Chapter One
The date isn’t going well.
Not that Lexi is surprised. Do they ever go well, really?
It started going wrong when she arrived at the bar, red-faced and sweating a little under her thick winter coat, and– horror of horrors in this town full of overachievers– four minutes late. And when the guy– Chad, Tom, Randy, whatever this one is called– finally stops talking about himself, his day, his commute, his Very Important Job, his choice of drink, Lexi’s lateness is the first thing he chooses to comment on. Obliquely, of course. So that it doesn’t seem rude. But he and Lexi both know better.
‘Busy day?’ he asks.
Lexi opens her mouth to defend herself, but she already knows from those two words and the slightly disparaging tone in which they’re uttered exactly how this conversation is going to go.
‘Actually, yes,’ she says, after a deep breath and an internal count to ten. ‘My days are all busy.’
Chad/Tom/Randy does the quizzical eyebrow thing people always do when she says things like this, i.e. when she says anything that implies that owning a bookshop is not all sunshine and puppy dogs, perching on high stools at artisanal coffee shops with a paperback open in front of her.
Lexi catches the bartender’s eye to order what has become an emergency daiquiri.
‘My meeting with my accountant overran,’ she tells Chad/Tom/Randy, which, while it’s true, is not the reason she’s late. The reason she’s late is that Layla– one of her favourite customers– was looking for a new thriller to take on holiday, and what was she supposed to do? Just leave her there to browse with no help or guidance, when Lexi knew a book that is perfect for her had just arrived, in long-awaited paperback?
’Cause that’s a hard pass.
And then, when she started chatting about her latest five-star read, was Lexi supposed to hold her hand up, interrupt her, and say, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I have to stop talking to you about books because I’m meeting some random dude from one of the useless apps and it’ll probably turn out to be a giant waste of everybody’s time, but I’m going to choose to prioritise him over you right now?’
Again, no.
You might be surmising from all of this that perhaps Lexi isn’t giving Chad or Tom or Randy a fair chance. Perhaps she’s misread his tone, and he isn’t being patronising at all, and she is just letting the nine thousand other dates she’s had with DC dudes and their overinflated egos colour this experience, and Chad or Tom or Randy doesn’t deserve it.
Well, maybe.
But also, maybe not.
‘Accountant?’ he repeats, and she hears it, the surprise in his voice, and then witnesses him trying to catch himself. ‘I guess there’s more to running a bookstore than sitting around reading all day.’
Lexi loves her job, but if there’s anything about it that she doesn’t love, it is, in fact, that she barely has time to read anymore, artisanal coffee shops or not. Honestly, it’s a shock that she has time to shower some days. But if you’re not working in politics, or– at bare minimum– in a politics-adjacent NGO, you might as well be sitting at home twiddling your thumbs as far as most men in Washington are concerned.
This dating charade is clearly a waste of time. She has known this since date 837– since date 8, if she’s honest with herself– and the last thing she has to spare is time.
Lexi takes a sip of her strawberry daiquiri, a long breath, then another sip. She’d be lying if she claimed she wasn’t tempted to walk out. But this is a really good daiquiri, and she’s more than earned it.
‘Yes,’ she tells him. ‘There’s managing a team schedule and paying bills and keeping customers happy and pitching publishers for events and keeping an eye on social media and balancing the chequebook and writing press releases and adding things up over and over to make the numbers make sense. For example.’
Chad or Tom or Randy has the decency to look sheepish, at least, which is how she knows she’d gauged his tone correctly. That he really was assuming owning a bookshop is a walk in the park, that maybe she’d have loads of free time to do his laundry and cook for him while he’s out doing the more important thing of lobbying Congress for some vaguely unethical deal or schmoozing with someone who might be able to get him a job at the White House in the next administration.
Still, maybe she should let the drink work its magic. Maybe she should give him the benefit of the doubt. And maybe, if this wasn’t her nine thousandth date with limited to zero prospects, she would have.
But she’s tired.
You know, from all the sitting around reading books she pays herself millions of dollars to do.
So she asks Chad or Tom or Randy about his job, so that she can zone out and drink her daiquiri and make a graceful exit after a few polite comments. It’s not walking out, exactly. But it’s as close to it as she can manage.
And on the way home, she deletes the apps.
Chapter Two
When Lexi inherited her grandmother’s bookshop, there was never any question that she was going to move to DC to run it. Selling it didn’t once cross her mind. Her grandmother had intuited this, which was why she’d passed it on to her in the first place.
After all, what self-respecting bookworm with the last name Austen wouldn’t want to have their own bookshop?
