Chapter Fifteen
Fifteen
I yawned most of the way through my opening shift at the bookstore the next morning, and by the time Emily arrived I’d already polished off three double-shot lattes.
The caffeine, it did nothing. She restocked displays while I stayed at the front counter, staring glassily at my laptop.
Nothing productive was getting done today.
“What is with you this morning?” She shot me a side-eye when I’d stifled my third yawn in five minutes. “You doing okay over there?”
I nodded. “Fine.” But this time a full-on yawn escaped and I could do nothing about it. “Sorry,” I finally said. “Late night.”
Before Emily could ask me to explain (and before I could beg her to not make me explain), the front door chimed and Alex walked in.
“Hi, Emily.” He looked and sounded as tired as I felt, but his eyes warmed when he looked at me. “Hey.” His brown eyes crinkled with a smile as he leaned his elbows on the counter.
“Hi.” Was I blushing? It felt like I was blushing all over. Had Emily turned the air-conditioning off?
“How’s it—” But his sentence was cut off by a massive yawn that he did his best to cover with his hand, his eyes squeezed shut as his involuntary muscles took over.
“Good Lord,” Emily said. “What is going on? You and Caitlin both are yawning like neither of you got any—” Her voice died in her throat and her eyes went wide.
“I got sleep,” I said defensively.
“Yeah,” Alex said. “Me too.”
“Sure.” Emily didn’t believe us for a second. “Get out of here,” she said. “The both of you. Get some coffee or something.”
“We have coffee here.” I should know, I drank most of it this morning.
Emily’s eyes turned to lasers, and it took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize she was giving me the afternoon off. To spend with Alex. My aunt always did have a romantic streak.
But Alex, he’d already caught on. He extended a hand to me, eyebrows raised. “Milady?”
I glanced over at Emily. “You sure?”
“Please.” She practically shoved us out the door. “It’s not that busy, and you’d be doing me a favor. Just looking at you two makes me want to take a nap.”
I steered us to an ice-cream shop that hadn’t been open when I’d lived here before, then to the park in the center of town.
Sitting on a park bench with Alex, our shoulders pressed together as we ate double-scoop ice-cream cones while an unseasonably cool breeze ruffled my hair, felt illegal.
No summer afternoon should be this perfect.
“How’s Lulu doing?” he asked. “Is she ready to be Queen this weekend?”
“I think so,” I said. I liked that we were doing small talk. Faire topics were safe topics. “She’s having a little trouble with the opening speech, but she’ll have it down by tomorrow.” I shrugged. “She promised she would, anyway.”
“I’m sure that’s a huge relief.” He crunched down on his cone. He ate ice cream a lot faster than I did, biting through the scoops with relish. I envied his teeth, which were apparently less sensitive than mine. I took another conservative lick of my cookies he was most of the way through his first cup of coffee while Lulu simply cupped her mug in her hands, staring into its milky depths like she was reading her future.
“You okay?” I asked her. I didn’t like that our Queen looked kinda green.
“Fine,” she said a little too quickly. Her breath shuddered a little as she finally raised her mug to take a sip of coffee. “It’ll be fine,” she said, mostly to her coffee.