She presses her palms together, begging or praying.
“This is how you want to spend the next two weeks?” I say, skeptical. “Not resting? Not reading and watching movies and lying out in the sun?”
“Desperately.”
Whether it’s a distraction or a way for her to exercise control or a chance to try a new life, this is what she wants, so this is what she gets.
“I’ll ask Dusty.”
Libby throws her arms around my neck, kissing my head a dozen times over. “We’re doing it! We’re saving a local business.”
I’m not convinced, but she’s happy, and Libby’s happiness has always been my drug of choice.
24
OF COURSE, OF course!” Dusty says, in her Dusty way, at once a bit hyperactive and vaguely spacey. “I’d love to help, Nora. But . . . I’ve never actually been to Sunshine Falls. I just happened to drive through, years ago.”
“Well, the people here love your book,” I say. I glance back toward the side of the cottage, where Libby’s stretched out on a picnic blanket, sunning herself whilst eavesdropping. She flashes me two encouraging thumbs up, and I clear my throat into the phone and go on. “The whole town has these plaques about different parts of the story. It’s really cute.”
“Really cute?” She repeats these words with awe. Probably because they sound like an ancient Latin curse coming out of my mouth.
My voice wrenches higher. “Yep!”
I feel out of sorts, asking a client for a favor, especially since it requires admitting I am here, working in person with Charlie.
Dusty is shocked to hear I’ve left the city, and when I explain I came here with my sister, she is nearly as shocked to learn I have a sibling.
As it turns out, all my longest-standing client really knows about me is I never leave New York and I’m always reachable by phone.
So after some backstory, I fill her in on the plight of Goode Books and lay out the plan for the fundraiser: an online book club with Dusty herself, open to any and all who order a book from the shop.
“It’s an hour of my life,” she says. “I think I can make it work. For the world’s best agent.”
“Have I told you lately you’re my favorite client?” I say.
“You’ve never told me that,” she replies. “But you have sent me some very expensive champagne over the years, so I figured.”
“When edits for Frigid are done, I’m sending you a swimming pool of champagne.”
Libby straightens up on her blanket and points a finger at me. SEE? ALCOHOL WATER PARK, she mouths victoriously, then pitches herself onto her feet and thunders inside to call Sally with the good news.
Yesterday I broke down and texted Brendan to ask if something was going on between them, and he simply didn’t reply, but I’m trying not to focus on that.
“Can I ask you something, Dusty?” I say.
“Of course! Ask away,” she says.
“Why Sunshine Falls?”
She stops and thinks. “I guess,” she says, “it just seemed like the kind of place that might look one way on the outside, and be something totally different once you got to know it. Like if you had the patience to take the time to understand it, it might be something beautiful.”
Sally, Gertie, Amaya, and a slew of other semi-familiar faces are in and out of the shop over the next few days, prepping for the ball. Finally I’m able to concentrate on my work. Libby, meanwhile, is at the center of the planning whirlwind, constantly coming and going, loudly taking phone calls until other customers’ disgruntled looks send her into an apology tailspin on her way out the door.
Charlie and I mostly only work over email. If we’re in the same room for too long, I’m positive that Libby — and maybe even Sally — will know exactly what’s going on, and complicated will be here fast.
I’ve been taking Libby’s disapproval of Charlie at her word, but now a part of me wonders if it’s something else. If me using the dating apps was a sort of soft launch for her, just to see what’s out there. Either way, I don’t need to put this fling on display when she’s dealing with her own relationship’s implosion.
My stomach roils every time I let myself think about it, but honestly, Charlie’s and my email correspondence is the picture of professionalism. Our texts are not, and sometimes I have to sneak out of Libby’s pop-up war room in the café to read them someplace where no one can see me flush.
Half the time Charlie intercepts me, and we sneak around the shop, stealing seconds alone wherever we can get them. The bathroom hallway. The children’s book room. The dead end in the nonfiction aisle. Places where we’re out of sight, but still have to be nearly silent. Once he pulls me through the back door into the alleyway behind the shop, and we have our hands on each other before the door swings shut.
“You look like you haven’t slept in years,” I whisper.
His palms roam down to my ass, hoisting me against him, and he drops his mouth beside my ear. “I’ve had a lot on my mind.” His hands range up me, testing each curve. “Let’s go somewhere.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere that my mother and your sister aren’t within eyeshot,” he says. “Or earshot.”
I glance back at the door, in the general direction of Libby & Co.’s thousand-point whiteboard checklist.
All those little superglued cracks in my heart pulse with pain, a sensation like emotional brain freeze. I want this, him, but I can’t forget what I’m doing here.
I look back into his honeycomb eyes, feeling like I’m sinking waist deep into them, like there’s no hope of getting away, in part because I lack any motivation while his hands are on me. “Anywhere?” I ask.
“Name it.”
Libby’s so immersed in Work Mode, she doesn’t insist on joining our Target run, and instead forks over the fundraiser’s shopping list. Sally agrees to run the register if anyone comes in, and we set out in the old beat-up Buick Charlie’s borrowing while he’s in town.
The air-conditioning doesn’t work, and the sun beats down on us hard, the blazing-hot, grass-scented wind ripping my hair free from its tie strand by strand. All of this just makes the cool blast of air and clean plasticky smell of Target more pleasant. I didn’t think we’d been spending an inordinate amount of time outside, but in the surveillance cameras at the self-checkout, my skin looks browned, Libby-esque freckles are dappled across my nose, and the humidity has given my hair a slight wave.
Charlie catches me studying myself and teases, “Thinking about how ‘hot and expensive’ you look?”
“Actually . . .” I grab the receipt. “I’m daydreaming about how hard I’m about to work you.”
His eyes spark. “I can take it.”
We drive straight to the cottage, and as soon as we step into the cool quiet, I’m keenly aware that this is, realistically, the most alone Charlie and I have ever been, but we don’t have long until Libby will be here, and there are, ostensibly, more important things to focus on than the places that sweat has his shirt clinging to him.
“You can get started out back,” I say, and head for the stairs to gather the rest of what we’ll need.