Conall
What am I doing?
It's the question that keeps flashing across my mind as the bell above Shipton's rings and I step inside. It's overly warm in the store. The afternoon heat sits untempered in the box of the shop. Several of the front windows are open, trying to catch the cool lake breeze.
"What are you doing in here?" Amy's sharp voice demands.
She's behind the counter. I open my mouth to reply that I'm not sure. My hound just insisted. Then Ivy walks in from the back room. Her brown hair is pulled into two low pigtails, and she’s fanning herself with a notepad against the heat.
A sheen of sweat makes her skin glisten in the artificial lighting.
Her eyes meet mine, and her eyebrows shoot up. "Listen, I know you denied the stalking, but—"
"I'm not stalking you," I growl. "I just need some… tape." The word “tape” leaves my mouth with more than a little hesitation. Like I made it up as I said it. Which is exactly what I did. Ivy tilts her head and rolls her eyes. She knows that wasn’t what I meant to say, but I’m not about to take it back.
She marches to the back of the store, grabs tape, and brings it to me.
"Here. Tape," she says. I hold it in my hand and choose to ignore it. Instead I meander past her, looking at items on the shelf. As I do, our wrists touch and a green spark lights between us. Tiny but noticeable.
"How are you liking running the store?" I ask.
Amy huffs and goes to the back room, apparently bored with my attempts at small talk.
Ivy sighs. "It's a job."
"Not a dream job though?" I ask. "What did you do before you came here?"
She laughs, but it's humorless. "Actually, owning a business is my dream job. Before this, I owned one kind of like this. A gift-shop-type store."
There's a backstory hanging off the end of that sentence. I shouldn't push. It's not my concern, but I do it anyway.
"So, what happened?"
She looks down, then around, finding things to straighten on the shelves to keep her hands and eyes busy while she tells me this slice of her past she'd clearly just as well forget.
"I lost it," she offers vaguely.
I stare at her longer than I should.
"Losing an entire business sounds like a very hard thing to do. Did you check the cosmic lost and found or…" I mean for it to come off as teasing, but she winces and I instantly regret it. Her mouth is a tight line, her eyes downcast, shoulders high and stiff.
I realize I'm poking at an emotional wound. I feel like an ass.
"Sorry," I mutter.
"It's okay," she replies, and I can tell it's just a platitude.
"So why can't this be your new dream job? If it's similar to the kind of store you wanted anyway." I remind myself I'm just making small talk. Nothing more. That my hound is being a jerk about protecting her, likely because the spell went wrong.
She looks around the store. "It can be. I've been thinking about it.
I just don't know if I have that in me again.
" I watch her. There's a lot of spirit in her.
More than there should be for someone who's clearly lost here.
I'd seen it in my observations of her. Not stalking.
The way she took everything in with quiet steel instead of breaking.
So why does running a simple store full of knick-knacks seem to be the thing wearing her down most?
I open my mouth to press, but the chime over the door rings and a short man with red hair and an overlarge nose comes in. Randy, one of the town counsel members. "Got any gold dust?" he asks in a high voice.
"Oh," Ivy says, shaking herself out of whatever memories I'd pulled her into. "Yes, I did see that over here."As she helps Randy, I slip out the front.
My hound snaps within me, growling and clawing at my insides.
"What the fuck?" I mutter, trying to shove him back into his corner of my mind. "What is your problem?"
He only growls louder.