‘Yeah,’ Erin says. ‘That’s why I wouldn’t be so quick to assume they’re getting back together. It doesn’t exactly sound like a match made in heaven.’
Lexi shrugs again. ‘I should probably focus on the bookshop right now anyway. I don’t really have time for romantic shenanigans.’
‘Any bright new ideas?’ Erin sounds so hopeful. Always rooting for Lexi.
Lexi tells her about wine night. She knows Erin will get it; after all, they’d enjoyed tipsy browsing together on that Galentine’s Day night out in North West DC a few months ago. After dinner, still buzzed from the wine, they’d wandered around Kramers and picked up armfuls of novels, lured by pretty covers and recommendations from staff and each other. The next morning, they’d counted their new books in awe and looked at their receipts in horror.
‘Tipsy browsing is the best browsing,’ Erin says now.
Lexi pictures a mural of a girl reading with a glass of wine. A cute new logo featuring a bottle.
Sam would kill her. And right at this moment, giddy and exhausted, that seems like reason enough to do it.
Chapter Fifty-One
Lexi’s fingers feel like they’re starting to ache from not playing the piano. Only a few months ago, she’d never touched one, and it’s not like she was playing every day even when she was learning. Still, while she should be looking up the rules for serving wine in a bookshop, she finds herself looking up pianos instead: how much they cost, how heavy they are, how much of a headache it is to move them.
If she’s going to be looking up anything that isn’t wine rules, she should probably be trying to figure out what she is going to do when Erin moves out. Despite how much fun they had together last night, it was also a reminder that Erin will be leaving soon. Lexi has put off even thinking about what that means for her (to be fair, she has had one or two other things to think about). She doesn’t want to live with a random, haggling about dirty dishes and whether they’re best left in the sink or next to it if you don’t have time to do them right then and there. At thirty-two, she also feels like she’s too old for all of that.
Which explains, in part, why she’s assumed the ostrich pose and gone down the piano rabbit hole. She tries to picture a lovely flat with a piano in the corner of the living room, but here’s the thing: the picture is incomplete, because a piano without Sam to play it feels wrong.
‘Numbers not adding up?’ Natalie asks, setting a cup of tea on Lexi’s desk, and she realises she’s sighed out loud and not just in her mind. And that, for people to make her tea without her even having to ask, she must be radiating anxiety and the need for some TLC.
Lexi clicks out of the music shop tab. ‘Something like that.’
‘Well,’ Natalie says, ‘I come bearing good news.’
‘Good newsanda cup of tea? Things are looking up.’
‘The good news is that we don’t need a liquor licence to give wine out for free. And the other good news is that wholesale wine is cheaper than I thought.’
She’s made a very organised and informative spreadsheet detailing exactly how many books they’d need to sell to make up for the price of the wine, and it’s very doable– essentially just a couple of books for each bottle, which seems eminently possible, with the added buzz of a full and happy shop and a few less inhibitors when it comes to spending money. She goes through it together with Natalie, and it almost seems too good to be true. But Natalie is nothing if not thorough, and a tiny bubble of hope forms in Lexi’s stomach, fluttering, light, like the first signs of a crush.
So it’s full steam ahead for the first wine night. Lexi’s accountant pulled an unconvinced face when she told him about giving away wine for free, but when she showed him the calculations, he relented a little. It’s possible that she forgot to mention the extra expenses for the first night: napkins with the shop’s logo and tote bags that sayTipsy browsing is the best browsing. They were designed for free by her friend Imani, though, and they’re also for sale online, so Lexi is crossing her fingers that they’ll soon make their money back on them. Imani also designed a logo for wine nights, so they have something new and interesting to post to the social media that has been slightly sleepy since Tessa left.
Lexi is nervous to presspostthough. Until now, it has been all internal discussions and brainstorming with her supportive friends, but once it’s out there, once people see it, then what? And bypeople, she specifically means Sam. She knows you can’t copyright an idea, and she knows that technically it was hers first, but she also knows that if she were him, she’d be mad, and she doesn’t know what, exactly, that is going to look like.
Her fingers hover over her phone and she takes a deep breath. It’s too late to back out now, anyway. The wine has been paid for and the tote bags have been ordered. Like most things in life, if this is worth doing, then it’s worth doing whole-heartedly.
She closes her eyes as she tapspost, looking away from the potential car crash, the collision with Sam, but also feeling the kind of excitement in the pit of her belly that she hasn’t felt in a while: the high of a creative idea that might actually work, might mean the shop doesn’t just survive but thrives, when just a few weeks ago even survival seemed barely attainable.
The best thing about having her own bookshop, Lexi sometimes thinks, is exactly this: these creative ideas she’s free to dream up and go with the flow on. Over the years, she’s often talked to authors about how it feels to be inthe zone, where nothing except them and their book are present and they don’t notice time passing. Lexi has had brainstorming sessions that have felt that way, like a shot of adrenaline injected into her veins.
So what if Sam is mad? She was here first, on this patch, and he’s broken her heart and deserves a little revenge, even if Lexi isn’t proud of herself for seeing it that way. But when she opens her eyes and sees he’s already texted her, a message that simply saysWTF, all her bravado leaks out of her. The happy adrenaline and the creative high desert her as quickly as they arrived, replaced by a fight-or-flight response, her legs jelly-like and an inability to form coherent sentences even in her own brain.
She stares at the three letters, unsure how to respond or if she even needs to. She doesn’t have the stomach for out-and-out war. She’s just trying to keep her bookshop alive. And in the end, that’s what she tells him. The fight for her bookshop has both everything and nothing to do with him. She wants to win; she’s determined to win. But if it was something else threatening its survival– a rent increase, say, or a global pandemic– she’d be fighting every bit as hard.
Nobody’s going to buy wine at my shop when they can get it at yours for free.Sam writes.
Sure they will. Mine is bog standard; yours is carefully selected and curated.
But yours is free.He points out.
And therefore I’m making no money on it.
Which makes me think that the only reason you’re doing this is to undercut me. A leaf straight out of the capitalist playbook.
I thought you liked capitalism?
