Lexi looks up at him and meets his eyes. ‘Yes. It is.’
She wants to kiss him, but also she’s afraid to. Thelet people talk, I don’t carebravado of twenty minutes earlier has faded now that they’re within sight of their respective streets. Lexi can almost see curtains twitching, Capitol Hill moms sipping coffee post-school drop-off and wondering if the two of them are planning world domination with a book empire or if they’re about to stab each other in the back in order to assert dominance over this particular patch of the nation’s capital. If it weren’t for their linked hands, Lexi doubts it would cross their minds that they’re currently fighting very different impulses, but one kiss seen by one mom would soon disabuse the whole neighbourhood of that notion.
‘Is this whole thing a really bad idea?’ Sam asks, as if reading Lexi’s thoughts. The answer is obvious.
‘Probably. But I don’t want it to be. Do you?’
He shakes his head, and takes her other hand too, so now they’re standing opposite each other, joined, potential Capitol Hill gossip be damned. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I don’t.’
They walk in silence the rest of the way, the kind of companiable silence that Lexi has read about but never really believed existed. If you love someone, she’d always thought, wouldn’t you want to talk to them non-stop? Getting to know Sam, though, is teaching her other ways to be. Maybe silence is okay. Maybe fierce loyalty to one shop doesn’t mean you have to hate another one. Maybe hard-nosed businessmen have hearts, too.
‘You’ve got this,’ he tells her on their corner before they go their separate ways and it’s time to test the phantom limb theory. ‘Go save that bookshop.’
Lexi squeezes his hand before she leaves him. She tries not to think about the fact that he’s the one it needs saving from.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Lexi leaves the shop early, to go shopping for something to wear on her Official Date with Sam. She doesn’t want to wear her usual tops, tainted with the disappointment of first dates with guys who won’t shut up about themselves. In this case, she actuallywantsSam to talk about himself. He’s still a mystery, and while that’s definitely part of the allure, the curiosity is also burning Lexi up inside. She’s ready to cave and ask the questions. She wants to know why he opened a bookstore when he doesn’t even seem to love books that much. She wants to know why he’s still in DC if New York is so much better (which it isn’t). She wants to know what the ex-girlfriend did to him, exactly, that left him broken and unable to hold down a relationship. (A little online stalking has revealed her name to be Amanda, but that’s all the information she has managed to glean.) She also wants to know what his gym routine is, because those arms... Now that it’s properly summer, she gets to see a lot of them. A definite perk.
She also wonders where he’s going to take her. So to speak.
In Clothes Encounters on 7th Street, she looks through the tops in her size, picking out a few to try on. She thinks aboutThe Hating Gameand Joshua Templeton’s obsession with Lucy’s eye colour. Borderline creepy? Maybe, but also very romantic. Should she pick out something blue to highlight her own eyes? Or should she choose something that doesn’t look that well thought out, something that will look like she just threw it on without trying too hard? Something that will make Sam think this isn’t a big deal for her and he’s going to have to work hard to win her over?
It might be too late for that. She might have shown her hand, what with her clear desperation that he throw her onto his bed straight away, even before the formality of a real date. Shecouldtry to insinuate that her heart will be harder to capture than her body, but she doesn’t think she’d be fooling anyone. She thinks aboutFriends, how Joey can allegedly look at a woman’s bra and have it pop open. That’s the way someone can look at Lexi and have her heart pop open for them. Or not justsomeone. But the right person. Or sometimes, as is very possibly the case here, the wrong one.
On the changing room chair, Lexi’s phone lights up with a text.
Hey. Above it, in bold, the name of the sender: Sam. Lexi’s heart, traitor that it is, does a little flutter. There’s no way it’s staying safely tucked in her chest, is there? She’ll have to be careful. Just in case this whole thing is an elaborate ploy to distract her so he can swoop in and take over the literary world in this part of town. It probably isn’t, but you never know.
She waits for him to say something else, but there’s nothing.Heyis so lazy. He’s expecting her to carry the conversation when he’s the one who started it. She’s not letting him get away with that. It takes a lot of energy to resist the urge to write back, but she does. Lexi curses herself for enabling read receipts– she wants him to think she has better things to do than stare at her phone, even if staring at it is exactly what she’s doing.
What are you up to?He writes eventually, and she mentally congratulates herself for the tiny victory.
She considers saying,Nothing. But the prospect of teasing him is too enticing to resist.
Buying something to wear for our date. So you won’t be able to take your eyes off me.
That won’t be necessary.
Most restaurants do tend to prefer you to wear clothes. At least, I assume so. I haven’t actually asked.
See, that’s where you’ve been going wrong with all those DC dudes.
I imagine most of them would have preferred we skip the chat and just get naked, yes.
A pause, then he sends a blushing emoji, Lexi is all out of banter.
I don’t blame them.
She coughs, right there in the shop, holding a red off-the-shoulder top that she could wear with her laciest bra straps showing, just to tease and distract him. It may not be the most efficient way to get the answers about his life that she’s looking for, but in this moment, it feels worth it.
We could’ve got naked a long time ago. You’re the one who wants to do dinner. And that requires clothes.
As God and Jane Austen intended.
It feels weird and borderline blasphemous to put both God and Jane Austen in the same text chain as the wordnaked.
Indeed.
