There was a bookstore, small and simple, tucked between the coffee shop no one went to and the busy street that grew larger with every passing car, threatening to swallow the store. Very few customers came in, and fewer still bought anything. She watched everyone who came in, weighing the words she would say if they asked for help. They settled on her tongue like stones.
A man came in, the bell ringing above the door like some sort of sentence. She waved, but he didn't see, already picking up a book and reading the back cover. Greedy eyes stared, taking in his shape.
He was scratchy in the way a man was. He had arm hair that poked and the whisper of stubble on his chin like he hadn’t shaved in a few days.
Maybe just one.
His hair was slightly unkempt in a windswept way that she could never do. In the way she would look messy, in a way he looked effortless and she was lazy. His glasses were smudged with dried water from the rain outside, and there was a red bump of skin promising a white head on the tip of his nose. She’d be called Rudolph for it. A purple hickey stained the side of his neck, and he wore it proudly like a string of pearls. She’d be called whore. She would lie and say her curling iron burnt the skin, no one would believe her.
His fingers were long in the way hers could never be, with chipping nail polish and scribbled notes of what to do for the day. He had tattoos of two words from some poem she barely remembered. Two little words, sprawling in blue-black ink. She could never have tattoos on the back of her hand, somewhere so visible. She’d be stupid for the choice, and he was full of art and life, and it spilled out onto his skin. Maybe he just wanted something he could draw doodles around in pen ink, seeing how it washed away under the sink and left two small words behind.
He walked into her little bookstore, though it wasn’t really hers. She just worked there, with her apron that was a little too big with a porcupine assortment of pins. Maybe she felt proud of her apron, tightened it a little when he walked up to her.
Do you have any poetry books?
Of course they had poetry books. A small, independently owned bookstore crammed full of local authors and second hand copies of classics. The entire back room was stuffed with rhymes and couplets, sonnets and lyrics, and an array of letters that slithered and made her head spin.
She showed him the room, lost in the light from the tall window in the back that showed everything she—they had to offer, a siren’s call to beckon in patrons through the front door.
He clapped his hands, rings clinking together in a way that bled musicality and she would be too loud for, take up too much room for. She watched his high tops move with buoyancy, covered in thick black lines of spirals and swirls. He walked on his toes, and he’d be called light as a feather and aware of the space he holds. He’d get polite applause. She’d get glares for being weird.
This is perfect.
Perfect in the way she couldn’t quite taste, like fairy floss dissolved in water and then it’s just sweet water. No one wanted to drink that, except the bees. She would be a flower for the bees, and he would be a man that held the perfect amount of space in an odd way. A creative way that bled out of the corners of him and leaked into the real world like ink footprints following behind him or puddles of chipping black nail polish.
Scratchy and perfect, a thing she could never be behind the counter at the bookstore, ringing him up with the employee discount (it’s not like she used it). He smiled at her in a way that made her feel a little lighter and a little bit sad.
Thank you—
His eyes, hazel, darted to her nametag hidden among enamel and gold.
Thank you Lauren.
Plain. Normal. Her name deflated on his tongue like a balloon let go. It hit the wall with a splat and sank. All the air was gone.
You’re welcome.
She didn’t ask his name. She didn’t need to, want to.
He left a cloud of smoke behind, and it burned. Maybe she relished the way air stung down her throat and settled in her lungs, tucked behind a rib cage that threatened to crack. She leaned over the counter, half expecting there to be a pool of oil on water left where he had stood. There wasn’t. Just a note with his number and a drawn smiley face.
It was crooked.