Leather Bound (2 page)

I kissed Kyle’s nose, with a sigh of regret.

‘Sadly, if I stay I really will be late, which Lily will certainly hold over my head all day long if she can. Maybe longer.’

‘You’re afraid of Lily? Just threaten to mess up her hair.’

That made me laugh, as Kyle often did. My best friend did have perfectly coiffed hair. The kind that’s so perfect you have to hate her, just a little, for having it.

‘No go,’ I said, as I pulled myself from the bed.

Getting dressed was me rushing and tumbling while Kyle watched me from his sprawl under the covers. Too late to do more than pull on whatever was closest, I grabbed a simple black dress from the closet and threw my dark hair into a messy ponytail. My store key on its red ribbon around my neck for pseudo-jewellery, my little librarian glasses, and I was calling it good.

When I sat on the bed to pull on a pair of knee-high boots, I caught Kyle’s glance. He looked oddly serious for post-sex reverie, his usual grin replaced with something far more contemplative.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked.

He reached out and touched my arm. ‘I just got fucked by a beautiful woman. How can I not be good?’

‘Good.’ I grinned at him before I kissed him, letting my lips linger against his for a long moment. ‘You know how to get out, right?’

He nodded, reaching out to run his hand along my arm as I turned away.

I was at the bedroom door, mind already turning to work and the bookstore, before he spoke again.

From the depths of my bed, he said in that sexy, post-orgasm voice that never failed to turn me on, ‘Janine. Marry me.’

The heel of my boot caught on the area rug, sending me sprawling against the doorjamb.

‘Funny man.’ Laughing, I turned to shake my head at him, at his impossible joke.

And in that moment, standing there in the doorway, I saw that he was serious. That he was, really and truly, asking me to marry him.

Shit.

* * *

Shit. Shit. Shit.

That was my refrain the entire fifteen-minute walk from my house to Leather Bound. What the hell was Kyle talking about, marry him? We had a perfect, lovely, sexy thing. Get together a couple of times a week, have dinner, get hot and heavy. Good fun sex on the kitchen floor. Or the couch. Or behind the couch. Then he went home and I curled up with a cup of coffee and a couple of books.

Lust. Not love.

Marriage. Was that why he’d been so quiet all night? Who the hell asked a girl to marry him from bed anyway? From
her
bed, no less. And, more importantly, why?

I was still turning a million questions over in my brain when I reached the bookstore. The door was locked – we didn’t open for fifteen minutes or so – but the back lights were on, letting me know that Lily was already inside. Webster, the store cat, was snoozing in the big front window display, his grey striped tail tick-tocking, probably in time to some mouse-hunting dream.

I fished my skeleton key from where it hung on the long ribbon around my neck. Lily and I’d had them custom made when we opened the store, and I loved the heft of mine, the curled metal J of the bow.

Even when I was in a rush, even on a morning where I felt my world had just been turned upside down and carelessly shaken, unlocking the front door to Leather Bound felt like entering a far-away universe. Or someone else’s story, right at that point where it all comes together and you know the ending is going to be fine. Everything dropped away in the seconds it took to slip the long metal key into the ancient lock and turn it.

As I stepped inside and shut the door behind me, I closed my eyes, inhaling the scent of paper and leather with a pleasure that I reserved just for this place. Yes, the bookstore was work, and sometimes it was hard and thankless work at that, but it was also a sanctuary. A little corner of bookworm heaven, made just for me.

‘You, Miss Janine, are late,’ Lily said.

I opened my eyes. From where I stood, Lily had her back to me so I couldn’t see her customary smirk, but I could see the back of her legs, the black tattoo of the word
read
curled up the back of one calf, the red curlicues of the word
lips
scrawled up the other. She had lots of tattoos – most of them words – but I bet none of them got as many questions as that missing
my
. I’d seen it, of course. Kyle had done it for her. But I’d promised never to tell anyone just where that particular piece of lettering was situated.

‘I’m sorry, Lil,’ I said. I meant it. My co-owner worked her ass off at Leather Bound, maybe even more than I did, and we were supposed to share everything half and half.

Lil stretched to tuck a book into the upper shelf, tsking her tongue teasingly. As her black pumps lifted off the ladder, I caught a glimpse of one tan sole covered with hand-written book titles. Being book geeks was one of the few things Lily and I had in common, but it was a big enough thing that it had kept our friendship thriving for nearly ten years. Not to mention convince us to go into business together. It was a decision I’d never regretted.

While she finished shelving the books in her hand, I tugged at my buttons with cold fingers. My coat and scarf were collaborating to kill me, getting caught in my hair and glasses while I tried to get them off. ‘I got stuck –’ I started.

‘Not stuck. Fucked. You got fucked, Janine.’ Lily’s laughter floated down at me. ‘Don’t lie. I don’t even have to turn around and look at you to know.’

My cheeks burned hot all the way to my ears, the way they always did when I got busted trying to fib. I’ve always been horrible at even little white lies. I don’t even know why I try. Especially not around Lily. She’s like a genetically enhanced bloodhound when it comes to lies and falsities.

Still laughing, Lily made her way backwards down the ladder. Her cherry-red hair bounced against her shoulders in perfect ringlets. The one problem with Lily was that she was always picture perfect. Make-up. Outfit. Hair.

I touched my scarf- and sex-mussed ponytail, not even bothering to try and smooth it into something presentable. I’d had enough experience to know that, in some cases, attempting to fix things only made them worse, and gave you gigantic tangles in the process.

‘How do you always know when I have sex?’ I asked. ‘I never know when you have sex.’ Of course, Lily seemed to have a lot more sex than I did, so maybe that’s why I couldn’t tell. Or maybe I was just oblivious.

‘I can smell it on you,’ she said.

I sniffed myself. I smelled like cold wind and conditioner. Maybe a little like Kyle – he always smelled like chai and sometimes like those cinnamon candy hearts – but that didn’t mean sex. And what did marriage proposal smell like? Would she be able to tell that too?

‘You can not,’ I said. I hoped.

Lily was still snickering when she hugged me, completely ignoring the fact that her gesture made it even more impossible to get my coat off or to keep my scarf from strangling me. ‘You’re right. It’s just that you’re never late for any other reason. Also,’ she pointed out, ‘you didn’t bring coffee. And you always bring coffee.’

‘Jerk,’ I said, laughing.

‘You love me.’

‘It’s true,’ I said, as I managed to untangle myself finally from coat and scarf and stuff them under the front counter.

Then I took a minute to get my bearings. From the front counter, you could look out of the picture windows at the world going by. But the worlds in here were what interested me most. Ancient books all shelved and labelled in their perfect little rows, just waiting for someone to adopt them.

Leather Bound was a lot of things to me, but mostly it was my second home. Sometimes it felt more like my first home. There were few things I loved more than being surrounded by books, especially old books. The scent of leather and paper and glue, the edges roughened by unknown fingers riffling the pages, the stories told black on white, permanent and yet ever changing. Different every time you read the words.

There were a lot of people who wouldn’t understand that, who had moved on to video games, ebooks, videos, and argued that they were the same thing. Or, at the very least, that you could get the same enjoyment from them.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like new technologies. I did. I read ebooks almost as often as I read paper books. It was that it felt like the difference between masturbating and having sex. Masturbation was fun, but it was certainly not the same as having another warm, aroused body pressed against you.

Just the thought made me think of Kyle, and I shivered a little.

‘Aha,’ Lily said, pointing one ring-laden finger my way. Her bright-blue, perfectly kohled eyes flashed at me. ‘You
were
having sex.’

‘I said I was sorry.’

‘You didn’t,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘It’s fine. I’m only a little jealous.’ Lily handed me the change bag from the bank. I started counting bills into the register while she leaned on her elbows on the counter. ‘Really,’ she said. ‘I mean … who wouldn’t want to be here opening the store we own together while you’re off getting pinned to the bed? Me, I’ve run through every vibrator in my toy box at least twice in the last week, and I’m still bored out of my mind.’

‘What happened to that –?’ I gestured with my stack of bills. Apparently I couldn’t think of names and count fives at the same time. ‘The girl with the motorcycle. She was –’

‘No,’ she said, tugging one shiny red curl between her fingers. It sproinged back up perfectly when she let go. ‘Just no. Don’t even go there.’

Lily had the worst taste in women. Not physically. They were always hot as hell. But emotionally they were always just shy of bat-shit crazy. Some of them weren’t even shy of it. I’d hoped the new girl would be different. She’d had a motorcycle, sure, which hadn’t boded well for Lily in the past, but she’d also seemed nice enough. And she’d clearly been into Lily. She’d even come into the store and bought a book, some ancient tome on early motorcycles.

‘Women suck, but I’m fine,’ Lily said.

Despite her brave words, she was hurting. Lily believed in true love and happy ever after more than anyone I’d ever known. It sucked that she had such a hard time finding it. I wanted to offer her something. Condolences. Dating advice. The number of a totally hot girl who would be just perfect for her. But considering how screwed up my own relationship was at the moment – even the fact that I was suddenly thinking about Kyle in terms of something as serious as a relationship was a sign of things being way, way off-kilter – I wasn’t in any position to offer her anything beside a heartfelt ‘I’m sorry’.

She waved a hand at me, her nails perfectly polished in a blue-black hue that somehow matched her shirt exactly. Some days I dreamed I would wake up and have the kind of put-togetherness that Lily did. The horrible thing was I’d seen her get ready for things. What took her five minutes would have taken me five hours and turned me into a wailing mess with nail polish all over my bathroom and mascara smeared across both cheeks. She just had those skills somehow. I swear women like Lily are born knowing how to get their hair to behave perfectly just by looking at it sternly in the mirror.

An old boyfriend once asked me if I kept my face natural because I wanted to show off how I looked without make-up or because I was lazy. I didn’t have the courage to admit that I kept my face ‘natural’ because I didn’t know how to do anything else with it.

Lily raised her hand again and flipped off what I imagined to be a whole wall of former exes. The blonde biker chick. The beautiful volleyball player who’d had a penchant for threesomes. The teacher who’d shown up at Leather Bound in her glasses and her button-up cardigans, but who Lily said fucked like a wildcat in heat. And those were just the ones I could remember recently.

‘Fuck love,’ Lily said.

‘Fuck love,’ I said. Right now, I couldn’t agree more. Love, or maybe the lack of love, seemed to screw everything up.

‘Maybe you just need a quickie,’ I said. ‘A loving fuck to say fuck love?’

This time she flipped
me
off, her throaty laugh filling the front half of the store with sound. ‘Seriously? Last time I did that, I almost ended up in Vegas saying “I do” to a vegan wiccan in front of a guy who didn’t look in the least like Elvis. Worst. Quickie. Ever.’

I laughed with her, even though I felt my own throat close up a little as she went on.

‘I mean, can you seriously ever see me getting married? Little white dresses for both of us? House with a picket fence? Adopting kids or fighting over who gets to be the biological mom? Jesus.’

Can you see
me
getting married? I thought. Because I certainly can’t. And, oh, Lily, my life is a little fucked up right now.

I’d never wanted to get married. I could easily give my entire life to a bookstore that was barely making ends meet, but couldn’t seem to handle a relationship that required anything more than delicious sex and maybe dinner a couple of times a week.

I used to think I just hadn’t met the right person, but now I wondered if something was wrong with me. Maybe I should think about getting married. Everything in my life was good, even if it was sometimes a little staid. Leather Bound was almost making enough money to keep us afloat. Lily and I worked well together. Kyle’s work as a tattoo artist was getting recognition. Our sex was great.

‘Actually,’ Lily said quietly after a moment. ‘Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.’

For a second I thought I’d been speaking out loud. My hands shook as they slipped the bills into their proper places in the register.

‘OK, stop talking,’ I said. ‘Or I’ll have to start the count over again.’

It wasn’t entirely true, but I needed her to be quiet because my heart was thumping too hard in the hollow of my chest and, every time Lily said one more thing, I wanted to cry. Uncertainty and confusion do that to me sometimes. It’s the little things that get me. When things are big and bad, I’m all strong and stoic on the outside. But when they’re small and confusing and complicated, well, just bring on the tears.

When our friend Conrad died a couple months back, I didn’t cry when he announced that he was sick, I didn’t cry at his hospice bed and I didn’t cry at the funeral. But when he shipped us a box of all the books he’d bought from Leather Bound over the years with a note thanking us for all the beautiful stories we’d given him, I fell down on my knees and wept until I’d ruined the letter with my tears.