Page 14 of Comfort Read

KIT:

This convo started with me pointing out that my building is going to be condemned before December. I’m not sure your chances of success are so high.

SAGE:

eh, i don’t know. i think we’re doing okay.

Kit stares at this text for an amount of time that shames him before he can bring himself to respond.

KIT:

Well, it can’t hurt to aim high. I should be free Thursday afternoon—Allison’s shift starts around three and we’re usually dead then. Why don’t you come by the bookstore when you’re done and we’ll figure it out?

SAGE:

ok b honest: are you EVER not at that bookstore?

Kit sighs, then puts the phone down at his side and looks guiltily around him. Though it’s nearly midnight, he’s still within the walls of the bookstore, and he’ll wake up here tomorrow, too. He made his dinner in the terrible break room kitchenette, just like he does every night, and showered in the horrible firehouse locker room, with its cracked tiles and persistent mildew spots.

It’s not that Kit’s homeless, exactly. He’s just… living at the firehouse. It’s his property, after all! Don’t shopkeepers keep apartments above their businesses all the time? Why shouldn’t he live here?

He and Allison have had this argument so many times that he can almost see her ticking reasons off on her fingers as she lists them. Because it’s basically condemned. Because it’s not zoned to be a residence and he could get himself and the shop in trouble. Because Throgmorten has popped three different air mattresses making biscuits in the middle of the night. Because while the previous owners had renovated the first floor and part of the second into Sawyer’s Books in the seventies, the area that Kit is living and sleeping in hasn’t been touched since before the firehouse was decommissioned. Because it’s sad and upsetting and like he’s punishing himself for what happened with Emerson, which she feels was punishment enough.

Kit hadn’t really meant to move in; all he’d meant to do was move out of Emerson’s apartment and Emerson’s neighborhood and Emerson’s life. He’d brought his stuff to the bookstore, intending to use one of the closed-off, unrenovated rooms of the old firehouse as temporary storage until he found a place to live. He blew up his air mattress, trying to forget that it had been a Christmas gift from Emerson a few years ago in the hope it would make Kit more willing to go camping. It would be fine until he found a new apartment.

But new apartments, as it turned out, wanted lots of things from him. They wanted a rental history he didn’t have, because from the moment he’d left off-campus housing, he’d lived in the same apartment with Emerson, paid his half of the rent to Emerson, and that lease was in Emerson’s name. More importantly, they wanted first and last month’s rent and a security deposit, and were not willing to take a partial stake in a local bookstore instead.

A few days became a few weeks, then a few months, and then Kit just got used to it. Allison didn’t like it, but it wasn’t Kit’s forever plan or anything. It was just something he was doing for now.

Frankie had asked about skeletons in Kit’s closet, and the truth of this one seems to dance mockingly around him, bones clicking and clacking across the chipped linoleum floor. The weight of what it will mean if he loses the bookstore bears down on him, compressing his lungs like flower petals destined for display. Deep down, he knows he should have said something about it this morning, warned Frankie and Sage of the potential tabloid fodder.

Even deeper down, he knows this is why he hadn’t batted an eyelash at the idea of keeping a secret from his loved ones. After all, what was one more?

KIT:

Haha, not really. See you Thursday.

SAGE:

cool. c u then

Under normal circumstances, Kit would spend the next two days stressing about Thursday. What does one do with a movie star in a town like Cedar Falls? Eating an ice cream cone by the waterfall, the traditional Cedar Falls first date, is probably not going to impress a man who has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Also, it’s not exactly seasonally appropriate.

But as it turns out, Kit doesn’t have time to stress about Sage. On Tuesday morning the company that manages his payment processing experiences a nationwide outage, and though service is quickly restored for most customers, Sawyer’s is in the unlucky group whose issues persist.

Having never been faced with this problem before, Kit has no choice but to reach out to the previous manager. He’s an old man, hard of hearing, who guides Kit on a harrowing journey through the basement to find an ancient hand-operated credit card machine. It’s so stiff it’s barely useable, and slows down operations to a truly upsetting degree. Between calling and begging the processing company to send someone out, begging the customers to use cash, and begging the piles of hand-captured receipts to be more legible as he types them up, he’s too exhausted to ruminate on any upcoming fake dates he may or may not have committed to.

Kit regrets this deeply when he returns from the bathroom on Thursday afternoon to find Sage tucked into the armchair next to the poetry shelves. He has a book open in one hand, the other busy petting Throgmorten, who is purring contentedly in his lap. He looks a bit ridiculous, once again dressed in high-end dark clothing and a baseball cap that seems to scream, “I’m someone famous desperate to go unnoticed!” But he’s still gut-twistingly, breathtakingly handsome, to a degree that, for a moment, he looks more like a painting of Sage Ballard than like the man himself.

Treacherously, Kit’s heart lurches. Can you imagine, it seems to ask, as it grips the sides of his rib cage and squeezes, if you were the kind of person who this could really happen to? If it wasn’t about Sage saving his image and getting a movie made and he just, y’know, liked you? Thought you were hot? Can you imagine coming home every day to find him sitting in your house, with that body and that face and those stupid, gorgeous hands, and being free to touch him however you wanted? Can you?

Kit swallows. He can imagine it a little too well; if anything, his area of struggle is stopping.

“Hi,” he says, because it’s that or continue to stand staring at the man. Sage looks up, and smiles briefly, but then his eyes flick to something behind Kit, and he frowns.

Kit, looking around, feels the corners of his own mouth pull down. It seems he’s not the only one who’s been standing and staring. Several of the Sawyer’s regulars are openly gaping at Sage, books they were browsing held loose and abandoned at their sides. Only Allison—God bless her—is behaving normally, standing at the counter having an enthusiastic debate with a customer about the costuming in Dune.

Annoyed, he reaches down into the well of patience he used teaching the second grade, takes a deep breath, waves a hand, and says, “Hi! Hello! What’s happening here, and do I need to be worried about it? Group trance? Everyone seeing a ghost that I’m missing? Are we smelling smoke? No? Great.” When nobody looks away, Kit sharpens his tone a little and adds, “Okay, folks, less staring might be good. I understand that Throgmorten is awe-inspiring, I really do, but I have to live with him, and this is the kind of thing that goes right to his head.”