He nods gravely, in recognition of her excellent point. ‘You’re right. Probably not. I wouldn’t want to set a bad example.’ Then he nods again, towards the piano stool.
Lexi sets her bag down and does as she’s told. She’s going to have to get used to his bossing her around. She wishes she could say she hated it.
At the end of the lesson, during which Lexi has learned about the different clefs and the way you read music differently depending on if you’re playing it with your right hand or your left hand, Sam looks at her like he wants to say something. The silence stretches out and she starts to feel squirmy.
‘Are you heading to the shop now?’ she asks, for something to say more than anything else.
‘Yeah,’ he replies. ‘Sure. Why not.’
‘You don’t sound very sure.’
‘I have admin to do, and sometimes I do it from home. But there’s no reason I can’t do it from there.’
Lexi likes to hide in her cave in the shop for her admin, knowing that just beyond the wall, children are reading with their parents, Pippin is wandering around, and Megan or Debbie or Hazel are putting just the right books in just the right hands. It grounds her. It reminds her why she’s doing the chasing of bills, the arguing with the internet provider, the organising of rotas. She doesn’t know exactly what motivates Sam, because it doesn’t seem to be that, exactly. He’s a mystery to her, still.
‘Want to walk together?’
He raises an eyebrow. ‘People will talk.’
Lexi laughs. What a ridiculous idea that anyone would think anything was going on between these two bitter rivals. ‘Let them,’ she says.
‘Okay.’
Sam picks up his keys and his backpack, which is ready and waiting at the door. If it had been the other way round, Lexi would have needed at least ten minutes of faffing. First of all, she wouldn’t have been able to find her keys, even though there’s a hook just by the door perfect for hanging them when she gets in. She does this six or seven times out of ten, but you can guarantee that the times when she doesn’t do it are the times when she’s in a rush to leave. It’s the kind of thing her mum used to shake her head at her for; now it’s Erin who shakesherhead. Then she’d scramble around gathering her notebooks, her Post-it Notes, her highlighter pen. As Erin has pointed out many times, it would be much easier to just leave all of that at the office in the shop. But Lexi always intends to do more work at home, even if she does mostly end up flopping on the sofa, exhausted, chatting to Erin or catching up on Netflix’s latest must-watch or, if she really wants to feel virtuous, reading an advance review copy of a book for an upcoming event.
What nobody tells you about owning a bookstore is you end up reading less than ever, despite all that increased access to early and free or cheap material, and despite being around people whose enthusiasm for books is infectious. Lexi finds herself saying,That sounds great, I’ll have to read it soonfar more times per day than she ever has, and actually doing it less and less. If she’s perfectly honest, the reason she wants to hire a manager she can entrust with the day-to-day running of the shop isn’t just so she can have a life, see her friends more and be more present for them, and maybe even fit in some dating on the side. It’s also so that she can have time to read again. She misses the lazy Sundays she used to have in bed with a cup of tea and a good novel, emerging from a happy ending well into the evening, simultaneously wondering where the day had gone and feeling deeply satisfied with how she had spent it.
She used to read purely because she loved it. And also because it made her feel connected to her grandma. They always talked about books when she was alive; she always wanted to know what Lexi was reading, what she thought about it. Her guilty pleasures were Jilly Cooper and Mary Higgins Clark, but she loved to sink into literary fiction and poetry, too.
But then, books became more than a passion for Lexi: they became connected to the dopamine hit of Instagram likes and growing follower counts– a performative hobby rather than a private one, and she knows there’s no way to put the proverbial genie back into that particular bottle. And then, owning a bookstore: well, that’s a whole other thing, because now books are tied up with mundane things like paying her rent and keeping on top of electricity bills, with managing staffing issues, with choosing healthcare plans, with competing with Sam, and with the darker aspects of late-stage capitalism. So when Lexi wants a break and she picks up a book... it doesn’t quite feel like a break. And the shameful fact is that sometimes she resents the shop just a little bit for that.
Outside, it’s roasting. The summer humidity that will frizz up her wavy hair hasn’t quite kicked in yet, but it’s a very warm spring day– the kind of day that back home people complain about because it’s ‘too hot’. And because Lexi is British, and because she is feeling suddenly awkward at being outside, in public, with Sam, this seems like an appropriate way to break the silence.
‘I love this weather,’ she tells him.
‘Say what you like about the British,’ he says, ‘but you guys certainly know how to appreciate the sun.’
‘Well, yeah. We have to. I’ve been here six years, but shaving my legs in early April is still a novelty. And yeah, it’s a pain. But I love the feeling of soft legs and a dress.’
Sam makes a sound like he is being strangled.
‘You okay there?’
‘Yup.’ He nods energetically. ‘Sure. Absolutely.’
Another pause, and Lexi has already used the weather as a topic to defuse the awkwardness. So now what?
They walk in silence along I street, the cars on the busy South Capitol Street behind them rescuing them from hearing themselves not speaking. But as the traffic noise recedes, Lexi scrambles to think of a question. It’s going to be a long twenty-minute walk otherwise.
‘So do you like living in Navy Yard?’
‘Here we go,’ Sam says, under his breath, and then, louder, ‘I do. I love living in Navy Yard. I love living in a new-build apartment. I love the rooftop. I love the pool.’
It’s Lexi’s turn to make a strangled noise. She hopes he interprets that as jealousy and not as her trying not to think about his body in tiny Speedos. (He’s obviously too cool to wear Speedos. It just makes for better imagination games.)
He mirrors Lexi’s question back to her. ‘You okay there?’
She thinks about mirroring his answer–yup, sure, absolutely– but that seems a little... much.
