Look at what I’ve done.
The bookshelves, the rug, the mural behind the counter. Thepilea peperomioideson the counter.
She’d remembered last night, even in the dark, even in the exhaustion. She knew it again now. What the most important part of moving somewhere new was.
Leaving, and then coming back again.
Even a short time away made you appreciate all the details you had forgotten to appreciate. It didn’t take long at all, Mae had learned, to stop seeing the details in a place.
You also didn’t have to be in a place very long to know it was where you wanted to return to. At least for that exact moment in time. The place that life had led you to, for whatever reason, right here, right now.
It wasn’t quite a bookstore, not yet.
But it was hers.
She put her keys and IGA coffee behind the counter, and she propped open the front door. Began bringing in what she’d been able to transport in her car. The bigger things she’d need to wait for Dell for, and a lot of what she’d dug out of the storage unit were creature comforts she simply wanted for the ADU, even if the ADU didn’t exactly have the space for any of it. But there were knickknacks, framed photos, artwork, pottery, small furniture pieces she wanted for the shop, either for the front desk or the office, to make 12 Main even more her own. It was Saturday morning. She kept the door propped, started taking her time with the trips the more folks she started talking to.
Say hi, sometimes.
It was the height of whale-watching season; weekends in Greyfin Bay in October and November were often as bustling as they were in July. She stuffed a stack of Vik-designed, newly printed business cards in her coat pocket, handed them out to any passerby who paused even a moment. Encouraged them to peek their head inside. Asked them about their favorite books. When she explained that the glass of the front window was being replaced soon, nobody even blinked.
By the time she kicked away the doorstop, several hours had passed, and Mae was almost high on the enthusiasm of strangers. What a kind thing, to earnestly wish someone luck.
What a blessing, to have several hours’ reprieve from remembering the feeling of Dell McCleary’s body, tucked alongside hers.
Taking a big swig of now-lukewarm coffee—Mae’s nose wrinkled as the bitter taste slid down her throat—she flipped on the lights in the office, opened the back door to make sure homophobes hadn’t fucked with her raised beds while she’d been gone.
And then she almost fumbled her coffee entirely into her mums and black-eyed Susans when she saw what Antonio from UPS had left for her.
She rushed back into the office to put the coffee down and retrieve her phone to document them, and maybe call Vik to squeal.
Whereupon she discovered her phone was…completely and utterly dead.
“Dammit,” she muttered, reaching for the charger on her desk. She stared at the dark screen, biting her lip and tapping her feet, before twirling on her heel to grab the boxes. This would have to be alet’s just remember in our heartssituation.
She carried them to the front counter, found her favorite pair of scissors with the glittery pink handles, and carefully, preciously opened her first box of books as a bookseller.
She smiled when she saw the first books, sitting on top, glossy little mass markets: Tessa Dare’s Spindle Cove. She plucked them out, inspected the spines and corners for damage. Her heart swelled with the appropriateness of it all. Maybe everyone had to get swept away, at some point, by a whimsical coastal fantasy.
And then she unpacked more, romance novel after romance novel, and the smile began to slip from her mouth.
She stared at their colorful covers, every depiction of embraces and longing glances scattered across the dark wood of the counter, and felt suddenly dizzy. She realized, dimly, that she had missed lunch.
In all of these stories she’d read, all the comfort she’d escaped into over the years, the characters met the loves of their lives at the exact right time. Maybe it didn’t seem that way in the first chapters, of course; there had to be some hurdles for them to jump over to be together, but…they could always be together by the end. Because they were both unencumbered, ready to let their love interest in.
They weren’t already fucking other people.
Mae sank into her chair, dropped her forehead to the counter.
After a deep breath, she walked into the office to retrieve her phone.
Where several panicked messages from Vik yelled at her from the screen.
Are you okay?? Are you back in Greyfin Bay?
ARE YOU ALIVE PLEASE TEXT ME
I am imagining you just had so much wild sex into the early morning that you are now sleeping it off and that’s why you’re ignoring me and you’re not actually in a ditch somewhere in the coastal range
