Book Lovers

18

I CAN SEE THE scene playing out like it’s happening to someone else. Like I’m reading it, and in the back of my mind, I can’t stop thinking, This doesn’t happen.

Only, apparently it does. Tropes come from somewhere, and as it turns out, from time immemorial, women have been slow-dancing to staticky country music with hot architect-carpenters as deep shadows unfurl over picturesque valleys, crickets singing along like so many violins.

Shepherd smells how I remembered. Evergreen and leather and sunlight.

And everything feels nice. Like I’m letting loose in all the right ways and none of the ones that could come back to bite me.

Take that, Nadine. I’m present. I’m sweaty. I’m following someone else’s lead, letting Shepherd spin me out, then twirl me in. I am not stiff, rigid, cold. He dips me low, and in the half-light he flashes that movie star smile before swinging me back onto my feet.

“So,” he says, “is it working?”

“Is what working?” I ask.

“Are we winning you over?” he says. “To Sunshine Falls.”

Someone like you — in shoes like that—could never be happy here. Don’t get some poor pig farmer’s hopes up for nothing.

I miss a step, but Shepherd’s too graceful for it to matter. He catches my weight and moves me through a quarter turn, all trouble avoided except where my heels are concerned. They’re caked in dirt, smeared with grass stains, and I am furious with myself for noticing.

For flashing back to Charlie carrying me up the hillside after our pool game.

From the outside, Shepherd and I still form that perfect, heart-squeezing scene, but I have that feeling of outsideness again. Like it’s not really me, here in Shepherd’s arms. Or like I’m still on the wrong side of the window.

The image is immediate, intense: Our old window. Our apartment. A sticky-floored kitchen and a waterlogged laminate countertop. Me and Libby perched on it, Mom leaned up against it. A carton of strawberry ice cream and three spoons.

It hits me like a horror movie jump-scare. Like I rounded a corner and found a cliff.

I tighten my fingers through Shepherd’s, let him draw me closer, my heart racing. I backtrack to his question and stammer out, “It’s definitely making an impression.”

If he’s noticed the change in me, he gives no indication. He smiles sweetly and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. This is it, I realize. I’m about to kiss a nice, handsome man on an unplanned date in an unfamiliar place. This is how the story’s supposed to go, and it finally is.

His forehead lowers toward mine, and my phone chimes in my bag.

Instantly, another window glows bright in my mind. Another apartment. Mine.

The squashy floral couch, the endless stacks of books, my favorite Jo Malone candle burning on the mantel. Me lounging in an antique robe and a sheet mask with a shiny new manuscript, and on the far side of the couch, a man with a furrowed brow, mouth in a knot, book in hand.

Charlie, hitting my brain like an Alka-Seltzer tab, dispersing in every direction.

My face jerks sideways. Shepherd stops short, his mouth hovering an inch shy of my cheek. “I should be getting back to my sister!” It comes out unplanned and roughly sixty times louder than I meant for it to. But I can’t go through with this. My brain feels too muddy.

Shepherd draws back, vaguely puzzled, and smiles good-naturedly. “Well, if you ever need a tour guide again . . .” He reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a scrap of paper and a blue Bic pen, scribbling against it in his palm. “Don’t be a stranger.” He hands me the number, then hesitates for a second before saying, “Or even if you don’t need a tour guide.”

“Yeah,” I stammer. “I’ll call you.” Once I figure out what’s going on in my head.

Charlie pushes my coffee across the counter. “Precisely on time,” he says. “So I guess Shepherd didn’t break your city-person curse.”

For some reason, his confirmation that he did see me getting into the truck yesterday rankles. Like it’s proof that he purposely invaded my thoughts.

I tuck my sunglasses atop my head and stop at the desk. “We had a very nice time. Thanks so much for asking.” I’m mad at him. I’m mad at me. I’m just generally, irrationally mad.

Charlie’s jaw muscles leap. “Where’d he take you? The Creamy Whip in the next town over? Or the Walmart parking lot for some truck-bed stargazing?”

“Careful, Charlie,” I say. “That sounds like jealousy.”

“It’s relief,” he says. “I expected you to show up here today in Daisy Dukes and pigtails, maybe a Ford tattoo on your tailbone.”

I slide my forearms onto the desk and lean forward in such a way that I really might as well have brought a silver platter out and presented my cleavage to him that way. The lack of sleep is really getting to me. I feel haunted by him, and I’m determined to haunt him right back.

“I would be”—I drop my voice—“adorable in Daisy Dukes and pigtails.”

His eyes snap back to my face, flashing; his mouth twitches through that grimacing pout, a pair as reliable as thunder and lightning. “Not the word I’d use.”

Awareness sizzles down my backbone. I lean closer. “Charming?”

His eyes stay on my face. “Not that either.”

“Sweet,” I say.

“No.”

“Comely?” I guess.

“Comely? What year is it, Stephens?”

“A real girl next door,” I parry.

He snorts. “Whose door?”

I straighten. “It’ll come to me.”

“I doubt it,” he says under his breath.

The self-satisfaction lasts about as long as it takes to set up in the café and pull up my checklist for today’s tasks. There are proposals I didn’t finish marking up yesterday, queries I need to send on delayed payments, and submissions lists I need to solidify before the slow season ends.

Once again my work needs my full attention, and once again I can’t compartmentalize enough to make that happen. Last night’s dinner with Libby keeps spiraling through my mind like flaming butterflies. She was effusively chipper, no sign of anything wrong, until I pressed her on her mysterious errands, at which point her energy flagged and her eyes hardened.

“Can’t a grown woman have a little alone time?” she said. “I think I’ve earned the right to a little privacy.” And that was that. We’d brushed the awkwardness aside, but the rest of the night, some of that distance had come back into her eyes, a secret looming between us like a glass wall or a block of ice, more or less invisible but decidedly material.

I open Dusty’s pages and picture myself in a submarine, sinking into them, urging the world around me to dull. It’s never taken effort — that’s what made me fall in love with reading: the instant floating sensation, the dissolution of real-world problems, every worry suddenly safely on the other side of some metaphysical surface. Today is different.

The bells chime at the front of the shop, and a familiar, feminine purr of a voice greets Charlie. He responds warmly, and she gives a sexy laugh. I can’t make out every word, but every few sentences are punctuated by that same gravelly sound.

Amaya, I realize, as she’s saying something like, “Are we still on for Friday?”

Charlie says something like, “Still works for me.”

And my brain says something like, DOESN’T WORK FOR ME. NOT AT ALL.

To which the career woman angel on my shoulder replies, Shut up and mind your own business. He’s not supposed to occupy any of your mental real estate anyway.

I put on headphones and blast my cityscape sounds to make myself stop listening in, but not even the dulcet tones of New York City’s finest cabdrivers cussing one another out is enough to soothe me.

Charlie said Amaya wasn’t jilted, which more than likely means she broke up with him. I don’t want to be following this thought out to its logical conclusion, but my brain is a runaway train, smashing through station after station with unrelenting speed.

Charlie didn’t want the relationship to end.

Amaya regrets her decision now.

Things are complicated for Charlie. Whatever’s going on between him and me “can’t be anything.”

Charlie’s keeping the door open to something with his ex.

Amaya just asked him out.

I mean, that’s only one possible through line, but that’s how my brain works: it plots.

This is why crushes are terrible. You go from feeling like life is a flat path one needs only to cruise over to spending every second on an incline, or caught in a weightless, stomach-in-your-throat drop. It’s Mom running out to catch a cab, hair curled and smiling lips painted, only to come home with streaks of mascara down her face. Highs and lows, and nothing in between.

When Libby finally shows up, I’m grateful for the number-twelve-related tasks she assigns me, even if they’re all of the dusting/scrubbing/organizing variety.

Charlie mostly remains tucked in the office, and when he does come out to help customers, I avoid looking at him and somehow still always know right where he is.

After our lunch break, Libby sets out some Book Lovers Recommend cards by the register for customers to fill out, along with a decoupage shoebox drop-box to return the cards to. She hands me three cards “to get them started,” and I wander the shop, searching for inspiration. I see the January Andrews circus book I bought my first weekend here, the one Sally told me Charlie had edited, and prop my card against the bookshelf to scribble a few lines. Next I choose an Alyssa Cole romance Libby loaned me last year, which I made the mistake of opening on my phone and ended up devouring in two and a half hours while standing in front of my fridge.

Next I duck into the children’s book room and straighten to find myself nose to nose with Charlie. Magnets, I think. He catches my elbows, holding me back before we can collide, but you’d still think we were smashed up to each other from mouth to thigh based on the instant crush of heat that wells in me.

“I didn’t know you were in here!” I say in a rush. Huge improvement over LION!

I see the spark in his burnt-sugar eyes the second the perfect response pops into his brain, and I feel the lurching drop of disappointment when he decides to say instead, “Inventory.” He releases me and lifts the clipboard from the shelf. A whopping three point five inches separates us, and an electric charge leaps off him, buzzing through my veins. “I’ll let you get back to . . .”

Still neither of us moves.

“So you and Amaya are hanging out.” I add, almost involuntarily: “I wasn’t eavesdropping — it’s a quiet shop.”

His eyebrow ticks. “ ‘Not eavesdropping,’ ” he teases in a low voice. “ ‘Not stalking.’ I’m sensing a pattern here.”

“Not jealous.” I challenge, stepping closer. “Not adorable.”

His eyes dip to my mouth and slightly dilate before rising. “Nora . . .” he murmurs, a heaviness in his voice, an apology or a half-hearted plea.

My throat squeezes as our stomachs brush, every nerve ending on high alert. “Hm?”

He sets his hands on my shoulders, his touch light and careful. “I need to go,” he says quietly, avoiding my gaze. He sidesteps me and slips from the room.

On Friday another batch of Frigid pages hits our inboxes. I spend the first couple of hours reading and rereading, gathering my thoughts into a document and resisting the urge to live-text Charlie in the other room. Libby’s only around from lunchtime to about three, at which point she leaves with the reminder that she has another surprise for me tonight.

I try to convince myself that’s what her disappearance the other day was about, but I can’t escape the thought that it had something to do with Brendan. I’ve suggested we video call him a few times, but she always has an excuse.

At five, I pack up and leave to meet her. Once again, Charlie’s not at the register, and now I’m not only annoyed and frustrated, I’m sad.

I miss him, and I’m tired of us hiding from each other.

Steeling myself, I duck into the office. He looks up, startled, from where he’s leaned against the bulky mahogany desk on the right side of the room, reading. His eyes, his posture, everything reads jungle cat. If by some strange, ancient curse, a jaguar was turned into a man, he would be Charlie Lastra. After a seconds-long staring contest, he remembers himself and says, “Did you need something?”

Last year, I would’ve thought he was being snotty. Now I realize he’s cutting to the chase.

“We should schedule a time to talk through the next hundred pages.”

His eyes bore into me until there’s smoke lifting off my skin. I’m an ant beneath his sunlit magnifying glass. Finally, he looks away. “We can just do it over email. I know Libby’s keeping you running.”

“It needs to be in person.” I can’t take this tension between us anymore. Avoiding him is only making this worse, and I hate feeling like I’m hiding. With Libby, the way to get to the heart of things might be a slow, cautious obstacle course, but this is Charlie, and Charlie’s like me. We need to bulldoze through the awkwardness. I miss him. His teasing, his challenges, his competitiveness, his care for my overpriced shoes, his smell, and—

Shit, I didn’t expect the list to be so long. I’m in deeper than I realized. “Unless you’re too busy!” I add.

He flashes his first smirk-pout of the week. “What could I possibly be busy with?”

His plans with Amaya surge to the front of my mind. I picture him sweeping her over a puddle to save her shoes, flicking open an umbrella to protect her blown-out hair.

“Maybe that Dunkin’ Donuts grand opening,” I say. “Or the divorce proceedings for that couple who fought at town hall.”

“Oh, they’ll never split up,” he says seriously. “That’s just the Cassidys’ foreplay.”

Foreplay. Not a word I would’ve chosen to introduce to this conversation.

“Does tomorrow work for you?” I ask. “Late morning?”

He studies me. “I’ll reserve us a room.” At my expression, he laughs. “At the library, Stephens. A study room. Get your mind out of the gutter.”

Believe me, I think, I’ve tried.