Page 6 of Comfort Read

There is a moment, as they’re leaving—Sage is the last out, and for a second he lingers in the doorframe, his hand still caught on the knob. He glances back at Kit, and Kit has the strangest feeling that he wants to say something but can’t quite bring himself to. Which is asinine, of course. Sage is a movie star! What more could he possibly have to say to someone like Kit?

Still, he thinks about that hesitating, almost shy look on Sage’s face the whole rest of his day. He is, for some reason, unable to quite let it go.

THREE

Three days later, Kit has put the whole thing out of his mind.

He’s tried to put it out of his mind. It’s a lot easier said than done. Sage is the most famous person Kit’s ever met, to such a comically absurd degree that the next person on that list is a woman primarily known for a series of sour cream commercials.

Also he’d been… well. How had he been? Strange? Intriguing? Somehow more handsome in person, which was surely in violation of natural law, or, at very least, the mercy rule? A hostile alien from the planet Condescending Bastard? Nice to Kit’s cat, who is quite possibly a hostile alien himself?

It’s difficult not to think about the encounter, is the point. Kit is doing his best not to dwell on it even as he closes up the shop on Friday. He and Allison pass one another and have one of those worn-in routine conversations that would be incomprehensible to anyone else:

“Hey, I’m gonna⁠—”

“Right, cool, and I’ll⁠—”

“Yeah, great, and don’t forget to⁠—”

“I won’t! That reminds me, do you still⁠—”

“No, I did it already. And you⁠—”

“Yep, yep, I got it.” There’s a beat, and then Kit smiles at her and says, “You think maybe we’ve known each other too long?”

“Not ’til we start making up our own languages,” Allison says cheerfully. “If you go full Tolkien with a coworker, either somebody has to quit or the two of you have to get married. I love you, Kit, but we can’t get married. I could not abide your half-empty coffee cups all over my living space.”

Kit laughs. “That’s the deciding factor, then? Not the fact that I date men, and you usually date women?”

“I may have been single for a long time,” Allison says, already heading off in the direction of the stockroom. “But I still have standards.”

Kit rolls his eyes in amusement at her back. Raising his voice with each word to be audible as she gets further away, he calls, “In case we don’t catch each other again before you go, bye! Have a good night!”

“You too!” Allison hollers, followed by the traditional door slam. That’s not Allison’s fault; the unknowable draft that has plagued the bookshop since Kit worked here as a teenager loves slamming that door, and does so essentially every time it’s opened. In the early days of Allison working here, they’d both hollered apologies whenever it happened. She’d done him an insane, enormous favor by shifting her career as a hairstylist to a part-time, at-home operation in order to help him run this place, and he’d been terrified of sending the impression he was in any way upset with her. She was just appalled at being associated with any door slam, because—as she insisted many times—she had not been raised in a barn.

However, they’ve both spent eighteen months being driven slowly mad and loving every minute of it, which a variety of other booksellers have informed Kit is simply the nature of the job. These days, the draft has a name, and that name is Bartholomew.

“Bartholomew!” Kit calls with affected annoyance, and receives a similar, if muffled, “Bartholomew!” in reply.

This portion of the evening ritual thus completed, Kit allows himself a brief, satisfied sigh. Sure, this is all probably going to be ripped away from him in a few months, but that doesn’t mean he can’t enjoy it. Hell, it probably means he should enjoy it, while it lasts.

A wrong note strikes him when he returns to the front room of the bookshop. It takes him a second to place it, and then he realizes: There is a pair of legs visible in the Self-Help section.

It’s been more than fifteen minutes since Kit, as he does every night, used the firehouse’s crackly old intercom system to say, “Last call for books, folks! Sawyer’s is now closed! Ten-minute grace period before we lock you in here with us!” Now, annoyed to see a lingerer but merciful by nature, he hits the button again. “Dun dun dunnnn! We are now fifteen minutes past closing time. Anyone who maybe got lost in a good read has been granted a brief reprieve from justice, but we will lock you in here if you don’t get out soon. Don’t let us make you our prisoner! It isn’t worth it.”

There is what sounds like a soft snort from the Self-Help section, but the legs don’t move. They stand stock still for another five full minutes, which Kit watches tick by on the shop’s ancient Felix the Cat clock.

The longer he waits, the angrier Kit gets. The owner of those legs clearly heard his announcement! This is no innocent accident born of getting lost in a book, this is malicious lingering. Lurking with malice aforethought!

Finally, after eight (eight!!) minutes, Kit leans on the intercom button again. Attempting to smother the annoyance in his voice, he says, “Hello! Me again! If you are still in here, perhaps in the Self-Help section, just a piece of information to consider: Sawyer’s Books has been closed for twenty-three minutes and I don’t like confrontation! Please stop holding me hostage, unless you’re planning to rob the place, in which case also kindly get on with it but please don’t actually hold me hostage⁠—”

Kit chokes on his words, on his breath, as Sage Ballard walks out from behind the shelf and says, “Hi.”

“Hello,” Kit says, staring. He finds himself drifting out from behind the counter and towards Sage like a boat someone forgot to tie up. Halfway across the room, he notices that he’s doing it and stops abruptly, at what he immediately realizes is an awkward distance away. “You’re—here. Again. Hello.”

Sage graciously takes a few steps forward, closing the distance between them to a more normal one for conversation. “You said that already.”

“So I did,” Kit says, faint. It was surreal enough to have the man in his bookshop on Official Business three days ago, but to find him lurking here of his own volition is so strange that Kit can hardly think.