Chapter 38
chapter
thirty-eight
CALDER
On a post I was sure Shay had since forgotten she’d posted, she’d said how the hottest date would be a guy taking her to buy a bunch of books. No limit. It was a joke, in some bookish thread.
“What are we doing?” she asked as I held the door open for her to the store.
I arched a brow. “Buying you books.”
Her face lit up, but she washed it away instantly. Insanely, I missed it already.
“That’s… You don’t have to do that.”
She was nervous again. She’d been nervous in the car.
I wanted her comfortable. More than that, I wanted to prolong this. Even if we were breaking our one-night rule, this was still temporary. We still had an expiration date.
I feel safe with you.
Her earlier words came echoing back. She felt safe with me? I didn’t deserve that, and still I was fucking addicted to it. I’d guard that safety with my life. I would never give her a reason to think otherwise.
“I’m not doing it because I have to,” I said. “I’m doing it because I want to.”
Her brow furrowed in an adorable, suspicious scrunch. “How many?”
I shrugged. “No limit.”
Her eyes popped, then narrowed. “So I can get a thousand books?” she asked, incredulous.
I shrugged. “Sure. Just need to get another car to carry them all.”
She rolled her lips between her teeth. I was beginning to realize Shay was more suspicious of nice things than, say, strangers in graveyards.
My hand slid around her hip and I leaned forward, lips at her ear. “Be a good girl for me, Shay, and let me buy you books.”
Her body softened and sagged into mine. I pulled back just enough to see her eyes.
That fucking flush was back on her cheeks.
Compliance kink, I remembered.
She dragged her bottom lip between her teeth, a teasing smile playing at the corners. “Maybe just a couple hundred.”
Her voice was soft, and with my forehead shadowing hers, the world disappeared into just us.
“That will definitely be easier on my back,” I said, and stepped away. “Lead the way.”
She led me up the escalator to the second floor. Which was, according to her, where they kept the best books—all the romance and fiction.
Shay picked up a brightly colored pink book from a table filled with books. She flipped to the back, reading the blurb. As her eyes scanned the page, her features grew more and more interested. Her brows even lifted.
Yet despite that, she put the book down.
“Do you want it?”
“Yeah, but I don’t need it—”
I grabbed it off the table.
We played that game for a few more books before Shay gave in and started putting anything that interested her in my hands. She placed a Mafia book on the ever-growing stack and, without thought, I took it off, slamming it to the table.
“In real life, these men are overweight, balding, with tiny cocks and stains on their shirt.”
She blinked at my outburst. “Wait, what?”
“Pick any other genre,” I grunted. “Mafia is trash.”
Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t argue, continuing down the row. I stayed put, lingering on the way her skirt hugged her perfect fucking ass. Her exposed shoulder, her soft, bare thighs, or the way she revealed her lower back anytime she stretched to get a book.
Basically, I was focusing on anything other than the ever-blaring fact that Mafia was just a genre to Shay.
“Oh my god!” Shay grabbed something with foil. “I’ve been waiting years for this. This book started a whole new subgenre—” She broke off. “I’m sorry. That’s not interesting.”
“No,” I said. “Don’t stop.”
She gave me a suspicious look but kept talking.
About her favorite novels. About how she had been looking forward to the sequel of one book because it was supposed to be why choose and was disappointed to find out it wasn’t.
About an adaptation she’d seen that was better than the book—blasphemous, she’d said.
And I was enthralled.
Not interesting? She could read me her fucking grocery list and I’d be enthralled.
Shay got so animated when she spoke. It was beyond bubbly, it was like her soul was shining.
And knowing what she’d been through, managing to keep that sparkle was all the more impressive.
She’d gone through the dark of hell and come out smiling.
Fuck.
I ground my jaw.
I wanted to fucking pummel her ex to the ground for even slightly dimming that.
Shay got so engrossed, she stopped noticing things like people and furniture, and I would gently direct her by her elbow.
“Do you think you’d ever open a bakery?” she asked, looking over her shoulder. “Or do you like accounting?”
“My dream was to open a bakery.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Because I’m in the Mafia. And still fucking lying to you.
“My turn,” I said. “Why did you get into cosmology? You started to tell me on our first date.”
She slowly placed a book on the pile, leveling me.
“My dad left after I got sick—because I got sick,” she said.
“My mom doesn’t think I know the truth, but I heard them arguing.
Heard him say it wasn’t worth it. I wasn’t worth it.
That I was ruining their life. We never really talked about him when he left. It was like he died.”
“Shay—”
“Anyway,” she continued, cutting me off, and continuing in what I’d gathered was her go-to move to deflect.
“That’s how I got into it. I was filled with unknowns, and my dad leaving just…
compounded them. When I looked to the stars, I was reminded that everything, even the things we don’t yet understand, serve a critical purpose—” She shot me a look over her shoulder. “I’m rambling again.”
“I like it when you ramble,” I all but growled.
I wanted more of this.
I needed to know more of her, all of her. All those secret places she used smoke and mirrors to hide.
“Why do you like romance?” I asked as she placed another book on the pile.
Her fingers lingered on the soft cover of the hardback. She had to crane her neck to find my eyes over the stack.
Fuck, she was so cute.
“I’ve always loved love…” She fingered the teal spine before spinning and heading in another direction. “I don’t know when it started,” she continued, glancing over her shoulder. “I think I just arrived on Earth obsessed with romance. Even when I was little—”
Shay broke off, eyeing a new book. She pulled it out of the shelf and placed it on the stack.
“When you were little?” I probed.
“Oh, right. When I was little, I would ask boys to be my valentine. I was six. And it’s not like my mom was into it.”
“No?”
She shook her head and continued on her way down the aisle.
“My sister loves romance—now,” she continued. “But she was very much the ‘I hate pink’ girl growing up, so naturally she had to love horror not romance. I was the only one in the family into it for a while.”
She kept walking, telling me how romance had always been part of her life. How it had evolved from young adult to spice when she found her first smutty book.
“It was like fucking cosmic,” she said. “It was just sitting there, abandoned on a park bench, waiting for me.”
I loved it when she was engrossed like this. It meant I could watch her brazenly, without her getting self-conscious.
My eyes traced her pale legs in her small skirt as she stood on her toes to get a book.
The way her sweater exposed her shoulder as she reached for it.
I wanted to bite the exposed flesh.
“When I got sick, it was an escape. Rather than be at the doctor’s, I could be a girl at boarding school, about to meet a secret prince.”
She turned and placed the book at the top of the pile. She lingered, and our eyes locked.
“Thank you,” I said.
She smiled and shifted her gaze to the side in the way I realized now was less about nerves, and more that she was thinking something she wasn’t ready for me to know.
By the way her cheeks flushed, I had a guess.
She spun around abruptly and continued her book hunt.
I stayed stuck, watching her practically bounce down the row.
I didn’t know what the fuck was happening to me.
Shay was stuck in a loop in my head.
I wasn’t supposed to want more than one night.
But I wanted to know the name of the first book she fell in love with. I wanted to know what she’d look like in ten years, in twenty. I wanted to see that joy and radiance etch lines into her face. I wanted to be part of the memories that put them there.
And the fact that I wouldn’t ever get that privilege shoved me past the edge and right off of it. More than when she’d fucked with me.
Shay was too engrossed to notice me set the books down and come up behind her.
I pressed a knee between her thighs, pushing her up against the wall of books, back to mine. She gasped, fingers scrambling to find purchase on the spines.
“What are you doing—”
“Look ahead.”