Leather Bound (8 page)

Just call me Scarlett O’Hara, I thought, as I lost myself in dreamland.

I kept my promise to Lily. I wasn’t late to Leather Bound the next morning. I even hauled my ass out of bed early enough to stop at Cream for coffee. I saw Stefan in the corner, but he was captured by an overly enthusiastic customer, so I left him to his fate and headed to Leather Bound, armed with a caramel mocha for me and a cinnamon latte for Lily. I smelled like Christmas, all wrapped up with a coffee bow.

I’d slept fine, but I’d dreamed of sex all night long. Some of it was sex with Kyle and Davian, sometimes both of them at once. Sometimes the woman in the shirtdress was there, and sometimes Lily and sometimes even one or two of my exes. But mostly it seemed I’d dreamed of having sex with a faceless stranger, who then kept turning into Davian or a Davian lookalike. I was never sure.

Lily hadn’t arrived at Leather Bound by the time I got there, so I set her coffee on the counter, hoping it wouldn’t get too cold, and spent some time giving Webster chin scratches and breakfast before I headed back to my office.

I needed to tackle two things this morning.

One, call Kyle.

OK, wait, three things.

One, figure out what I was going to say to Kyle.

Two, call Kyle.

Three, research Mister Cavanaugh and find out as much as I could about the mysterious man and his equally mysterious book. Yes, I’d turned him down, but I supposed I was like Lily in that way: once something caught my interest, especially something as shiny and intriguing as this, I didn’t let it go easily. Not to mention that I thought I saw him cutting the buttons off a hot girl at the sex store. Yesterday he’d responded to Lily’s comment about L&L with a knowing smirk. ‘I know the place,’ he’d said. If it really was him I’d seen, then he certainly did.

But first, I should decide what to do about Kyle. Second, I should call him.

So I sat down at my beloved desk and got ready to do a little research. Because clearly the best way to do the thing you don’t want to do is to tackle something else instead.

I popped open my laptop and give a couple of light strokes over her keyboard for good luck. Lily says she’s ancient and just needs to be put down, but she’s seen me through a lot of thick and thin, and I get her upgraded every couple of years. She might not even have any original parts by now, but she works like a charm. Mostly.

‘Come on, Clementine,’ I whispered. ‘Gimme something good.’

The internet is everyone’s friend when it comes to finding information, whether you’re trying to find rare books or stalk strangers. But the truth is that most people don’t know how to use it properly, or they find a bit of surface information and figure that’s good enough. My skill is digging deeper, poking into all the little corners of the web to find the hidden books and the dirt that most people don’t even notice.

I figured it would take me five minutes, maybe ten, to find out everything the world knew about Davian Cavanaugh and his non-existent book.

Turns out I was wrong.

I was still digging when Lily showed up twenty minutes later, just in time to open Leather Bound, and I hadn’t found a thing. Not a single mention. These days almost everyone on the internet leaves a trail of some sort, even if it’s accidental. In fact, it’s near impossible to
not
have at least something about you. Especially with a name like Davian Cavanaugh. If you’re alive in the world with a name that unusual, then the internet knows about it.

Except that it didn’t seem to.

Which meant that he’d either given me a fake name, which was seeming more and more like a possibility, or was a super secret spy. If he was a super secret spy, I was definitely changing my mind and taking him as a client. And I was definitely fucking him.

But I was betting more on the former.

Curiouser and curiouser, cried Alice.

‘Hey, thanks for the coffee.’ Lily poked her head in, holding up the drink I’d brought her. As always, she was impeccable, right down to her swingy skirt and her purple toenails peeking out of a pair of black sandals. It was way too damn cold for that. I was in a long wraparound dress, striped tights, and black boots and I was still freezing.

She looked me over. ‘No sex this morning, I see.’

‘No sex,’ I said. ‘Thanks for finishing up yesterday. How did it go?’

‘Steady.’ She draped herself in the theatre chair with a tired ‘oof’. ‘I’m glad we’re almost at the weekend.’

We close Leather Bound on Mondays and Tuesdays, which gives us a sort of weekend without killing our business too much. Our only other option was to hire employees, which got all kinds of crazy and expensive. And no, it has nothing to do with the fact that I’m slightly anal and slightly OCD and I’m not about to turn the store over to a bunch of people I don’t know.

‘Yah, weekend,’ I agreed, although I didn’t feel that way. Mondays and Tuesdays were the days Kyle and I usually spent together. He kicked off at the tat shop early on Monday and took Tuesday as one of his days off. It was something I usually looked forward to, but now it made my chest feel tight. I realised I hadn’t even listened to his messages as I’d promised myself I would, much less called him. I was beginning to feel like a horrible, horrible person.

‘Did you talk to Kyle?’ Lily asked. ‘About the whole marriage thing?’

As if there was something else I needed to talk to him about. Sometimes I hated her knowing me quite so well.

Clearly she saw the answer in my face because she quickly said, ‘Never mind. I’ll go flip the sign.’

I heard her turn the sign – it was wooden and it clunked against the glass storefront every time you moved it – and then I heard her talking to someone. Her voice carried back, but not her words. Probably a customer, from her tone. That made two early-morning walk-ins back-to-back. What an odd week it was turning out to be.

I pressed Clementine’s lid shut on my myriad disappointing searches, forcing myself to let go of my desire to spend time researching a man I knew nothing about and didn’t need to know anything about. He probably wasn’t the man I’d seen at L&L. He was just some guy – some very sexy guy, granted – who was either looking for a little thrill to fill his boring days or was two eggs short of a sanity dozen. Either way, it was a hassle I didn’t need.

It would have been easier to convince myself that was true if I wasn’t thinking about him constantly. The sexy mystery of him was clearly doing bad things to my brain.

Well, I’d turned down the job, and we were rid of him. I was going to excise him from my brain once and for all.

A second later, Lily rushed into the office, carrying a piece of paper, her blue eyes wide.

‘Janine,’ she said. ‘They want to kick us out!’

* * *

‘Rewind,’ I said. Lily sometimes got overly excited about things and jumbled her words. I had no idea what she was talking about, but I was hoping this was one of those occasions.

‘They want to kick us out,’ she said, a hundred times more slowly. It didn’t help. Her words still didn’t mean anything to my brain and I tried to place them in some sort of context.

‘Some guy just delivered a letter from the landlord.’ She shoved it into my hand, and before I could read it she said, ‘They’re saying they’re going to double our rent.’

I looked at the letter she’d handed me, but I couldn’t read it. The letters were fuzzy, as if typed with a really old typewriter. Then I realised it wasn’t the letters; it was because my hands were shaking so much it blurred the type. I took a deep breath and tried to steady myself. Read it for real this time.

Lily wasn’t kidding; they wanted to double our rent. We could cover it, maybe. Just maybe. If we were willing to go mac and cheese and live in cardboard boxes – or the back room – for the next year.

Some of which I did in college, and I was so not willing to do that again.

‘What the hell?’ I said. ‘I don’t think they can do this. Doesn’t our lease go for at least another four months?’ I tried to count backward, to when we’d opened the place, but my head was doing funny things. Numbers usually liked me, but right now I couldn’t think.

‘Two,’ Lily said. ‘Two months. They’re trying to raise it with the next lease.’

‘So we have two months to either talk them out of this, find a new place or start making a whole lot more money.’

Lily chewed her perfect lower lip and nodded. ‘Yeah,’ she said.

‘Well, that sucks.’ I dropped my ass into my desk chair and let the letter fall into the recycling box. ‘Fuck-fuckity-fuck,’ I said.

Lily didn’t say anything. She just leaned against the doorway, staring down at her painted toenails.

When we moved in here three years ago, we got lucky. Our landlord was a book-lover who quickly took us under his wing. Conrad was the only reason we’d been able to afford the place. He’d rented it to us for way less than it was worth, and he’d made us a rent guarantee, with the promise that he’d keep the rent low as long as we promised to visit with him and to give him a discount on books.

Neither promise was hard to keep. First, he was easy on the eyes. He was just getting to that stage men have where they’re going grey at the temples, and the phrase ‘tall, dark and handsome’ described him perfectly. More importantly, he became a friend. Someone I trusted with every bone in my body. Conrad quickly became a fixture at Leather Bound, and his sense of humour and kindness made it easy to spend time with him.

But Conrad had died two months ago, leaving a hole in lots of places. Sometimes it felt like our entire little community was still grieving for him. I knew that I was. And Lily too.

Our new landlord was no Conrad, but he’d mostly been hands-off. Or at least he had been until now.

‘What a jerk,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to go talk to him. What’s his name? Walter? Weiner?’

‘Wes,’ Lily said. ‘And I think maybe I should be the one to go and talk to him.’

I realised I’d been swearing, rather loudly, and kicking the leg of my desk repeatedly. Trying to let go of the rising anger and panic I felt, I inhaled big and let it out with one last ‘Fucker’.

‘Rar?’ Lily said, which always made me laugh.

‘Fine, rar. You’re right. You should probably be the one to talk to him.’

‘I’ll just show him my tattoos,’ she said.

‘That’s a great idea,’ I said.

I closed my eyes. My head was thumping hard, a tiny headache making its appearance known behind my eye. We didn’t bring in enough money to pay double rent, but I wasn’t sure we had the money or the ability to start all over again either. Behind my eyelids, I saw Leather Bound slipping away.

‘What are we going to do, Lil?’

‘Stop turning down potential customers, for a start,’ she said, all business. ‘Call Davian up and tell him you’ll take the job.’

‘I already turned him down,’ I said.

‘Then turn him back up,’ she said.

‘I think he’s a little crazy. I don’t even think there is a book,’ I said. ‘There has to be another way.’

Even as I said it, even as I considered taking on Davian’s job, I felt my heart speed up, knocking against my chest in its excitement at seeing him again. Stupid traitor, that lustful heart of mine.

‘Not that I can think of,’ Lily said.

I sighed. No matter how crackpot crazy Davian might turn out to be, it turned out that we might need him. At the very least, we needed his money.

‘People suck sometimes,’ I said.

‘And not in the good way,’ Lily said.

Stupid things make me feel stressed, I’ll admit it. When I was in college, if a professor scolded me or even gave me a disapproving look for something I’d done, or even something I hadn’t done, I would feel sick for weeks. A former boss telling me that she wanted to see me in her office would sometimes drive me to tears.

My life was falling apart, someone wanted to steal my dream store from me, but the thing that really made me feel like throwing up was that idea of calling the man I’d just turned down and asking him to reconsider.

The man that I’d said no to. The man that I still wasn’t entirely sure I hadn’t just watched cut the buttons off a woman and bring her – and, if I was going to be honest about it, myself – to orgasm. The man I couldn’t stop thinking, or even dreaming, about.

His card was still on my desk. I picked it up and ran my thumb over it. Letterpress from the looks of it, and expensive. It had his name and a phone number, and beneath that, right in the centre, the shape of a keyhole pressed into the paper with black ink. The black keyhole was indented, the letters of his name and number raised.

Taking a deep breath, I forced myself to dial the number on the card. I didn’t exhale until I heard the answering machine’s mechanical voice, asking me to please leave a message at the tone.

I did just that, mostly stumbling all over myself to try and say what I needed to say without sounding like a complete fool. I’m pretty sure I didn’t succeed in the latter part, but somewhere in there I managed to convey the idea that if he was still looking for someone to find him his book, I’d like to talk with him about the possibility of such a thing. And then I hung up and tried not to throw up.

I couldn’t put off calling Kyle any longer. It was time. Long past time. Especially now that I’d seen how many messages he’d left. I listened to all of them. It was far less penance than I deserved for just running away like a scared little rabbit.

The first message was his usual sweet and funny self, still upbeat, laughing at himself a little and apologising for the way the proposal had slipped out.

‘Wow, I didn’t expect that,’ he said. ‘And I bet neither did you.’

I could almost laugh with him at that point. But the others became more serious and sad, asking me to please call him, and saying he hadn’t meant to scare me off, and he would gladly take it back if I’d just let him know how I was feeling.

‘I am feeling like an asshole,’ I said aloud.

I really was. He was a nice guy. What was I doing, avoiding him like that, just letting him hang in the wind? An asshole and a coward.

I hit CALL BACK and put my ear to the phone.