Beside Lexi, Hazel laughs. ‘We know what you mean,’ she says. ‘Nobody’s offended. Not even the less young among us.’
‘Thank you,’ she says, grabbing her bag of books from the counter and stifling a hiccup.
Lexi watches her pull the wrong door before remembering it’s the left one that opens. This customer has been to the shop approximately eight hundred times. She knows which door opens just as she knows that she has a teetering stack of unread romance novels with cartoon covers at home and certainly doesn’t need another five right now.
‘Tipsy browsing is the best browsing,’ Lexi says to Hazel, not-so-subtle code forThis bet is paying off, and she nods vigorously and enthusiastically. ‘Speaking of which...’
Lexi walks around the counter and helps herself to a glass, then takes one over to Hazel. She looks at Lexi quizzically, unsure: ah yes, Americans and their careful attitude to drinking.
‘Tipsy working is also the best working,’ she tells Hazel, winking, and she takes the glass. Lexi is enjoying the festive atmosphere and she wants her staff to enjoy it too. It’s been heavy lately, a little black cloud of stress hovering over her head and following here everywhere she goes. It’s high time the atmosphere lightened up. Besides, Hazel is sensible, conscientious and careful enough on the till not to make mistakes even after a few sips. It’s just scanning and bagging and handing over receipts, anyway, not like in England where booksellers have to manually input the total into the credit card terminal. Lexi would never trust herself to get that right, even sober. And she’d certainly miss the very subtleNot Authorisedmessage when a contactless payment doesn’t go through; she’d end up having to chase the customer down the street like in a meet-cute of a predictable but very enjoyable Nineties romcom. Here in the US, the terminal buzzes angrily when there’s a problem, and there’s no mistaking that kind of thing.
As for customer orders– one of the trickier things to master with the not-entirely-intuitive computer system– Lexi doubts there’ll be much of that tonight. This is a night for impulse buying and browsing, for catching up with friends from around the Hill you bump into unexpectedly, for standing next to the cosy mysteries and recommending your favourite to strangers. It’s not a night for admin tasks.
And that goes for Lexi, too: this evening is everything she loves about bookselling, all the reasons this shop charmed her when she was little even though she couldn’t have put it into words back then, beyondI love the way books smell. She had to stifle a cheer when she found out she’d inherited the place, because she didn’t want it to seem like she was cheering her grandmother’s death instead of this exciting way to keep her alive along with her legacy to the community. She anticipated moments just like this: when people share the joy of books, when that joy is amplifiedbecauseit’s being shared. Books, after all, bring people together and give them something to talk about when they think they have nothing in common.
Lexi is buzzing, and it’s (mostly) not the Champagne, and it’s (mostly) not Sam, or the fact that he seems to have come at best in peace as a supportive friend and at worst curiosity. Those things don’t hurt, admittedly, but the buzz is about the full shop, the emptying shelves, the sheepish but delighted demeanour of shoppers giving in to their impulses, the excited conversation, and the anticipation of so many of these readers coming back next week or next month to tell Lexi that they loved the book, to find the bookseller who recommended just the right thing and ask them for more titles they should try. She’s encouraged her booksellers to be even more enthusiastic, even more liberal with their suggestions tonight, and it’s working. When she circulates amongst them, she can tell there’s nothing forced about it. The energy in the room is feeding itself, vibrating and ricocheting off each bookseller and each satisfied customer.
She hasn’t felt like this at work in a long time, and she’s guessing her staff haven’t either. Lost in the moment, standing in the centre of her bookshop– her beloved grandmother’s beloved bookshop– it takes her a while to notice that Sam is standing right in front of her.
‘Hey.’ He says it gently, but the interruption makes her jump. Part of her wants to be mad at him for interrupting her moment, but he’s so handsome and he smells so good that she can’t be. She’s glad he’s here, seeing this, and not in a weird, vindictive kind of way: she’s glad because she’s proud of herself and her staff and what they’ve built here. The happy, successful bookshop owner feels like the truest part of her, and Lexi wants Sam to see that, to really seeher.
Not that it matters, or not that it should.
‘Hey,’ she says back.
‘So this seems like a roaring success.’
Living in the US has made Lexi less bashful, better able to take a compliment. In England, she might have said something self-deprecating likeOh, there’s probably nothing else to do on a Friday night in DCorYeah, free wine will do that. But instead, she says, ‘Yeah, it is, isn’t it?’ And she lets herself grin as widely as she feels like grinning, so widely her cheeks ache, so widely that Sam has no choice but to mirror it. Not that it’s a choice, exactly– more of an unconscious reflex, like a shared yawn at the end of a long shift the week before Christmas. They stand there, grinning, like earlier, but with added verve and enthusiasm, and Lexi’s cheeks are burning now and suddenly, much as she loves everyone being in her shop, she wants them all to leave so that she can kiss Sam. Instead, she takes a deep breath, trying to rid herself of what is clearly a ridiculous thought, but her cheeks only burn hotter.
‘You’re in your element,’ Sam says. ‘It’s so great to see. It’s like– you’re alive in a whole different way.’
It occurs to Lexi to ask if he feels that way in his shop, ever– alive in a whole different way– but she doesn’t want to ruin her enjoyment of the night by reminding him that they’re rivals, by reminding him that this evening is part of her fight for survival– a night made necessary in large part because of him.
Her internal buzz fizzles a little. Her cheeks start to relax out of their grin. She tries not to focus on those things; she tries not to resent him, to cling to the joy. Because, in this moment, it’s clear that Sam means his comment kindly: his voice is tender, and even sexy.
‘Thank you,’ she says. She lets herself appreciate that he’s seeing her, just as she wanted him to. And he’s still standing there, looking like there’s so much more he wants to say. Out of the corner of Lexi’s eye, she’s aware of a raised phone in their direction. She pictures a hashtag: #bookstorebabes, and stifles a giggle. She wonders vaguely if anyone will send a tip to one of the DC blogs, implying that Sam and Lexi’s rivalry may be rooted in sexual tension as much as their own drives for success and survival.
‘Busted,’ she wants to say to him, but then what if she has to explain to Sam what it is the phone-wielding photographer might be seeing, might be busting them for? Instead, she pulls her eyes away from him, looking for a customer who might need a recommendation, a legitimate way out of a moment she’d actually be perfectly happy to stay in forever: she and Sam looking at each other in the centre of her successful bookshop buzzing with satisfied customers.
She finds a gap on a shelf that needs filling with a face-out. She turns to do it, but first she can’t resist gently touching Sam’s arm, saying, ‘Thank you for coming,’ then adding, embarrassingly, ‘It really means a lot,’ because it does, this coming in peace, this coming to support her, this pride in her that she feels coming off him in waves.
Maybe it wasn’t his intention, but she’s almost sure it’s why he’s still here, and she barely cares whether anyone will notice as she walks over to the shelf, rearranges the books and Sam follows her and says, ‘You’re so good at this.’
Lexi barely cares who sees what or what conclusions they might draw because she’s drunk on the buzz of the bookshop, and the non-Champagne Champagne, and maybe a little bit on falling in love, even though it’s stupid and it makes no sense and they’re mortal enemies and he maybe even has a girlfriend. Alcohol doesn’t just lower resistance to buying books; it lowers Lexi’s resistance to caring about DC gossip, and to the blatantly obvious truth.
And tipsy flirting, it turns out, is the best flirting.
Chapter Fifty-Three
On Monday morning, the shop feels filled with hope. It’s like breathing in fresh air– like getting off the train in the Lake District on a camping weekend with her uni friends years ago, when she’d got on among the stress and crowds and pollution of London Euston. She’d stepped off and immediately her blood pressure had lowered, settling at a healthier level than usual, and her lungs had filled with something they had forgotten existed, had forgotten to crave. Pure, fresh air that almost hurt when it entered her London-scarred lungs.
That’s how it feels walking into the shop today. Natalie and Hazel are chatting, their shoulders– is Lexi imagining it?– visibly more relaxed, as if a rucksack full of hardbacks has been removed from them. Debbie and Marcus are smiling as they dust shelves, replace an old staff pick with a new one, or pull out some face-outs to fill gaps on the biography shelf. All of them greet Lexi with friendly, open faces, all traces of false cheer and resignation erased, and that feeds her own relief, the spring in her own step as she wanders downstairs to greet the books and check her email, to crunch the numbers from Saturday night and see just what they’ve done to the curve on the graph of doom. It turns out she doesn’t hate maths quite as much when it’s cheerful maths.
Downstairs, trolleys are full of books for shelving. Even in their wildest dreams of what Saturday could be, they hadn’t ordered enough to replenish the many gaps left by happy shoppers. But that’s okay: gaps mean more space for face-outs, and face-outs often mean sales, so it’s a win-win, and the new stock will be here from the warehouses in Pennsylvania and Tennessee in just a couple of days. Apart from anything else, Tipsy Browsing was a way to get rid of books that have sat around unbought for a long time, and that is space that can now be filled with books that they know (or at least hope) will fly straight off them again. It feels exciting. And now she’s got a bit of distance, the panic over the online gossip has receded, too.
It feels like those first few weeks of rebranding, when Lexi was fresh and full of ideas and enthusiasm. She’d gradually forgotten what it was like to be a new bookshop owner, a new bookseller, hungry to share her love of reading and eager to keep building community in her grandmother’s footsteps. She’d allowed herself to get more and more submerged by the admin and the maths and the worries about the graph, so that unconsciously she had become used to survival as the goal, rather than growth and innovation and, above all, joy. But Friday night had been like filling her lungs with that long-forgotten joy, and Lexi intends to cling to this feeling for dear life.
Pippin stirs as she creaks open the door to her office. He opens one eye, just to check that it’s just Lexi today, and not hordes of not-entirely-sober twenty-somethings. He wandered out at the beginning of the evening on Friday, just to see what all the commotion was about, and consented to being fussed over by a few people before running back to the safety of his basket. Lexi is pretty sure that could he have slammed the door behind him to keep the world out, he would have. Satisfied that it’s just harmless little Lexi, he closes the one eye he opened and burrows back into his morning snooze position, curled in on himself.
