Chapter Eighteen
Jorja
“U GGH, I’M SO TIRED ,” I groaned with a yawn, as he walked me to the front door.
“I know, it’s been a hell of a day,” Seth agreed, grinning. “But I think we did it, right?”
“You did it,” I replied, raising my eyebrows. “You’re the one who got all those people to visit.”
“And you’re the one who had the store for them to come to in the first place,” he reminded me. “But we can talk about that tomorrow. You should get some rest.”
“I will,” I told him, and I smiled at him as I unlocked the door. “See you soon?”
“See you,” he promised me, and with that, he headed back to his car, and I stepped inside, the lockbox full of donations and profits from the day under my arm.
I still had to count them all up, to see just how well we had done with everything, but I was sure we had enough to pay off everything we’d need to in order to keep the place ticking over. I still couldn’t believe everything that had happened today. It felt almost surreal, like it must have happened to someone else. No way could it have been me. No way could I have been gifted that much good luck out of nowhere.
Mia was insistently mewing for her food, and I stooped down to feed her, the scent of pine needles filling the air, and, as I fed her, I realized that Seth had left without so much as a hug goodbye.
Oh. Oh.
I straightened up again, and tried to control the panic that swam through my head at that thought.
It had been a long day, and I knew I shouldn’t let myself get caught up in the questions of what was going on between us, but I couldn’t help it. After all, today had been all about him spending time with other women. Sure, they had been paying him for the privilege of it, but still, there had been dozens of girls coming in and out of the store, showering him with attention, laughing with him, getting him to sign their books. And I hadn’t even recognized him! What if he had been insulted by that? Thought that I didn’t take his work seriously?
It wasn’t about that, of course. I had just never been particularly into romance novels, thought they were nothing more than a fantasy that was played out to satisfy people who were more open to the idea of love than I was. But I didn’t want him to think that I didn’t care about what he did. I didn’t want him to feel as though I was brushing him off or downplaying what he had made at least part of his career on.
Not to mention the fact that... well, a lot of those women who had been showing him attention today had been a lot more beautiful than me. And a lot more confident, too. No matter what, it still felt like I was playing catch-up to them, stuck back hiding in the office, trying to find some way to handle all this attention. He soaked it up with ease; of course he would want someone by his side who was capable of doing the same thing.
And he was a model, for goodness sake. A model. He had told me he was an event planner, and, sure, that might have been part of his life, but it was clear that his dazzling good looks were about more than just his personal life. Why would a model want to be with someone like me? When I pictured a model, I pictured someone with a gorgeous, confident girl on his arm—an actress, a musician, maybe. Not someone like me, someone who ran a bookstore in a small town and had more sweaters than sexy dresses.
I glanced up at the tree we had picked out together, and I felt a pang in my chest when I remembered how much fun we’d had that day. How easy it felt to be with him, how soft and gentle that night had been. How much I wanted to share nights with that like him again.
But it could have just been a break from reality for him, a break from his real life as the sexy model he so obviously was. And now he had succeeded in keeping the store open. Would he just be gone? My heart twisted in my chest at the thought. I could hardly stand the idea, but there was no way to guarantee that he would be sticking around. This could all have been some kind of game to him, and now he had won it, he would return to what he had known before.
Mia bumped her head against my legs, and I reached down to pet her. He had seemed so comfortable here, but would he be comfortable staying? It would be a lot, to ask him to leave that life behind to be in a place like Mastin Falls. Hardly what he was used to.
I grabbed the lockbox and tipped out all the donations and checks on to the kitchen table, something to distract myself from everything rushing through my head right now. I didn’t want to let myself get lost in thought, not when there were more important things to worry about. Had we made enough to keep the store open?
As I counted it out, I couldn’t help but wonder if any of these people would have given me the help they had offered me today if it hadn’t been for Seth. Of course, plenty of them had told me about memories they had in the store, parts of their past that were tied up in that place, but would they have bothered to rescue it from Wharton if it hadn’t been for the arrival of a celebrity? I didn’t know.
I mostly kept to myself in this town. Haley was about my only real friend here, and she worked for me, so I wasn’t sure that I actually counted. I wanted to believe that I had a place here, but I just wasn’t certain of that. Even the bookstore, it had come from my grandmother, and if it hadn’t been for her hard work, I wouldn’t have been able to lay claim to any part of Mastin Falls at all.
The money was enough to cover everything. More than enough, actually. I could finally do a few of the renovations on the store I had been planning for the last few years, but never gotten around to. And yet, I couldn’t help but feel as though this money wasn’t mine. It was Seth’s.
He was the one who had signed all those books, posed for all those pictures. If it hadn’t been for him, I wouldn’t have made a cent of this. I should offer it back to him. I mean, clearly he wasn’t struggling for money if he could hand this all over to me in the first place, but still, I didn’t like the idea of taking it from him. It felt like he should have had a chance to claim it back, especially if the novelty of being here had worn off by now.
I locked the money away and crawled into bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering what on earth I was going to do next. Really, nothing had changed—it all started when he hadn’t kissed me goodbye, and I had gone spiraling down a stupid rabbit hole from there. I should have known better than to let my overthinking get in the way of things, but it was downright impossible, when a man this perfect had just dropped out of the sky and onto my lap.
I eventually dozed off, and woke early the next morning. It was Christmas eve, and the snow had fallen in a thick cover across the ground overnight.
My grandma always kept the store open late on Christmas eve. She’d told me from when I was young that people came in to pick up their last-minute gifts until the very moment it ticked over into Christmas, and that you could make good money if you just let the place stay open late into the evening. So many Christmas eves we’d spent there together, me perched on the counter, kicking my legs and reading whatever book she’d given me for Christmas that I had been allowed to open early, a constant stream of hot chocolate from the cheap coffee machine in the back office, and Christmas carols warbling out from her crackly old radio.
I missed her right now. As I made my way down to the store, I hoped she was looking over me somewhere—hoped she could guide me in the right direction. She would have known what to do in a situation like this, she always did.
But she would never have landed herself in this spot. She would never have found herself with next to no money, under threat from Wharton, feeling like the town wasn’t on her side. She always knew how to talk to people, whereas I had grown up shy, and I still hadn’t really figured out how to get over it. Of course, I wanted to be more outgoing, but I didn’t know how to make it happen. I felt like I was stuck in my ways, and the more I thought about it, the harder I found it to believe that someone like Seth would ever want to waste his time with someone who couldn’t get through a conversation without stumbling over a sentence.
My grandma was married by the time she was my age, and, though I hadn’t gotten a lot of time with my grandfather, she had always talked so highly of him. Of what a kind, good man he was, how far he would go to make sure people were taken care of, how hard he worked to ensure that his family was provided for. He had helped her every step of the way with getting the bookstore set up, and she had kept a little corner in it dedicated just to his favorite kind of books, detective mystery fiction; I still had it, too, a little shrine to a man I hardly knew, but who had clearly had such a huge impact on our lives.
I arrived at the store, plodding through the snow, and unlocked the door, slipping inside. Without Seth here, I knew it was going to be a lot quieter today, but maybe that was a good thing. I would get an idea of how many people were actually interested in the store instead of him. I appreciated what he had done for me, but I couldn’t rely on his appeal to get people through the door. It just wasn’t fair.
As I planted myself behind the counter to get ready for another day of work, I felt my phone buzz in my pocket. Pulling it out, I saw a text from Seth, but I wasn’t ready to reply right now. I stuck my phone under the desk. Out of sight, of mind, right?
I would see him to offer him the money back, at least. It was the very bare minimum of what I could do. I just needed to make sure he was totally certain about what he was doing here. It didn’t feel fair to walk away with money that I would never have made if it wasn’t for him.
My phone buzzed a few more times through the morning, but I ignored it. I would speak to him when today was done with. For now, I wanted to focus on getting the store back in order after the rush the day before, and trying to organize my thoughts as much as I was trying to organize my books.
I felt a pang, when I picked up one of the romance novels with him on the front cover. He was dressed as a sexy firefighter, shirtless except for a pair of suspenders, with a helmet perched on top of his head. He looked incredible, no doubt about it, but instead of exciting me, it just made my heart sink.
Because what man who looked like that would ever want anything to do with someone like me? I needed to come back down to earth, and fast.
And accept that my life was better off without the fantasies that existed between the pages of these books. Because they could never have come to life for someone like me.