Shanna Germain - Leather Bound

She waved a hand at me, her nails perfectly polished in a blue-black hue that somehow matched her shirt exactly. Some days I dreamed I would wake up and have the kind of put-togetherness that Lily did. The horrible thing was I’d seen her get ready for things. What took her five minutes would have taken me five hours and turned me into a wailing mess with nail polish all over my bathroom and mascara smeared across both cheeks. She just had those skills somehow. I swear women like Lily are born knowing how to get their hair to behave perfectly just by looking at it sternly in the mirror.

An old boyfriend once asked me if I kept my face natural because I wanted to show off how I looked without make-up or because I was lazy. I didn’t have the courage to admit that I kept my face ‘natural’ because I didn’t know how to do anything else with it.

Lily raised her hand again and flipped off what I imagined to be a whole wall of former exes. The blonde biker chick. The beautiful volleyball player who’d had a penchant for threesomes. The teacher who’d shown up at Leather Bound in her glasses and her button-up cardigans, but who Lily said fucked like a wildcat in heat. And those were just the ones I could remember recently.

‘Fuck love,’ Lily said.

‘Fuck love,’ I said. Right now, I couldn’t agree more. Love, or maybe the lack of love, seemed to screw everything up.

‘Maybe you just need a quickie,’ I said. ‘A loving fuck to say fuck love?’

This time she flipped me off, her throaty laugh filling the front half of the store with sound. ‘Seriously? Last time I did that, I almost ended up in Vegas saying “I do” to a vegan wiccan in front of a guy who didn’t look in the least like Elvis. Worst. Quickie. Ever.’

I laughed with her, even though I felt my own throat close up a little as she went on.

‘I mean, can you seriously ever see me getting married? Little white dresses for both of us? House with a picket fence? Adopting kids or fighting over who gets to be the biological mom? Jesus.’

Can you see me getting married? I thought. Because I certainly can’t. And, oh, Lily, my life is a little fucked up right now.

I’d never wanted to get married. I could easily give my entire life to a bookstore that was barely making ends meet, but couldn’t seem to handle a relationship that required anything more than delicious sex and maybe dinner a couple of times a week.

I used to think I just hadn’t met the right person, but now I wondered if something was wrong with me. Maybe I should think about getting married. Everything in my life was good, even if it was sometimes a little staid. Leather Bound was almost making enough money to keep us afloat. Lily and I worked well together. Kyle’s work as a tattoo artist was getting recognition. Our sex was great.

‘Actually,’ Lily said quietly after a moment. ‘Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.’

For a second I thought I’d been speaking out loud. My hands shook as they slipped the bills into their proper places in the register.

‘OK, stop talking,’ I said. ‘Or I’ll have to start the count over again.’

It wasn’t entirely true, but I needed her to be quiet because my heart was thumping too hard in the hollow of my chest and, every time Lily said one more thing, I wanted to cry. Uncertainty and confusion do that to me sometimes. It’s the little things that get me. When things are big and bad, I’m all strong and stoic on the outside. But when they’re small and confusing and complicated, well, just bring on the tears.

When our friend Conrad died a couple months back, I didn’t cry when he announced that he was sick, I didn’t cry at his hospice bed and I didn’t cry at the funeral. But when he shipped us a box of all the books he’d bought from Leather Bound over the years with a note thanking us for all the beautiful stories we’d given him, I fell down on my knees and wept until I’d ruined the letter with my tears.

Unwilling to think about that, I decided I’d tell Lily about my morning. Maybe she’d have more insight into the situation than I did.

‘Hey, Lil,’ I started. ‘Kyle asked me to –’

At just that moment, the front door opened, and Lily and I both looked up in surprise.

My first thought was a very articulate ‘I thought I locked that.’

My second thought was simply, ‘Yum.’

* * *

Despite the fact that Leather Bound is a brick-and-mortar store, we don’t get a lot of early-morning walk-ins. Probably because we only stock rare and old books. Obscure first editions and things signed by dead people are our speciality. So, things that people don’t typically browse for. They call ahead, see if we have what they want and, if we do, they come by and pick it up. If we don’t have what they want, I do my best to get it for them. It’s something I’m known for, finding the obscure.

When we do get walk-ins, they’re one of two kinds. The first is older men – book dealers, collectors, professors, the generation that still likes to fondle the books and eschew all technology, including the phone if they can. Lily calls them our Grounders, because she’s afraid to get up on a ladder in her short skirts, in case she gives one of them a heart attack.

The other kind are the Velvets. Also Lily’s name. They come in, usually looking either all sheepish or all professorial, and then they make their way, casual-like, towards the back of the store, like they’re invisible lions sneaking up on prey.

We’ve got velvet curtains hung floor to ceiling back there. And behind them? A little room, not much bigger than a closet, the shelves stuffed full of delicious naughtiness. Not new stuff, though. Old stuff. Ancient versions of the Kama Sutra and Victorian-era sketchbooks and Sappho and Anon. You’d be surprised how much less repressed they were in years gone by.

So, Grounders and Velvets. Those are the kinds of walk-ins we get, on the rare occasions when we do get walk-ins.

What we most certainly never get are walk-ins who show up before we’re open, sporting chocolate-caramel eyes and a lazy, dimpled smile that gave me a nearly irresistible urge to lick the corners of his mouth.

The guy in our doorway was beautiful, in that rugged, strong-jawed, day-old-stubble kind of way. Dark shiny hair that looked like it would tousle into perfect waves with a pair of hands in it. White T-shirt and grey button-down that brought out hints of gold flecks in his light-brown eyes.

I took hold of the counter while the air did that thing it does where it gets all thin and makes you dizzy for no reason at all.

Apparently Lily wasn’t immune either. Which was odd, considering I’d never seen her go gaga over a male before. Except maybe a male puppy. And even then she was hard-pressed to admit it.

Not to mention, this was the longest I’d heard her be silent in about a year. She was still standing in front of the door, pretty much blocking his entrance.

‘Lily,’ I hissed. ‘Let the man in.’

‘But we’re not open yet.’ Her mock whisper was all mock and no whisper.

‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘Close enough.’ Plus, hello, who cared? A man like that walked in your door, and I was pretty sure you opened for him … opened the door for him … any time of day.

I swallowed and tried to right myself so that I could put my professional face on. Thankfully Lily beat me to it. Sort of. Her social skills, as a general rule, far exceeded mine, a fact that I was ever grateful for.

‘If you’re looking for the sex shop,’ she said, ‘it’s two blocks over and down on Mississippi. I can take you there.’

I tried not to gape at her. So much for that socially skilled thing. Why was she talking about the sex toy store?

She looked back at me for help and if I hadn’t completely understood her distress, I would have burst out laughing. Even back here, I was having a hard time thinking. I couldn’t imagine what it was like being so close to him. I wasn’t sure if I was grateful to Lily for being on the front line or jealous that she was in touching distance.