And then he paused, because what the fuck was he doing?
“Have you read it?” Mae asked after a moment.
And for half a second, Dell’s heart broke, picturing an alternate universe where Luca trusted Dell enough to let him read his book. Where Dell had been different from the beginning, more open. Where they could’ve gotten to a place where Dell would be brave enough to tell Luca he wanted to.
But he could only shake his head and stare at the ceiling.
“No. But I was just thinking…maybe you’ll sell it here, one day.”
“Yeah.” Dell could hear the smile in Mae’s voice. “I’d like that.”
And then she shifted up on an elbow, casting Dell a wry grin.
“Wait. One day? As in, you think this bookshop will still be around months and years from now? What happened to me abandoning this place the second it gets hard?”
Dell raised a brow in her direction, even if she was right. He was slipping up.
“Haven’t changed my mind. Jury’s still out. I was just engaging in some hopeful thinking, I suppose.”
Mae took another sip from her mug of champagne before collapsing back onto the ground.
“Well,” she said. “I suppose I’ll take it.”
Dell leaned forward to drink more of his OJ before settling back again. Damn, lying on this hard floor felt confusingly good for his back.
Mae’s phone shuffled through two more songs. Dell was almost starting to feel zen, close to a nap, when Mae spoke again.
“Can I tell you the other part?”
“The other part?”
“Of why I wanted to open a bookstore.”
Right. Dell blinked himself awake. “Sure.”
Another slight pause. Sometimes it felt like Mae physically held herself back before every sentence she ever said to Dell. At least, any sentence that mattered, any sentence that wasn’t about repairs to the shop, that wasn’t just to give him shit.
But they eventually always toppled out anyway, because Mae simply wasn’t very good, in the end, at holding herself back.
“The first person I ever loved was this woman Becks. We dated through college, and don’t laugh, but we worked together. At…Blockbuster.”
And dammit, but Dell did laugh.
“I’m old enough to remember, yes.”
Mae laughed a little too when she said, “And even more embarrassing, we both secretly loved it.”
“Working at Blockbuster?”
“Yeah. She knew way more about movies than I did, and she wasgreatat talking about them with customers. She was super charming, could relate to almost anyone who walked through the door. And even though I was going to school for social work, I found the business side…weirdly soothing? I loved everything about inventory, checking the movies in and putting them back in their designated sections, and Ilovedrearranging the New Releases wall every week. Counting the till at the end of the night. I don’t know; it was all satisfying.”
“Okay,” Dell said, a hint of a question mark in his voice.
“Anyway, so sometimes we dreamed about dropping out of school and starting our own store, where she could handle the customer service and I’d handle the back end. Except it was clear even then that the movie rental business was going downhill, so…we dreamed up a bookstore. Selling something I, at least, loved even more than movies.”
“Ah.”
“We would spend entire nights talking about our future store, writing out plans. I even contemplated switching my major to business a few times, even though by the time we were really in the thick of our daydreams it probably would’ve been too late anyway; we were almost seniors. Looking back, I probably got so invested in the idea as a way of ignoring the impending real world, where I knew I’d have to get a job that didn’t just involve restocking DVDs every day. And, well, because I was in love with Becks.”
