell Brendan you say hi?”

“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.