Chapter One – Bailey #2
He’d been leaning against his locker, all crooked smile and reckless confidence, like the world existed to amuse him. I was carrying a stack of library books almost taller than me, and he’d taken one look and said, “You know they invented e-readers, right?”
I’d told him I preferred paper because at least it didn’t talk back. He’d grinned like I’d just confessed a secret meant only for him.
And that was it. The moment I fell for a boy who’d never belong to me.
The memory stings like saltwater on a cut.
The bell jingles again, saving me from myself.
This time, it’s two tourists—an older couple, matching windbreakers, holding hands like they’ve been doing it forever. They wander the aisles, murmuring to each other about Hemingway, until the man picks up a collection of poetry and reads a line out loud.
She laughs softly. “You still remember that one?”
“It’s hard to forget the first poem I ever read to you.”
They leave smiling, and I’m suddenly very aware that my own love story never made it past the prologue.
The wind outside picks up, rattling the sign against the glass. A storm brewing, maybe. Or fate getting impatient.
Because when I look up again, a shadow is moving on the boardwalk. Broad shoulders. Familiar stride.
No.
Absolutely not.
I duck behind the counter, heart thudding. My reflection in the glass case stares back at me like I’ve lost my mind. Maybe I have.
I peek over the register. He’s closer now, head bent as he scrolls through his phone, hoodie tugged up against the wind. The same uneven gait from his old knee injury. The same careless posture that says I own every room I walk into.
Crew Wright, in the flesh.
I whisper to the espresso machine, “Play dead.”
The bell above the door jingles.
I swear under my breath.
He steps inside, bringing the smell of ocean and October with him, and the room shrinks.
For a second, neither of us says anything. It’s like time folds—ten years collapsing into this one impossible moment. Of course, it’s not like I have been actively avoiding any moment that would put us within the same space for years.
Then he grins. That same crooked, devastating grin that ruined my GPA.
“Hey, Book Girl.”
My pulse jumps, my sarcasm scrambles for armor, and my heart whispers, oh no.
Of the fourteen snappy replies loaded in the chamber of my mouth, somehow the one that tumbles out is, “You can’t just waltz in here and call me that.”
He leans on the endcap like it’s a casual choice and not a strategic decision to be within breathing distance of me. “I didn’t waltz. This is more of a”—he glances down at his boots—“shove-in-from-the-wind and try not to slip on your antique floors.”
“They’re original hardwood,” I say, because when flustered, my brain chooses Home & Garden Magazine.
“Still charming.” His eyes flick over the ladder, the register lamp, the basket of maple pecan muffins, then back to me. He holds my gaze long enough to make my rib cage feel like it’s trying to remember choreography. “You look the same.”
“I do not.”
“Okay,” he concedes, mouth tipping. “You look like the upgraded edition. Hardback with a better cover.”
I hate that my laugh escapes. “Flattery will get you nothing but store credit, Wright.”
“Store credit’s more than I’ve had in years.” He says it lightly, but there’s a hairline crack through the humor, and for a heartbeat, I see him without the grin—tired at the edges and that careful way he’s holding his right shoulder like it’s a secret.
I fold my arms. “What do you want?”
“A book.”
“Try the giant shelves of them.” I make a sweeping gesture with my arm.
He glances around. “You gonna curate for me, or do I wander until I fall in love with a spine the way people meet-cute on those shows my mother watches?”
“You can start in nonfiction,” I say sweetly, “under Consequences of Being a Teenage Coward.”
He winces, but his grin hangs on. “Ah. Going right for the scar tissue.”
“Just keeping us honest.”
He straightens, stepping away from the endcap, and the room somehow gets smaller. “Honest is good.” He tilts his head. “You gonna come help me, or are you going to stand behind the counter like a force field of ISBNs protects you?”
“I don’t need a force field,” I lie, moving around the counter because apparently, I do, in fact, intend to help him.
As I pass, he smells like ocean and laundry soap and the kind of cologne that lingers in the best way possible. The awareness snaps across my skin like static. I pretend to nudge past him, but my shoulder brushes his chest, and six hundred tiny, ridiculous fireworks go off in my nervous system.
“Watch the merchandise,” I mumble, when really I mean watch me not combust.
He falls into step beside me, a step too close. “What are you reading these days, Book Girl?”
“Everything you don’t.”
“Savage.” He taps a spine with his knuckle. “Do you ever put your own stuff on the shelf?”
“My—what?”
“Your writing.” He says it like it’s obvious, like the town didn’t weaponize my first attempt.
“We sell published books here,” I say lightly. “Turns out emotional distress doesn’t have an ISBN.”
He goes quiet then, and I feel him seeing it—the place in me that still glows like an old burn. He doesn’t reach for it. He doesn’t look away, either.
“What about something funny?” he says after a beat. “I have a lot of rehab time. I could use a book that doesn’t try to teach me how to be a better person.”
“Low bar,” I murmur, but head for the humor shelf anyway. “Here.” I pull down an essay collection. “Smart, irreverent, heart under the snark.”
“Is that your book’s bio?” he asks.
I hand it to him without touching his fingers. He manages to graze mine anyway, and I am serenely, absolutely fine about it except for the part where my pulse sprints.
“Got anything about second chances?” he asks, like a man tossing a line into water to see what bites.
“Depends,” I say. “Are we talking about second chances or recycled mistakes in a new outfit?”
He blows out a laugh. “You always hated easy answers.”
“Easy answers are usually lies spouted to sound sensible.”
He takes the essays but wanders, trailing me, reading titles out loud. “‘The Art of Letting Go.’ ‘Small-Town Secrets.’ ‘Begin Again.’ You alphabetize your trauma now?”
“It’s called cross-merchandising,” I say. “We keep the tissues near the sad section.”
“Strategic,” he murmurs. “So people cry, buy another book, and then wipe their eyes on the receipt.”
“Now you’re getting it.”
When I stop by the round window to adjust the display, he stops beside me.
The glass is cold enough to fog when he breathes on it.
Outside, the bay is slate blue and choppy, the gulls wheeling like badly behaved kites.
His reflection sits next to mine in the glass, too close, too familiar.
We stand like that long enough for the moments to stack.
“Why are you really here?” I ask, still watching our blurring shapes.
He doesn’t joke it away. “Coach wants me quiet. Home’s quiet. You—” He breaks off, then shifts. “This place always made me settle.”
Dangerous. That word is dangerous. I keep my voice breezy. “Well, we do sell books that teach breathing exercises in the self-help aisle.”
He huffs a laugh and angles toward me. “You didn’t ask how the shoulder is.”
“I assume it’s attached? I’m a small-town bookstore owner, not an orthopedist.”
“True,” he says. “But you used to be Bailey-who-knew-when-I-was-lying.”
“Congratulations.” I turn, meeting his eyes. “Now I won’t have to hear it.”
We let the silence sit, and it’s not empty. It’s full of every version of us that almost was.
The bell jingles. I step back so fast my hip knocks the table. A stack of paperbacks avalanches. He reaches out on instinct, one big hand circling my waist to steady me while the other catches three falling romances midair.
Time does that elastic thing where it stretches so wide a whole conversation fits in a breath without saying a word.
His palm is warm through my sweater. My body recognizes him faster than my brain allows permission. He smells like October and the kind of boy I promised myself I don’t love anymore. He looks down at me like I’m a page he dog-eared and never returned.
“Got you,” he murmurs.
I move first because self-preservation is muscle memory. I step out of his hold and crouch to right the books, pretending I’m not shaking.
“Careful,” I tell the paperbacks, because it’s easier than telling him.
He squats too—too close again—and passes me a novel. His knee bumps mine. We both pretend not to notice, which is unconvincing at best.
“Still got quick hands,” he says.
“Congratulations.” I stack the last book and stand. He does too. We’re almost nose to nose, which would be annoying if it weren’t doing criminal things to my heart rate.
The couple who just walked in clears their throat. “Is this the romance section?” the woman asks, barely hiding a smile.
“Apparently,” I mutter.
“Back wall, left,” Crew says smoothly, not taking his eyes off me as he points them toward it. The woman beams with delight and drags her partner away.
We share a helpless, stupid little grin that feels like a secret and a problem at once.
The register drawer chooses that moment to ding open of its own accord like it’s auditioning for the role of chaperone. I mutter a curse and move behind the counter to fix it. He follows, of course, because he only understands the concept of boundaries in football.
“Want me to look at it?” he asks.
“Are you a cash register whisperer now?”
“I’m a man with two brothers and a farmer for a dad,” he says. “I can at least pretend to fix things convincingly.”
“You can convincingly look like you’re fixing things,” I correct. “Different skill set.”
He rounds the counter anyway, which is apparently open season on my personal space. We both reach for the drawer. He gets there first. His forearm brushes mine, and I learn more about the tensile strength of self-control in three seconds than any self-help book could teach.