Chapter 6
Third Week of Faire
Tuesday night, Alex came to Tenison to draft the script. It was strange to see the pirate queen outside of the faire. Gone was the oversized hat and thigh-high leather boots. In their place were practical sneakers, stylish purple joggers, and a white crop top.
Their friendship had always existed in the confines of the painted castle walls.
Even though she and Alex got along well enough, a swell of anxiety surged through her.
Alex was going to see where she lived and worked.
It wasn’t that Lilian was ashamed of her town or her mother’s bookstore.
But Tenison wasn’t anything to write home about.
They had one locally owned grocery store. One high school with a total student body of three hundred. A single gas station. And lots and lots of old farmhouses. There wasn’t even a good place to get coffee. Lilian had to drive thirty minutes to Manhattan for a coffee treat.
But there was no other option. With her mother sick, she was manning the counter from open to close during the work week.
In some ways, the bookshop was the best place to meet.
After closing hours, the space was theirs to do whatever they liked.
But it also wasn’t exactly the kind of bookstore one went to for Instagram-worthy photos.
The aptly named Ten Cents Books was a cramped space, entirely consumed by yellowed paperbacks.
It smelled of paper, wet carpet, and faintly of the cigarettes the old owner used to religiously smoke.
The stains on the walls had been there for decades.
At one point, she and her mother had put up movie posters to try to make the place more appealing.
Now, it only made it look like a cheap college apartment.
Her mother had long ago abandoned any sense of organization.
At sixty years old, it had been easier to adopt the previous owner’s bookkeeping system, which was nonexistent.
The shelves were arranged loosely by genre, and that was it.
Mysteries. Dime store science fiction. Pulp true crime novels.
Nearly every romance novel published in the last three decades.
New books sat beside old ones. And when the shelves filled up, books simply migrated to the floor.
Two entire aisles were dedicated to yellow-paged paperbacks with bodice ripper covers.
In high school, Lilian used to sit in between the shelves, reading one after another.
She knew all the classics: Jude Dereaux, Johanna Lindsey, Julie Garwood.
She read about medieval castles, damsels in distress, dukes and earls who were far too broody for their own good.
Those books were her gateway to the larger world of romance.
Nestled against those shelves was where she discovered The Raven King series.
Lilian watched Alex’s face closely as she stepped inside, searching for a reaction. Her friend’s eyes widened in quiet shock. After a moment, she said, “It’s like a wizard shop in here.”
“I… think you mean it looks like an episode of Hoarders.”
“No, no,” Alex said quickly. “I love it. I bet some of these would fetch a decent price on eBay.”
“Maybe.” Lilian shrugged. She’d already combed through the shop for anything of value and hauled it to the faire.
The rest of the building felt like junk.
And checking listings online took time she didn’t really have.
“I’m trying to thin out the inventory. That’s part of why I opened the shop at the faire. ”
Alex nodded and followed Lilian to the back.
At one time, one might have had a clear path from the door to the checkout counter.
Now, the desk was partially hidden behind piles of books.
Lilian cleared as much as possible so they could get some work done, making enough room for a laptop and a Keurig machine for some much-needed caffeine.
A small bowl of candy sat precariously on top of some mystery novels, offering sugary goodness while the coffee brewed.
Alex giddily grabbed a Snickers while her eyes continued to roam around the store. “I love used bookstores. They really are something special.”
“I love them, too,” Lilian said. “And I love this one. It’s just…” She trailed off, hoping Alex would finish the thought.
But the other woman tilted her head in quiet consideration, forcing her to say the words out loud.
“Well, it's not exactly making a ton of money. And Mom kind of let the place go over the years.”
“Let the place go?” Alex repeated. “I think it’s charming. I mean, sure, it could use a good cleaning, but once you make some space and organize it a little more, it will be awesome. I’d love to come back when you're open sometime.”
“You would?” Lilian raised a brow at that. “Doesn’t Manhattan have bookstores?”
Most of the younger faire workers lived in the nearby college town of Manhattan. Alex was a graduate student at Kansas State University, studying theater. A degree that clearly wasn’t wasted, as it had propelled her from a simple pirate wench to a queen in the world of the faire.
“Yeah, of course. But they're all new and shiny.” Alex perched herself on the tall barstool Lilian set by the counter and shrugged. “This place clearly has some treasure buried here.”
That got a laugh out of Lilian. “All right, Pirate Queen, you know you don’t have to make puns outside of the faire, right?”
She made two cups of pumpkin spice coffee, and they settled in to get to work.
“I think Margo was on to something with her idea for finding Mr. Brawn. We can make it like a dating game show, but with romance tropes,” Alex started. “That way, all you have to do is ask questions. The guys are all actors, so we can give them room to improv and act like fools. They’ll like that.”
“Okay.” Lilian sipped her coffee as Alex wrote down her ideas.
She’d never been a fan of old dating shows.
She’d seen one or two out of morbid curiosity, but watching people on television for thirty minutes only served to demonstrate the lack of real connection.
It only cemented her love of romance books where the couples were always perfect for each other. “As long as I can stick to the script.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way, babe. Now, what are some romance tropes we can work with?”
“Well, we have a pirate, a Viking, a knight, and a Scotsman.” She stopped and groaned. “That sounds like the beginning of a terrible joke.”
“That’s good! That’s a joke we can use,” Alex cheered, writing it down.
They huddled together over Lilian’s open laptop and typed whatever came to mind. Lilian found herself pitching common romance tropes that Alex quickly turned into a line of dialogue. Not only was the pirate queen pretty and talented, but she was also whip-smart when it came to writing.
“You’re really good at this,” Lilian commented as Alex scrolled over the pages of lines they’d crafted.
Alex gave a sheepish smile. “Thanks, I really like writing scripts. Which is good because I need to produce a show for my master's.”
“What?” Lilian perked up. “You never mentioned that.”
Alex slumped over the counter in a defeated pile of mush. “Ugh, because I hate thinking about it.”
“Why? You do it all the time for the faire.” Alex had been one of the driving forces behind the pirate storyline for the season.
Along with running acting classes. Now that she thought about it, Alex did a lot more around the faire than Lilian realized.
No wonder she’d been in tears when Hawk suggested another show on top of it all.
“Yeah.” Alex sniffed dramatically. “But doing it for fun is so different than school. There is this extra pressure. Like it needs to say something profound, or they won’t give me my master's.”
“I didn’t realize it was so much work.”
“Everything is work at its core.” Alex straightened, her face set in determination. “But if it wasn’t hard, everyone could do it. Now let’s finish this up. What other tropes do you have?”
Lilian listed off some of her favorite tropes from the old school Harlequin novels and read them off. “Touch her and die.”
Alex’s brows narrowed. “What does that mean?”
“It means that at some point the hero threatens another person for touching his woman.” Lilian paused, her eyes widening at the woman beside her. “Have you… never read something where that happens?”
Alex grimaced. “No. I don’t really read these days. The last book I read was a vampire romance in high school.”
“No way,” Lilian said, closing her laptop. This was a serious conversation that needed her full, undivided attention. “You really haven’t read anything for fun recently?”
“No. School and the faire take up a lot of my time.”
She could understand that. The amount of reading she’d had to do as an English major had sucked the joy out of the activity. She’d been burnt out, and it took a long time before she’d found that joy again in reading without analyzing or the threat of having to write a paper.
“But you said you love bookstores.”
“I do, always have. I love books, it’s just…” She shrugged. “School gets in the way. When I’m not memorizing lines or doing TA responsibilities, I’m doing things for the faire. Being a grad student is not what I thought it would be.”
“How so?” Lilian asked, taking a sip of her coffee.
Alex shrugged. “It’s so much busy work, and for what? As soon as I finish putting on one production, it’s on to the next thing. There's no time to stop. And the professors put all the work on us TAs.”
“I never realized that before.” There was a lot about acting she’d never thought about before.
Stage performances were so different from Hollywood, and even the lifestyles she saw at the faire were vastly different.
People like Logan and his band of pirates made their living traveling from faire to faire, camping on the grounds.
“That’s right, you went to K-State, too, didn’t you?”