Book Lovers

17

TO MY SURPRISE, Dusty’s on board with the cuts. Within an hour of promising to get her formal notes soon, Charlie sends me a five-page document on Frigid’s first act.

I examine it in the café while Libby’s reorganizing the children’s book room and singing an off-key rendition of “My Favorite Things,” but replacing all of the listed things with her own preferences: Books with no dog ears and shiny new covers, cleaning and shelving and reading ’bout lovers!

I send Charlie’s document back with sixty-four tracked changes, and he replies within minutes, as if we aren’t twenty-five feet apart, with him at the register and me in the café.

You’re absolutely vicious, Stephens.

I write back, I have a reputation to uphold.

I hear the low laugh in the next room as clearly as if his lips were pressed to my stomach.

In the used and rare book room, Libby’s singing, Shop-cats in windows and full-caf iced coffee.

Isn’t this praise a little overboard? Charlie emails me. Perhaps referring to the forty-odd compliments I inserted into his document.

You love the pages, I reply. I just added details.

It just seems inefficient and condescending to spend so much time talking about things she doesn’t need to change.

If you tell Dusty to cut a bunch of stuff, but don’t make it clear what’s working, you risk losing the good stuff.

We volley the document back and forth until we’re satisfied, then send it off. I don’t expect to hear from Dusty for days. Her reply dings two hours later.

So many great ideas here. A lot to think about, and I’ll get to work on incorporating the changes. Only thing is, we need to keep the cat. In the meantime, I’ve finished cleaning the next hundred pages (attached).

She sends me a private email, its subject reading But seriously and the body reading can you just be my coeditor forever? I’m actually excited to get started. X

I feel like a lit-up light bulb, all hot and glowy with pride. Charlie sends me another message, and all that heat tightens, like one of those snakes-in-a-can gag gifts being reset for another go.

I think we might be good together, Stephens.

A very small star lodges itself in my diaphragm. I reply, yes, together we add up to one emotionally competent human, a real accomplishment, then listen for his gruff laugh.

But another sound draws my attention to the window — Libby’s voice, muffled by the glass but still half shouting, obviously frustrated. I follow the maze of shelves toward the front of the store, where I can see her through the window out on the sidewalk, her phone pressed to her ear and one hand shielding her eyes against the sun.

Her posture is defensive, her shoulders lifted, elbows tucked in against her sides. She gives a frustrated huff, says something else, and hangs up. I start toward the front door to meet her, but she hitches her purse up her shoulder and takes off across the street, turning to the right and briskly marching off.

I freeze midstep, my stomach bottoming out.

What just happened?

My phone chirps, and I jump at the sound. It’s a message from Libby. Had some errands to run! Should be home around eight.

I swallow a fist-sized glob of tension and write back, Anything I can help with? Not much work to do today after all. A blatant lie, but she’s not here to see that in my face.

Nope! she says. Enjoying the Me Time — no offense. See you later!

I walk back to my computer in a daze. It feels like a sort of betrayal, but I don’t know what else to do at this point, weeks into this trip and no closer to any answers. I text Brendan.

Hey, how are things back home? Did Libby ever get back to you?

He answers immediately. Things are good! Yep, we caught up! All good there?

I try fourteen different versions of What’s wrong with my sister before accepting she’d definitely be furious with me if she found out I’d asked him. The rules that govern family dynamics are nonsensical, but they’re also rigid. Mom knew exactly how to get us to open up, but I’m increasingly feeling like I’m in a booby-trapped cave, Libby’s heart on a dais in the center. Every step I take risks making things worse.

All good! I write back to Brendan and turn my focus to work. Or try to.

The rest of the afternoon, customers come and go, but for the most part Charlie and I are the only two people in the shop, and I’ve never been less productive.

After a while, he texts from the desk, Where’d Julie Andrews go?

Back to the nunnery, I write. She gave up. She couldn’t help you.

I have that effect, he says.

Not on Dusty, I write. She’s loving you.

She’s loving us, he corrects. Like I said, we’re good together.

I cast around for a response and find none. The only thing I can really think about is the strained look on my sister’s face and her sudden departure. Libby had some mysterious plans, I tell him.

He says, Must be the grand opening of the Dunkin’ Donuts two towns over.

A minute later, he adds, you okay? Like even from separate rooms, with multiple screens between us, he is reading my mood. The thought sends a strange hollow ache out through my limbs. Something like loneliness. Something like Ebenezer Scrooge watching his nephew Fred’s Christmas party through the frosty window. An outsideness made all the more stark by the revelation of insideness.

All I really want is to go perch on the edge of Charlie’s desk and tell him everything, make him laugh, let him make me laugh until nothing feels quite so pressing.

Fine, I write back. Afterward, I catch myself refreshing my email a couple of times and force myself to click back over to the manuscript. I’m so distracted by trying to distract myself, it’s eight minutes after five when I next look at the clock.

The shop is silent, and I pack with the care of one trying not to wake a pride of hungry lions. I sling my bag over my shoulder and run-walk from the café, still unsure whether Charlie is the lion in the scenario or if I am.

That’s what I’m pondering when I make it through the doorway and almost collide with Charlie on the other side, which might explain why I shout, “LION!”

His eyes go wide. His hands fly in front of his face (maybe he thought I meant, Here’s a lion! Catch!), and miracle of all miracles, we both screech to a halt, landing almost toe-to-toe on the sidewalk, but touching absolutely nowhere.

My heart thrums. My chest flushes.

“I didn’t know you were still here,” he says.

“I am,” I say.

“You always leave at five.” He shifts the watering can in his left hand to his right. Behind him, the flowers in the shop’s window box glisten, plump droplets clinging to their orange and pink petals and sparkling in the afternoon light. “Exactly five,” Charlie adds.

“Things got busy,” I lie.

His eyes dart to my chin. My skin warms ten more degrees. Quietly, he begins, “Is everything okay? You haven’t seemed like—”

“Hey! Charlie!” A low, smooth voice cuts him off. Across the street, an angelic giant of a man with twin dimples and gemstone eyes is climbing out of a muddy pickup truck.

“Shepherd,” Charlie says, somewhat stiffly, his chin dipping in greeting. It’s not like there are daggers in his eyes, but he doesn’t seem happy to see Shepherd either. History, subtext, backstory — whatever you want to call it, these two people have it.

“Sally asked me to drop this by,” Shepherd says, thrusting a tote bag in Charlie’s direction as he crosses the street toward us.

Charlie thanks him, but Shepherd’s facing me now, his smile widening. “Well, well, well, if it isn’t Nora from New York,” he says. “Told you we’d run into each other again.”

I read once that sunflowers always orient themselves to face the sun. That’s what being near Charlie Lastra is like for me. There could be a raging wildfire racing toward me from the west and I’d still be straining eastward toward his warmth.

So despite being eighty percent sure Shepherd’s flirting with me, of course I look straight toward Charlie. Or rather, to the shop door swinging closed behind him.

“Hey,” Shepherd says. “Any chance you’re free right now? I could give you that tour we talked about?”

“Um.” I check my phone, but there are still no new messages from Libby. For a beat, anxiety swells on every side of me, a hundred fists banging on the doors of my mind, demanding to run loose. I shove my phone back into my bag. Focus on something you can control. The list. Number five.

Resisting the urge to glance back at the shop window, I meet Shepherd’s eyes, smile, and lie through my teeth: “A tour sounds perfect.”

We drive with the windows down, the smells of pine and sweat and sunbaked dirt braided into the wind. I’ve never seen anything quite like the Blue Ridge Parkway, the way its easy curves are sliced into the side of the mountains so that shaggy treetops tower over us on one side and unfurl beneath us on the other. Shepherd’s a rare sight too. He has the kind of forearms that authors could spend full pages on, thick with muscle and dusted with fine golden-blond hair. He hums along to the country song on the radio, fingers drumming on the steering wheel and the clutch.

After the initial thrill of doing something spontaneous, the nerves set in. It’s been a long time since I’ve been out with an unvetted man. Setting aside the possibility that he’s a rapist, murderer, or cannibal, I also just don’t know how to talk to a man I know nothing about and am not considering as a long-term partner.

You can do this, Nora. You’re not Nadine to him. You can be anyone. Just say something.

He finally puts me out of my misery: “So, Nora, what you do?”

“I work in publishing,” I say. “I’m a literary agent.”

“No kidding!” His green eyes flash from the road to me. “So you already knew Charlie, before your visit?”

My stomach drops, then surges upward in my chest. “Not really,” I say noncommittally.

Shepherd laughs, a clear, booming sound. “Uh-oh. I know that look — don’t judge the rest of us based on him.”

I feel a swell of protectiveness — or maybe it’s empathy, an understanding that this might be how people talk about me. Simultaneously though, I’m annoyed that I literally got into a stranger’s car like it was a deep-space escape pod, and somehow the specter of Charlie is still here.

“He’s not as bad as he seems,” Shepherd goes on. “I mean, coming back here to help Sal and Clint, when pretty much all he ever wanted was to get away from . . .” He waves his hand in a sweeping arc, gesturing toward the sun-dappled road ahead of us. He turns up a side street that winds further up the foothill we’ve been climbing.

“So what do you do?” I say.

“I’m in construction,” he says. “And I do some carpentry on the side, when I have time.”

“Of course you do,” I accidentally say aloud.

“What’s that?” he asks, eyes twinkling like well-lit emeralds.

“I just mean, you look like a carpenter.”

“Oh.”

I explain, “Carpenters are famously handsome.”

His brow crinkles as he grins. “Are they?”

“I mean, carpenters are the love interests in a lot of books and movies. It’s a common trope. It’s how you show someone’s down-to-earth and patient, and hot without being shallow.”

He laughs. “That doesn’t sound too bad, I guess.”

“Sorry, it’s been awhile since I’ve been . . .” I stop short of saying on a date—which this is definitely not — and finish with the far more tragic “anywhere.”

He grins, like it hasn’t even occurred to him that I might have recently escaped a doomsday hatch in the ground after years of little to no socialization. “Well then, Nora from New York, I know exactly where I’m taking you.”

I’m not much of a gasper — dramatic, audible reactions are more Libby’s terrain — but when I climb out of the truck, I can’t help it.

“Bet you don’t have views like that back in New York,” Shepherd says proudly.

I don’t have the heart to tell him I wasn’t gasping about the view. Though it is gorgeous, I was actually stunned by the three-quarters-built house that sits on the ridge, overlooking the valley below us. At its far side, the sun sinks toward the horizon, coating everything in a honeycomb gold that might just be my new favorite color.

But the house—a massive modern ranch with a back wall made entirely of glass — is blazing in the fiery wash of the sunset. “Did you build this?” I look over my shoulder to find Shepherd pulling a cooler from the bed of his trunk, along with a blue moving blanket.

“Am building,” he corrects, knocking the tailgate shut. “It’s for me, so it’s taking years, between paying jobs.”

“It’s incredible,” I say.

He sets the cooler down and shakes out the blanket. “I’ve wanted to live up here since I was ten years old.” He gestures for me to sit.

“Did you always want to be in construction?” I tuck my skirt against my thighs and lower myself to the ground, just as Shepherd pulls two canned beers from the cooler and drops down beside me.

“Structural engineer, actually,” he says.

“Okay, no ten-year-old wants to be a structural engineer,” I say. “They don’t even know that’s a thing. Frankly, I just found out it was a thing in this moment.”

His low, pleasant laugh rumbles through the ground. I get that shot of adrenaline that making anyone laugh sends through me, but the drunken-butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling is obnoxiously absent. I adjust my legs so they’re a little closer to his, let our fingers brush as I accept a beer from him. Nothing.

“No, you’re right,” he says. “When I was ten I wanted to build stadiums. But by the time I went to Cornell, I’d figured it out.”

I choke on my beer, and not just because it’s disgusting.

“You okay?” Shepherd asks, patting my back like I’m a spooked horse.

I nod. “Cornell,” I say. “That’s pretty fancy.”

The corners of his eyes crinkle handsomely. “Are you surprised?”

“Yes,” I say, “but only because I’ve never met a Cornell alum who waited so long to mention that he was a Cornell alum.”

He drops his head back, laughing, and runs a hand over his beard. “Fair enough. I probably used to bring it up a little more before I moved home, but no matter where I went to college, people here are still more impressed by my years as the quarterback.”

“The what now?” I say.

“Quarterback — it’s a position in . . .” He trails off as he takes in my expression, a smile forming in the corner of his mouth. “You’re joking.”

“Sorry,” I say. “Bad habit.”

“Not so bad,” he says, a flirtatious edge in his voice.

I nudge his knee with mine. “So how’d you end up back here? You said you lived in Chicago for a while?”

“Right out of school I got a job there,” he says. “But I missed home too much. I didn’t want to be away from all this.”

I follow his gaze over the valley again, purples and pinks swarming across it as shadow unspools from the horizon. Trillions of gnats and mosquitoes dance in the dying light, nature’s own sparkling ballet. “It’s beautiful,” I say.

Up here, the quiet seems more calming than eerie, and he wears the thick humidity so well I’m able to (somewhat) believe that I also don’t look like a waterlogged papillon. The hot stickiness is almost pleasant, and the grassy scent is soothing. Nothing feels urgent.

In the back of my mind, a familiarly hoarse voice says, You’d rather be somewhere loud and crowded, where just existing feels like a competition.

I feel eyes on me, and when I glance sidelong, the surprise is disorienting. Like I’d fully expected someone else.

“So what brings you here?” Shepherd asks.

The sun is almost entirely gone now, the air finally cooling. “My sister.”

He doesn’t press for information, but he leaves space for me to go on. I try, but everything going on with Libby is so intangible, impossible to itemize for a near-perfect stranger.

“Wait here a sec,” Shepherd says, jumping up. He walks back to his truck and digs around in the cab until country music crackles out of the speakers, a slow, crooning ballad with plenty of twang. He leaves the door ajar and returns to me, stretching his hand down with an almost shy grin. “Would you like to dance?”

Ordinarily, I could imagine nothing so mortifying, so maybe the small-town magic is real. Or maybe some combination of Nadine, Libby, and Charlie has knocked something loose in me, because without hesitating, I set my beer aside and take his hand.