Book Lovers

14

WELL, IF IT isn’t young Charles Lastra!” An old woman with a pile of silvery-gray hair on top of her head and a dress whose neckline tops her chin comes toward us. “And you’ve brought a date! How lovely!”

Her hazel eyes twinkle as she gives Charlie and me both squeezes on the arm.

He looks downright adoring, by Charlie’s standards. Even Amaya didn’t get this smile. “How are you, Mrs. Struthers?”

She holds out her hands, gesturing to the bustling dining room. “Can’t complain. Just the two of you?”

When he nods, she takes us to a white-clothed table tucked against a window lined with candles dripping wax down wicker-wrapped wine bottles.

“You two enjoy.” She taps the table with a wink, then returns to the host stand.

The smell of fresh bread is thick and intoxicating, and within thirty seconds, a bottle of red wine appears on the table.

“Oh, we didn’t order that,” I tell the server, but he tips his head in Mrs. Struthers’s direction and hurries away.

Charlie looks up from the glass of wine he’s pouring for me. “She’s the owner. Also my favorite former substitute teacher. Gave me an Octavia Butler book that changed my life.”

My heart gives a strange flutter at the thought. I jut my chin toward the wine. “You have to drink all of that. I’ve already had two drinks, and I’m a lightweight.”

“Oh, I remember,” he teases, sliding my glass toward me, “but this is wine. It’s the grape juice of alcohol.”

I lean across the table, grabbing the bottle and tipping it over his glass until it’s full to the brim. As deadpan as ever, he hunches and slurps from the glass without lifting it.

I burst into laughter against my will, and he’s so visibly pleased it gives me a full-body twinge of pride. He wants to make me laugh.

“So how bad should I feel,” I ask, “about ditching Blake?”

Charlie leans back in his chair, his legs stretching out, grazing mine. “Well,” he says, “when we were in high school, he used to take my books out of my gym locker and put them in the toilet tank, so maybe a three out of ten?”

“Oh no.” I try to stifle a giggle, but I’m slaphappy, high on adrenaline from my escape.

“How many dates are left?” he asks. “On your Life-Ruining Vacation List.”

“Depends.” I take a sip. “How many more high school bullies did you have?”

His laugh is low and hoarse. It makes me think of the satisfying snap sound of a tennis racket delivering a perfect return.

His voice, his laugh, has a texture; it scrapes. I take another sip of wine to dull the thought, then switch back to water.

“Does that mean you want to date my bullies, or to humiliate them?” He grabs some bread from the basket on the table, tears off a piece, and slips it between his lips.

I look away as the heat creeps up my neck. “That’s all down to whether they ask how big my feet are within the first five minutes of meeting.”

Charlie chokes over the bread. “Was it, like, a fetish thing?”

“I think it was more of a Wow, did you have to fall in a pit of radioactive waste to get that tall? kind of thing.”

“Blake never did have the most secure sense of self,” Charlie muses.

We’re interrupted by a teenage waiter with an unfortunate bowl cut taking our order — two goat cheese salads and cacio e pepes.

As soon as he’s out of earshot, I say, “Libby picked Blake. She’s running an app for me.”

“Right.” His brows rise apprehensively. “MOM.”

“Two dates on the list. Blake is the first.”

Charlie’s eyes do a bored allusion-to-an-eye-roll. “Save yourself the trouble and use this as number two.”

“I already told you. You don’t count.”

“The words every man dreams of hearing.”

“Consider yourself the grape juice of dates.”

“So number five is go on two shitty dates with men you could never be into, in a town you couldn’t stand to live in,” Charlie says. “What’s number six again? Voluntary lobotomy?”

I slide his mostly full wineglass toward him. “I’m still waiting on your secrets, Lastra.”

He pushes the glass back toward the middle of the table. “You already know mine. I’m the uninvited prodigal son, here to run a rapidly dying bookstore while my dad’s busy with physical therapy and my mom’s trying to keep him from climbing on the roof to clean the gutters.”

“That’s . . . a lot,” I say.

“It’s fine.” His tone makes it clear that sentence ends with a period.

“And Loggia’s been good with letting you work remotely,” I say.

“For now.” When his gaze meets mine, it’s startlingly dark. It feels like I’ve stumbled toward the edge of something dangerous. And worse, like I’m trapped there in viscous honey, incapable of stepping back from the ledge.

“Now, what does Libby have on you that you went out with Blake?” Charlie asks. “Did you sell state secrets? Commit a murder?”

“And here I thought you had a younger sister.”

He relaxes back in his chair. “Carina. She’s twenty-two.”

Even though I’ve met his mother, it’s hard to imagine Charlie with a family. He seems so . . . self-contained. Then again, that’s probably what people say about me.

“And Carina can’t compel you to do something simply by asking?” I say. Or by dodging you for months, keeping secrets, and consistently looking like she just got unhitched from being dragged behind a train.

Charlie hesitates. “Carina’s why I’m here.”

I lean into the table, its edge digging into my ribs. I’ve got that feeling of reading a mystery novel, knowing a reveal is coming up, and fighting the urge to skip ahead.

“She was planning to come back and run the bookstore after college,” he says. “Then she decided last minute to just stay in Italy for a while. Florence. She’s a painter.”

“Wow,” I say. “People really just do that? Move to Italy to paint?”

Charlie frowns, turns his water glass in place, then readjusts his silverware into a tidy row. It’s satisfying to watch; feels like having someone scratch the spot right between my shoulder blades. “The women in my family do. My mom also went there to paint for a couple weeks when she was twenty and ended up staying for a year.”

“The whimsical free spirit bringing magic into everyone’s lives,” I say. “I’m familiar with that trope.”

“Some people call it magic,” he says. “I prefer to think of it as ‘raging stress hives.’ Carina was living in an Airbnb owned by a literal drug dealer until I booked her another place.”

I shudder. “That is exactly Libby in a parallel universe.”

“Little sisters,” he says, the twist of his mouth deepening the crease beneath his bottom lip.

I stare at it for a beat too long. My brain scrambles for purchase in the conversation. “What about your dad? What’s he like?”

He tips his head back. “Quiet. Strong. A small-town contractor who swept my mom so thoroughly off her feet that she decided to put down roots.”

At my self-satisfied look, he leans forward, matching my posture. “Fine, yes, they are the quintessential small-town love story,” he admits, eyes sparking as our knees press together. Under the table we’re playing a game of chicken: who will pull away first?

The seconds stretch on, thick and heavy as molasses, but we stay where we are, locked together by the challenge.

“All right, Stephens,” he says finally. “Let’s hear about your family. Where exactly do they fall in your catalogue of two-dimensional caricatures?”

“Easy,” I say. “Libby’s the chaotic, charming nineties rom-com heroine who’s always running late and is windblown in a cute and sexy way. My dad’s the deadbeat, absent father who ‘wasn’t ready to have kids’ but now, according to a paid PI, takes his three sons and wife out in their boat on Lake Erie every weekend.”

“What about your mom?” he asks.

“My mom . . .” I rearrange my own silverware, like they’re words in my next sentence. “She was magic.” I meet his eyes, expecting a sneer or a smirk or a storm cloud, but instead finding only a small crease inside his brows. “She was the struggling actress who chased her dreams to New York. We never had any money, but somehow, she made everything fun. She was my best friend. I mean, not just when we got older. As long as I can remember, she’d take us with her everywhere. And you know, for a lot of people who move to the city, it loses its glow in a couple years? But with Mom, it was like every single day was the first one.

“She felt so lucky to be there. And everyone fell in love with her. She was such a romantic. That’s where Libby gets it from. She started reading Mom’s old romance novels way too young.”

“You were close with her,” Charlie says quietly, halfway between observation and question. “Your mom?”

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.”

“Then where would my Garfield the cat tattoo go?” he asks so dryly that I have to spit my wine back into the glass. “One-one,” he says with a faint smile.

“What’s that?”

“Our spit take score.”

I try to wipe my grin off, but it sticks. Charlie’s commitment to the truth is contagious, apparently, and the truth is, I’m having fun. “So what then?” I say. “After you got held back?”

He sighs, straightens his silverware. “My mom was — well, you’ve met her. She’s a free spirit. She wanted to just pull me out of school and call me helping tend her marijuana plants ‘homeschooling.’ My dad’s the more . . . steady of the two of them.” His smile is delicate, almost sweet.

“Anyway, he figured if I was bad at school, then he just needed to figure out what I was good at. What I could focus on. Tried a million hobbies out with me, then finally, when I was eight, he got me this CD player — probably hoping I’d turn out to be the next Jackson Browne or something. Instead I immediately took the CD player apart.”

I nod soberly. “And that’s how he discovered your passion for serial killing.”

Charlie’s eyes spark as he laughs. “It’s how he realized I wanted to learn how to put things together. I thought the world made sense, and I wanted to find the sense. After that, my dad started asking me to help him work on this car he was fixing up. I got pretty into it.”

“At eight?” I cry.

“As it turns out,” he says, “I have incredible focus when I’m interested in something.”

Despite the innocence of the comment, it feels like molten lava is rolling up my toes, my legs, engulfing me.

I shift my gaze to my glass. “So that’s how you ended up with a race car bed?”

“Along with a ton of books about cars and restoration. The reading finally clicked, and I stopped caring about mechanics overnight.”

“Did it crush him?” I ask.

Now Charlie’s eyes drop, storm clouds rolling in across his brow. “He just wanted me to love something. He didn’t care what.”

Dads, as a concept, have always felt as irrelevant to my daily life as astronauts. I know they’re out there, but I rarely think about them. Suddenly, though, I can almost imagine it. I can almost miss it, this thing I never had.

“That’s really nice.” It feels like not just an understatement, but a complete mistranslation for something vast and unruly.

“He’s a sweet guy,” Charlie says quietly. “Anyway, he let the car stuff go and started picking up paperbacks for me every time he stopped by a garage sale, or a new donation box came into Mom’s shop. He has no idea how much erotica he’s given me.”

“And you actually read it.”

Charlie turns his wineglass one hundred and eighty degrees, eyes boring into me. “I wanted to understand how things worked, remember?”

I arch a brow. “How’d that turn out for you?”

He sits forward. “I was slightly disappointed when my first serious girlfriend didn’t have three consecutive orgasms, but otherwise okay.”

A torrent of laughter rips through me.

“So I’ve found the key to Nora Stephens’s joy,” he says. “My sexual humiliation.”

“It’s not the humiliation so much as the sheer optimism.”

His lips press together. “I’d say I’m a realist, but one who doesn’t always understand when what he’s seeing isn’t realism.”

“So why’d you run away to New York?”

“I didn’t run,” he says. “I moved.”

“Is there a difference?” I ask.

“No one was chasing me?” he says. “Also, ‘running’ implies speed. I had to go to community college for a couple years here, work construction with my dad to save up so I could transfer in my junior year.”

“You don’t strike me as a hard hat guy.”

“I’m not a hat guy, period,” he says. “But I needed money to get to New York, and I thought all writers lived there.”

“Ah,” I say. “The truth comes out. You wanted to be a writer.” My brain flips straight to Jakob, like a book whose spine is creased to land on a favorite page.

“I thought I did,” Charlie says. “In college, I realized I liked workshopping other people’s stories more. I like the puzzle of it. Looking at all the pieces and figuring out what something’s trying to be, and how to get it there.”

I feel a pang of longing. “That’s my favorite part of the job too.”

He studies me for a moment. “Then I think you might be in the wrong job.”

Editing might’ve been the dream, but you can’t eat, drink, or sleep on top of dreams. I landed the next best thing. Everyone has to give up their dreams eventually. “You know what I think?”

His eyes stay trained on me, his pupils growing like they’re somehow absorbing all the shadows from the room. “No, but I’m desperate to find out,” he deadpans.

“I think you did run away from this place.”

He rolls his eyes and leans back in his chair, the posture of a jungle cat. “I left calmly. Whereas, in one week, you will run, screaming, for the city limits, begging every passing semitruck driver for a lift to the nearest bagel.”

“Actually,” I say, rising to the challenge in his voice, “I’m here for a month.”

His lips press together. “Is that so?”

“It is,” I say. “Libby and I have a lot of fun things planned. But you already know that. You’ve seen the list.”

Because I am not Nadine. I’m capable of spontaneity, and flannel won’t make me break out in a rash, and I’m going to finish that list.

His gaze narrows. “You’re going to ‘sleep under the stars’? Offer yourself to the mosquitoes?”

“There are body sprays for that.”

“Ride a horse?” he says. “You said you’re terrified of horses.”

“When did I say that?”

“The other night, when you were three sheets to the wind. You said you were terrified of anything larger than a groundhog. And then you took it back and said even groundhogs make you uneasy, because they’re unpredictable. You’re not going to ride a horse.”

We changed it to Pet a horse, but now I’m unwilling to back down. “Would you like to make a bet?”

“That you won’t ‘save a dying business’ in a month?” he says. “Wouldn’t call it a gamble.”

“What will you give me, when I win?”

“What do you want?” he says. “A vital organ? My rent-stabilized apartment?”

I slap his hand on the table. “You have a rent-stabilized apartment?”

He tugs his hand back. “I’ve had it since college. Shared it with two other people until I could afford it on my own.”

“How many bathrooms?” I ask.

“Two.”

“Pictures?”

He pulls his phone out and scrolls for a beat, then hands it over. I was expecting photos where the apartment was incidental. These were obviously taken by a real estate photographer. It’s a gorgeous, airy, tastefully minimalist apartment. Also, it’s extremely clean, which: hot.

The bedrooms are small, but there are three of them, and the main bathroom has a gigantic double vanity. It’s the stuff of New York dreams.

“Why do you just . . . have these?” I say. “Is this your version of porn?”

“A page covered in red ink is my version of porn,” he says. “I have the pictures because I was considering subletting while I’m here.”

“Libby and her family,” I say. “When I win this bet, they get the apartment.”

He scoffs. “You’re not serious.”

“I’ve done more unpleasant things for less of a reward. Remember Blake?”

He considers for a moment. “Okay, Nora. You do everything on that list, and the apartment is yours.”

“Indefinitely?” I clarify. “You sublet it to them for as long as they want, and find somewhere else to live when you go back?”

He gives a kind of growly snort. “Sure,” he says, “but it’s not going to happen.”

“Are you in your right mind right now?” I say. “Because if we shake on this, it is happening.”

His gaze holds mine and he reaches across the table. When I take his hand, the friction feels like it could light a fire. A shiver races up between my shoulder blades.

I only remember to let go of his hand because, at that moment, the salad and cacio e pepe show up in a cloud of the most heavenly scent imaginable, carried by the bowl-cut server, and Charlie and I startle apart like we just got caught in flagrante on the table.

After that, we waste no time with small talk, instead shoveling handmade pasta into our mouths for ten minutes straight.

By the time we finish, most of the two-top tables have been dragged together for larger groups, their chairs rearranged so parties can combine, the laughter swelling to overtake the soft Italian music and clink of wineglasses, the smell of bread and buttery sauces denser than ever.

“I wonder where Blake is now,” I say. “I hope he found happiness with that minuscule hostess.”

“I hope he’s been mistaken for a wanted criminal and picked up by the FBI,” Charlie says.

“He’ll be released in forty-eight hours,” I add. “But until then, he will not have a great time.” Charlie outright smiles, and I add, “I just hope his interrogator isn’t as tall as me. That’s a bridge too far.”

“I think you should know something.” Charlie’s voice fades to a rasp as he leans across the table, goose bumps racing up my legs as his calf brushes mine.

I scoot forward too, our knees fitting together under us, like interlocking fingers this time: his, mine, his, mine.

He whispers, “You’re not that tall.”

I whisper back, “I’m as tall as you.”

“I’m not that tall,” he says.

What my body hears is, Let’s make out.

“Yes, but for men,” I say, “there’s no such thing as too tall.”

He holds my gaze far too seriously for this very unserious conversation. My skin buzzes, like my blood is made of iron fillings and his eyes are magnets sweeping over them.

“There isn’t for women either. There’s just tall women,” he says, “and the men too insecure to date them.”