Book People

Chapter Twelve

Tonight then. Keep your window open.

H

SEBASTIAN

I follow Miss Jones up the narrow set of stairs, ignoring the part of me that’s busily screaming that this is a very stupid decision.

It’s not a stupid decision. Not at all.

I’ve merely come to get my great-grandfather’s letters. I need to see them and I thought it was pointless waiting for Miss Jones to deliver them back to me.

I thought about it all afternoon and eventually decided that I was attaching far too much importance to what essentially is mere physical attraction. So what that she’s beautiful and I want her? And, yes, I told her this. So what? Yes, the kiss was a slip-up, but today will be different, because today I’m not going to stay.

I’m going to get the letters from her and then I’ll leave.

I didn’t expect to walk in on a book-club session, but all I could think when all those eyes turned in my direction was that I’d never seen so many people inside a bookshop before. I never have that many in mine, not even on busy days.

They were all laughing too, all smiling, all enjoying themselves.

In the space of two months she’s created a little community of book lovers right here in her shop, and while part of me is annoyed about it, I also can’t help but respect it.

She knows her market and she knows her books, and I had first-hand experience of that today after Mr Parsons finally moved from the chair having read half of Colours . He didn’t say a word. He merely handed me his credit card and, after I’d rung it up, walked out holding the book, still reading.

I couldn’t have predicted that and it makes me wonder if what I’ve been doing all these years has been wrong. Oh, I still sell books, but it’s getting harder and harder to make those sales as the demands on people’s time keep growing and become ever more varied. I don’t have a newsletter, for example, and I don’t do social media. I don’t have ‘event evenings’. I’ve always thought those kinds of things were stunts, that they weren’t really about the books in the end. Because that’s what it’s all about, after all. Books. They should sell themselves – or at least, they used to.

Not now. Hence me reviving the festival.

I walk up the stairs behind Miss Jones and she opens the door to her flat.

I’m not sure what I’m expecting, but when I take a step inside, I find myself in a small space filled with clutter. A little couch with some patterned throws over it. A battered wooden coffee table covered in papers and rugs on the wooden floor. A galley kitchen painted turquoise, with bright tiling and colourful mugs and mismatched plates stacked haphazardly on the draining board.

A little lamp on a side table near the couch has a pink scarf over the top of it and glows with muted warm light. It’s a fire hazard, obviously, but I can’t deny it makes the whole place feel . . . warm and homey.

Miss Jones fusses around collecting mugs from the coffee table and other dishes, her cheeks pink. Muttering apologies for the dreadful ‘mess’.

Yes, it is a mess. But I don’t mind it. Somehow it feels right for her.

She dumps the mugs on the kitchen counter and turns, folding her arms. ‘So, what did you want to talk to me about?’

There’s a wary look on her face and I don’t like it. I want her to smile at me instead. Then again, I haven’t earned the right to a smile and I know it, not after that murmured conversation back in my shop.

I keep making mistakes with her, and I should know better. I should have known, for example, that she’d push back about the sex. She’s a stubborn woman and it turns out she’s not shy about what she wants. Me.

It’s tempting, so tempting to give her what she wants, what we both want, but I can’t. I can’t start down that path, even knowing she doesn’t want a relationship. Even knowing that she’s okay with one night.

Resistance and control are all that separates me from the addictive tendencies of my father and grandfather, and I can’t compromise on that.

Because what I told her was true.

It would never be just sex with us and I can’t have it be anything more.

‘I came for the letters,’ I say. ‘I need to look at them.’

‘Of course.’ She turns away without another word and vanishes through a door. A few seconds later she’s back, carrying the stack of envelopes. She hands them to me, her face a mask of politeness. ‘Here they are. But . . . are you sure you gave me all of them? I feel like some are missing.’

I take the stack and frown down at them. ‘How can you tell? None of them are dated.’

‘It’s just . . . some of the notes refer to earlier ones and I was trying to find one of them and it was missing, so I just wondered.’

‘Not that I know of,’ I say. ‘But I’ll see if there are any more in that box.’

‘I wonder how he got them all. I mean, he has not only her notes, but his own as well. Which means she must have returned them to him.’

‘Good question. Perhaps she was angry with him?’

She lifts a shoulder. ‘It could be. Something must have happened, I suppose, because, as you told me, he went to war and there are no notes mentioning him leaving, so he must have stopped sending them before he left.’

‘That makes sense. He married not long after he returned.’

‘And your great-grandmother definitely isn’t C?’

There’s a wistful note in her voice, as if she hopes my great-grandmother was the other correspondent, but I know it’s not the case. Dad told me that Sebastian’s marriage was unsuccessful and that my great-grandmother, Grace, did not like the village or the bookshop, which rules her out as a candidate for C.

‘No,’ I say. ‘Definitely not.’

‘Well, there goes that idea.’ She sighs. ‘I was really hoping she was and that they ended up together.’

She’s a romantic at heart; I can see it in her face, hear it in her voice. Which makes my decision about not repeating the mistake of the kiss a good one.

‘Sadly they didn’t.’ I am not a romantic. At all. ‘Will that put Lisa off?’

‘No. In fact, it’s probably better that they don’t. Lisa loves a tragedy.’ Miss Jones is looking dreamily off into space. ‘Perhaps she was married. “He” gets mentioned a lot, and how she couldn’t sneak out to meet your great-grandfather in case “he” found out. Could be her husband.’

‘Or her father,’ I point out. ‘Parental authority still mattered back then.’

‘True,’ she admits. ‘Would your great-grandfather go after a married woman?’

I want to tell her that of course he wouldn’t, but sadly I don’t know that. ‘My grandfather didn’t say much about him, but apparently he kept very much to himself after the war. There are a few village rumours that he returned from where he was stationed in North Africa a changed man. That he used to be wilder. His father wanted him to give up the bookshop and study law, but he refused.’

As I speak, I’m conscious of the similarities between my great-grandfather and me. I too refused my father’s edict to study. I too preferred working in a bookshop. And, if I’m honest, I too have an interest in a woman off limits to me.

At least Miss Jones isn’t married, though she did mention earlier today that she’d just come out of a long-term relationship.

I’m not interested in that, though. Not in the slightest.

‘Sounds like someone I know.’ She gives me a pointed look.

‘My father wanted me to study medicine,’ I say, for some completely unknown reason. ‘But I refused, so I suppose, yes, there are some similarities.’

Her eyes widen. ‘Medicine?’

‘Dan and I both applied to get into medical school. Me because my father wanted me to and Dan because he couldn’t think of anything better to do. We both got in, but I didn’t go.’

She’s staring at me in surprise. ‘Why not?’

It’s the same response most people give me. As if it’s unheard of to refuse a place in medical school. As if doing that in favour of owning a bookshop is the height of stupidity.

‘Because I wasn’t interested. Like I said, Dad pressured me into applying, but I wanted to work in the bookshop instead.’

She’s giving me an intent look. ‘Why was medical school important? Oh. It was because of your mother, wasn’t it?’

I haven’t told her about my mother, so some other kind soul, aka a fucking busybody, has let it slip. It’s not a state secret or anything, I just can’t stand the ‘oh, you poor thing’ looks I get when people find out.

‘Yes,’ I say tersely. ‘Cancer. It was a long time ago.’

She opens her mouth and I expect the usual platitudes, but all she says is: ‘I’m sorry. I lost my mother a couple of years ago. That was cancer as well.’

I’d heard. The relationship breakup was news, but not her mother’s death.

I’m not sure what to say. Grief shadows her eyes, echoes of an incalculable loss. A loss that echoes inside me too. But my grief is older, the edges filed away and not so sharp these days. Hers is still raw. It still has teeth.

Words can’t encompass it, but words are all we have in the end, so I say, ‘I’m sorry too.’ And then, ‘You don’t get over it. But you do learn to live with it. It’s not what people want to hear, but it’s the truth.’

The moment sits between us, heavy with the weight of our losses. But it’s not uncomfortable for a change. It feels as if we’re sharing something.

Her mouth curves and, finally, there is the smile. Bittersweet but there, and, yes, it’s mine. She gave it to me. ‘I’d prefer the truth any day of the week.’

And just like that I can’t stand the distance between us. I can’t stand that she’s just across from me with the little breakfast bar in between us, preventing me from reaching her and pulling her into my arms.

Her dress would be so easy to get rid of. I’d only have to pull the tie that holds it closed and it would open. It would fall off and then she’d be in nothing but her underwear.

I bet she is beautiful.

I bet she is to die for.

Would she smell as sweet as she did last night, sitting on the couch next to me? Would she melt like warming candle wax against me, all soft and pliant? Would she sigh again? As if she’d been waiting her whole life to kiss me?

This is a disaster of epic proportions and only now do I see how much I’ve been lying to myself the whole time.

The envelopes are just an excuse.

I didn’t come here for them, I came here for her. And this . . . obsession, or whatever it is that I have with her, won’t end until I have what I want.

Which is her. All of her. In bed. All night.

Taste her sunshine. Wrap it around me, cover myself in it.

And maybe if I do, then I’ll be able to think.

A silence falls, thick and heavy and full of the buzzing tension that is always between us.

She flushes. ‘Would you . . . um . . . Would you like a drink? I don’t have any scotch, I’m afraid, but I have some white wine.’ She smiles again and there’s a faint, wistful hope in her gaze. ‘Or maybe some tea?’

Every muscle in my body is tense. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea, Miss Jones.’

‘Why?’

‘I would have thought the reasons would be obvious.’

She blushes deeper and, as with every expression I’ve seen on her face so far, it suits her. Makes her eyes glow. She really is a rose in that delicate pink dress. ‘You can’t even have one drink?’

I shouldn’t reply. I shouldn’t.

‘I think you’re underestimating your considerable charms,’ I say, like the idiot I am. Then again, it’s not as if I haven’t told her how I feel already. ‘And my susceptibility to them.’

She doesn’t look away. ‘Susceptible? You? I could be dancing naked in front of you and you probably wouldn’t even blink.’

My throat is tight all of a sudden and so are my trousers. If that isn’t a direct challenge, I don’t know what is, and of course my inner Neanderthal wants to rise to it (double-entendre absolutely intended).

Her. Naked. Dancing.

‘Care to test that theory?’ I say, before I can stop myself.

Her eyes widen, then turn smoky, and her full mouth hardens. ‘Oh no, I’m not testing anything. We already did that and not only did you push me away, you told me it would never happen again. You want me dancing naked, you’ll have to beg for it.’

This is wrong. This is very wrong, and yet the words come out of my mouth all the same.

‘Come here, Miss Jones,’ I order.

She hears the change in my tone and her eyes darken even further. ‘No,’ she says. ‘You want me, you’ll have to come and get me.’

So many reasons why this is a bad idea.

So many reasons I’ve told myself I can’t do this with her.

But they’re all excuses.

Like I told her, sex won’t be just sex with us.

It will be a cataclysm.

Perhaps that’s why I start walking. Not out the door, but towards her.

Perhaps I need a cataclysm in my life. That’s why my heart stopped the moment I first saw her. Why my world shifted on its axis. Why I’ve been nothing but restless since the moment she arrived.

My life has felt suffocating, pressing in on me, and I never saw that until she appeared. Bringing with her the endless joy she has for books, the respect and care she has for readers. Building communities, making connections. Doing things differently while all I’m doing is the same.

I’m trapped in the past.

Trapped by my life. Suffocated by my history.

She makes me want to blow it apart and why not?

Perhaps it’s time.

And perhaps I’ll start with her.

I move around the breakfast bar and stalk up to her. She watches me and I can’t read the expression in her eyes now. But she doesn’t move away as I come closer. She leans back against the kitchen bench and looks up at me from beneath golden lashes.

There are only inches between us. I can feel her warmth, smell the scent of her body, vanilla and musk and summer sunshine. The pulse at the base of her throat is racing.

This moment, just before I touch her, is precious. Aching with tension. Infinite with possibilities. I want to make it last, because I have no idea what will happen after I take this step. One thing I do know, though, is that things will change, and change is something I do not care for.

Yet I think it is also something I need.

I take her hands in mine. They are small and her fingers are slender. She is trembling slightly, but it’s not fear I see in her eyes.

I guide her hands to my chest and hold them there, pressing her palms flat so I can feel her touch bleed through the cotton of my shirt. Into my skin.

Into my blood.

Into the cells of my being.

Suddenly, I feel as if I’ve been suffocating for years and never noticed, and only now, with her hands on me, can I take a full breath.

I look down into her eyes, see the flames of desire flickering high. And I allow myself this one indulgence. Her name. ‘Kate,’ I murmur.

Her lush mouth opens and her hands are pressing hard to my chest, fingers curling into the cotton of my shirt as she rises on her toes.

And presses her lips to mine.