Archive of Our Own ^beta

(prologue)

(“I’ll buy the flowers myself,” Andy says, stomping her way out the door.

“Later, Mrs. Dalloway,” Joe shouts at her retreating back without missing a beat, startling a laugh out of Nile and a muffled, bemused groan from Booker.

“Where is Andy going?” Nicky asks, emerging from the back room to join their group gathered in the front of the store.

“She says she’s going to go buy the flowers for tonight,” Quynh says, hopping up onto the cash desk to perch next to Nile and the snoozing cat in her lap.

Nicky just smiles, patting her knee as he walks by to the front door. “I will be back in fifteen minutes.”

“Where are you going?” Nile wants to know.

“To actually buy the flowers for tonight,” Nicky says. “Ten dollars says she forgot the moment she walked out and went to the bakery instead.”

“I don’t make sucker bets,” Booker drawls. “But I would put money on her coming back with grasshopper pie.”

“Meringues?” Copley suggests hopefully.

“Baklava,” Quynh says with an air of certainty of someone who’s been in a committed and healthy decade-long relationship. She’s proven completely accurate when her wife saunters back into the store with a box of beautifully wrapped baklava from the fancy bakery down the street with no flowers in sight.

“What happened to the flowers?” Joe asks, peering into Andy’s bag of spoils, to which Andy asks what flowers around a mouthful of pastry. Her nonchalance is misguidedly rewarded, too, when Nicky walks back through the door, arms loaded down with flowers. Nile takes the chaos in, a piece of baklava in hand, and feels her heart swell and crest with love for every single one of these weirdos.)

one.

Nile has always envisioned herself following in her father’s footsteps and joining the Marines after high school, so no one was more surprised than Nile herself when she had found herself packing up a car with her best friend, Dizzy, to drive from Chicago to New York City on a two-day road trip for a four year degree at New York University on a partial scholarship. She knows it’s the right choice when her mother hugs her goodbye, reminds her that she loves and supports her no matter what, but that she’s also glad that Nile will be carving her own path; the look on her little brother’s face says that same.

In New York, first in a shoebox sized dorm with other teenage girls, and later in a shared Brooklyn one bedroom plus den apartment with Dizzy for the next few years, Nile grows up. She gets her four year degree in Africana Studies at New York University; she falls in love for the first time and has her heart broken four months later and spends three days eating her weight in ice cream with Dizzy on their dilapidated couch. She makes the decision to stay in New York with Dizzy after graduation, as they look for jobs and dream about the future.They scrape together their pocket change for overpriced coffee and they go on misadventures around the city. Nile goes on one, two, three, ten dates with a dancer named Jay, and she gets folded into their little unit as well, alongside whoever Dizzy’s flavour-of-the-week just so happens to be.

(“I have a bad news, good news, cursed news scenario,” Dizzy announces one night, dramatically throwing herself onto Nile’s bed, bouncing once.

Nile texts Jay a koala emoji goodnight, because romance is boring, and shoves her phone under the pillow to give Dizzy her undivided attention. “Okay, hit me.”

“Bad news,” Dizzy says. “I’m twenty-three percent less gay than we originally thought I was. Turns out I’m only like, eighty-five precent gay.”

“A hundred minus twenty-three isn’t eighty-five,” Nile points out.

Dizzy sits up. “I don’t have to be good at math, I’m gay—”

“—that’s still not a thing,” Nile interrupts the same argument they’ve had over the years, because Dizzy will forever be Dizzy, and this will be an infinite loop of absurdity they’ll both fall into if Nile doesn’t do her best friend duties immediately and reign her back in. “So what’s the good news?”

“Good news is that it turns out I’m...pan?” Dizzy says it with nonchalance, but tosses her head in the way that Nile, who knows her best, is certain means that she’s nervous about Nile’s reaction.

“Nice to meet you Pan, I’m Nile,’ she says because she’s pretty sure it’ll make Dizzy smile.

It does. “What did I ever do to deserve you?”

“I’m the best,” Nile agrees cheekily, throwing an arm around Dizzy’s shoulders to draw her in for a cuddle. “So what’s the cursed news? That you met someone?”

“Yes. And he’s a man.”)

At the end of summer, after a whirlwind year-long bliss-fog of a relationship, featuring letters and sodas and all that stupid old shit, Jay lands a role as a Swing for an Equity National tour of CATS, and she and Nile make the decision to break up instead of testing out long distance. And if maybe Nile had cried a bit on her walk home from Jay’s that night, no one but Nile herself will ever know.

So Nile does her best to fill her time and forget about Jay. She makes pizza dough from scratch with Dizzy and gets her first salaried job with a marketing firm as their social media person. She signs up for a kickboxing class and starts visiting her local independent bookstore with the abhorrent name but incredible selection of fantasy and science fiction novels by queer Black authors. She goes full hours without thinking about Jay, and then days, weeks, and Nile finds herself finally settling into something beyond fine.

And then, out of nowhere, Dizzy drops an unexpected bombshell: she’s moving back to the midwest with her boyfriend.

“Seriously?” Nile says.

“Columbus is the midwest,” Dizzy says defensively.

“Sure, but it’s also in Ohio. I can’t believe you’re abandoning me! After so many years of learning phonetic Korean for your K-Pop loving ass.”

“Please. It was only fifty percent K-Pop, we had a good mix of the shit you liked, too. All those girls singing about feelings and wanting to smash, followed by six hours of Frank Ocean and Beyonce? And the time I found especially for you that crossover event between that Chicago rapper you like and K-Pop, as if the song was created specifically for the two of us? Admit it, you love the playlists I make for us.”

“I’ll miss squishing onto the F train with you and sharing earbuds,” Nile allows, grudgingly.

“Oh I’ll be waitin’ on you, on the other side of the loop,” Dizzy sings tunelessly, nudging Nile’s shoulder. “You and I are gonna walk down the aisle at our wedding to that song.”

“You’re the one leaving me, and for a man no less,” Nile points out mildly. “Also, what loop? You’re not even going back to Chicago.”

Dizzy sighs theatrically and Nile loves her. “The sentiment, Freeman. The sentiment. Where’s your sense of romance?”

“Running off to Ohio with a man,” Nile says.

“You’re still my girl, you know that right?”

“I’m still your girl,” Nile agrees.

two.

After Dizzy skips town, Nile has the unenviable task of moving out of their beloved little home for the past seven years, and into a brownstone with four new roommates.

Everything kind of sucks, in that nothing’s actually truly terrible, but Nile finds that she’s kind of adrift, unmoored by Dizzy’s move and the just okay living situation and her increasing amounts of complacency at her whatever job, a little guilty about her indifference to being gainfully employed at this particular company. Nothing’s wrong, per se, but Nile finds herself missing the comfort and familiarities of last few years, unprepared for the sudden onslaught of changes that seem to keep coming at a never-ending pace.

Even going to her comfort place, her favourite bookshop, is starting to feel underwhelming: her weekly browse of their once robust and ever-changing sci-fi shelves seems to have stagnated, no longer bursting with exciting and diverse titles. It’s absolutely mystifying, as the front window displays continue to change with creativity and unique excitability on a bi-weekly basis while the new selections of her favourite section seems to have ground to a halt.

It’s by chance that she looks up and sees that the guy who’s been putting up the new window display seems to be saying something to her. She straightens up and pulls out her earbuds: “Sorry, I missed that. Did you say something?”

“All good,” the man says, and Nile blinks, because he’s literally wearing a backwards leopard print cap, curls spilling out the front. “I was just asking if I could help you with anything.”

“Oh,” Nile says. “Uh. I guess I was just...wondering why the fantasy and sci-fi section hasn’t changed in, like, three months?”

The guy gives her a sheepish smile. “Yeah, so Lykon had a career change and took his great taste with him. Sorry about that. But we can order anything you want in for you?”

Nile has no idea who this Lykon is, but even the confirmation that this isn’t just a conspiracy theory in her mind has her feeling strangely disappointed.”Oh. Okay, no that’s fine. Thanks anyway.”

Hats tilts his head a little at her. “Hey, you’re in here a lot, right?” And then without waiting for a response, points at himself. “I’m Joe.”

“Nile,” says Nile, with a little wave.

Joe’s head stays tilted. “Sci-fi and fantasy, yeah? Afrofuturism?”

Nile grins. “Absolutely. But make it queer?”

Joe straightens up and holds a fist out to bump, which Nile does. “Are you looking for a job?” he asks casually, as if that would be an obvious follow-up question.

It’s Nile’s turn to look a little confused. “That’s not weird at all. And I already have one, but thanks.”

“Hey, that’s cool,” Joe says easily. “What do you do, can I ask?”

“Digital marketing for a startup?” Nile tells him, but it sounds more like a question than a fact.

Joe nods. “You like it?”

“Oh, yeah, it’s a dream. Graphic design is my passion and all that,” Nile deadpans.

Joe laughs at that, full on throwing his head back when he does; he has a great laugh. “Listen, not to sound weird, but we’re actually looking for somebody exactly like that here. Loves discovering new sci-fi and fantasy and maybe knows how to internet. Can I at least pass your contact information on to Andy to hear her out?”

Nile can feel herself scrunching up her face. “Andy?”

“Proprietor,” Joe says. “Boss lady.”

Nile’s not sure why, but finds herself scribbling down her email and phone number on the crumpled receipt with a leaky pen. When she walks out of the store that afternoon with her newly purchased copy of The Song of Achilles on Joe’s recommendation—while not the speculative fiction or hip-hop inspired cultural criticism she was hoping to come in for, it was impossible not to be swept away by Joe’s enthusiasm as he had waxed poetic about the modern classic novel she had never before gotten around to picking up—she feels lighter and more optimistic than she has in quite a while. She finds herself hoping this mysterious Andy will actually call her.

three.

When Andy does end up calling her a week and a half later, Nile finds herself playing impromptu hooky from her actual paying job to go into the store for an informal interview, doing her best not to sweat through her secondhand interview blouse and wipe her sweaty palms on her slacks.

When she walks into the store, she’s immediately met by a woman with close-cropped hair in a tank top and jeans, who introduces herself as Andy. She brusquely holds out a hand to pump Nile’s twice before bustling both of them into what she calls the office, a closed off room in the back of the store that seems to scream controlled chaos, spilling with stacks of books and boxes on every available surface.

“My best and favourite employee left to work at a NGO, leaving a gap in the section,” Andy says, without preamble. “He was also running our social media accounts. My wife’s been helping out, but it’s not her favourite. So it’d be a bookselling job, but you’d also buy for the section. And handle our social media and digital marketing plans.”

Nile takes this all in; thinks for a moment, unsure of how to respond. Finally, she goes with, “I already have a job.”.
.
“Yeah, Joe said. Can I ask how much you’re making there?”

Nile tells her and Andy looks at her, expression unreadable. “We’ll salary match,” she finally says. “With benefits.”

There’s a long moment of silence between them. Nile blinks. “Just like that?”

“Just like that,” Andy confirms.

“But…I’ve never worked in a bookstore before?”

“Look, I know this is unorthodox,” Andy says. “But I’ll be straight with you, we need someone on staff and soon. And this isn’t rocket science or spinal surgery on infants. You’re here all the time, you have good taste in books, you seem to pick things up quickly. It’s a good group of people. Strange. But good.”

What Nile means to say, cautious all her life, is that she’ll need some time to think about it. What comes out of her mouth is: “I’m gonna need two weeks of notice at my current job.”

When Andy smiles, it seems to soften her entire demeanour, and deep down, Nile knows that she’s probably made the right choice. “Deal.”

four.

Nile’s been on the job for a week and still can’t believe the events that led her to this point. (“Only you, Freeman,” Dizzy had said on the phone when Nile had called to recount her tale, as she laughed and laughed and laughed.) She’s met all her coworkers, too, just as much of a ragtag group of weirdos as Andy had promised when Nile had come back to the store to sign her job offer letter.

Nile meets Quynh, their community and events manager, who moonlights in making pastries to sell in the store, and Nicky, the guy who runs the children’s department and seems to be the only person who actually knows the store’s operational ins and outs and definitely knows all their delivery people’s names. She meets Copley, their part-time accountant, and the big and fluffy bookstore cat that follows him around like a shadow. She also meets the aptly named Booker, postured in a perpetual slump over the register.

(“Booker and me go way back,” Andy says. “But I only keep him employed here because it’s good to have writers on staff. Cred and all that.”

Nile hasn’t read his most recent novel, but remembers reading his debut collection The Old Guard for an elective creative fiction course. She had liked it fine.)

She learns that Joe’s backwards leopard print baseball cap isn’t a hipster statement while they’re having cheap get-to-know-my-new-coworker beers after closing on Monday. It’s just who he is: “Wearing the cap backwards is better for kissing my boyfriend,” Joe says with utmost sincerity, knocking his pint with Nile’s in cheers. “A total life hack.”

Over the next hour, Nile learns that Joe’s part-time in the store and part-time doing his PhD with a horrifying funding structure, and the aforementioned boyfriend seems to be Nicky, who’s absent from drinks because he had been tricked into helping Quynh make pastry dough.

She learns that the cursed bookstore name is a result of botched paperwork when Andy had first filed the incorporation papers and then never bothered to fix it: “Wait, so it’s called ‘Bookshop Bookshop’ because Andy literally filled the paperwork out wrong?” Nile wants to know, in disbelief.

“Yeah, that’s a million percent true,” Joe confirms. “She literally wrote ‘bookshop’ under both name and business but hates paperwork so much that she left it.”

Nile can feel her jaw drop. “She hates it that much?”

Joe laughs. “She hates it so much, we literally work in a store called ‘Bookshop Bookshop,’ and every single day, we have to pretend that’s not weird.”

“Wow,” Nile says, taking a long pull from her glass, mystified.

“Here’s the thing about Andy,” Joe says, leaning forward earnestly. “She’s the best. She also hates most things, but I think what she hates most might be paperwork. Inefficiency might be a close second, followed by the patriarchy. So she just, like, doesn’t do paperwork anymore and makes Nicky do the paperwork for her, but also won’t let him change the name because she says that’s inefficient, since we already have a name.”

“And does he mind?”

Joe shakes his head. “Nah, he’s fast and will do it for her, and when she reminds him that men are terrible and the reason why systemic and inherent sexism pervades, he just agrees while he fills out the paperwork. Well, that and the fact that he’s the only one who ever remembers when recycling day is.”

“Why doesn’t he write it down on the calendar?”

“He did. He says he colour-coded it too, but Andy says that if he knows she can just ask him.”

“That’s...horrifying but seems very on brand.”

Joe nods and solemnly raises his glass to cheers against Nile’s again.

Nile takes a drink and then sets her glass back down on her coaster, her finger tracing the condensation on the side of her glass. “So what’s ‘Andy’ even short for, anyway?”

“Aleksandrina. Aleksandrina Sythica.”

“Seriously?!”

Joe holds up four fingers. “Scout’s honour.”

“It’s supposed to be three fingers.”

Joe just shrugs, eyes sparkling. “I live for plausible deniability.”

five.

Nile’s taking advantage of an afternoon lull between customers to re-merchandize the new releases table when she hears Booker “oh, fuck me” groan from behind the cash, and then raising his voice to yell “Andy, your boyfriend’s back!” in the general direction of the back of the store. It’s followed by a loud crash from the office that definitely doesn’t sound like Andy working on anything productive.

“Andy has a boyfriend?” Nile asks, turning to Booker.

He looks over at her from his perpetual slump, gesturing out the window with his chin at the two men, one scurrying to jay-walk across the street and the other lumbering behind him. “Some condo developer named Merrick and his pet guard dog. They come over about once every couple weeks to sleeze it up and try to get her to sell the place.”

“For condos?”

“For condos.”

Nile turns to squint out the window again. “...is that a hoodie and suit jacket combo? With running shoes?”

“Yeah, he sucks,” Booker says, and goes back to his half-finished game of Sudoku, leaving Nile to deal with the store visitors, and in this moment, Nile resents him just the smallest bit for it.

The two men immediately start inspecting the beautiful window display Joe had designed just last week, and then drift over to the staff picks shelf, picking up the hardcover edition of Children of Blood and Bone that proudly sits on Nile’s shelf, balking when they flip the dust jacket and see the price.

“Cheaper on Amazon,” Merrick’s lackey says, not even attempting to keep his voice down. Nile hates him already and notices that even Booker’s shoulders tense a bit behind the cash where he’s pretending not to notice any of the goings ons.

“Quite right, Mr Keane,” Merrick says, eyeing the selections with disdain. Nile can feel herself taking in a deep breath and holding it for a five count, before injecting as much cheer in her voice to see if they need any help—the faster they get served, the faster they’ll get the fuck out of here.

“Ah,” Merrick says, gingerly settling one of Booker’s picks—another modern retelling of Don Quixote—on Quynh’s shelf, because of course he does, and Nile can only imagine how livid she’s going to be when she finds out, because Quynh would never. “Is Ms. Scythica in?

“I’ll go get her,” Nile manages as pleasantly as possible, trying not to clench her teeth as she makes her way to the back office to grab Andy.

When Andy comes out, she plasters a smile on her face that looks more like she’s chewing on shards of glass than anything else. “Merrick. Keane,” she says mildly.

“Ms. Scythica,” Merrick says, reaching out a hand to shake. When Andy makes no move to take it and crosses her arms instead, he barely even looks fazed. “Lovely weather we’re having.”

Andy doesn’t rise to his bait. “What do you want, Merrick?”

The sudden chill in the air isn’t lost to Nile, and even Merrick’s confidence seems to falter for a moment to Andy’s brash approach. “Perhaps we should go somewhere a little more private to have this conversation?”

“Or perhaps we should not,” Andy says, immovable and unyielding.

“Very well,” Merrick says. “I wanted to circle back to our earlier conversation and see if you would reconsider.”

“We’re not selling,” Andy says. “Anything else you came to ask?”

“Yes, actually,” Merrick replies, without missing a beat. “I'd like to buy a copy of Jordan Peterson's latest."

"Yeah, we don't have that."

"Isn't that poor business practices? It's selling incredibly well."

"Not here it's not. We don't sell that here."

"Ah, so you're censoring him, Ms Sythica."

"Censorship implies I'm keeping his voice from being heard. No one is stopping you from picking up a copy of his book elsewhere, Merrick."

Merrick stares at her like he's just swallowed a bug. "Well, then I'd like to buy a copy of Shakespeare’s masterpiece, King Lear. But I wouldn’t expect you to be carrying a copy of that, would you? Since a store of this size can only carry so much stock at once.”

And Nile can only watch as Andy calmly makes her way to the poetry and drama shelf, plucking the copy and depositing on the front desk in record time. ”Are we done here?”

“We will do such things—what they are, yet I know not: but they shall be the terrors of the earth," Merrick says as a reply as he pays with his Apple watch, and Nile fights the urge to roll her eyes and desperately hopes that the front door will somehow hit both Merrick and Keane on their way out.

(“They want Andy to sell the property so they can build condos,” Booker explains, later, to Nile. He’s still working on his Sudoku, now full of scribbled out pen marks—Nile’s pretty sure he might just not be so good at it and should probably consider swallowing his pride and using a pencil instead. Andy had walked out about half an hour ago, telling Booker and Nile that they were in charge until she was back, probably to fight a tree or whatever it was that she does when she’s annoyed. “Andy’s one of three holdouts on this block of storefronts, besides the bakery and the little shitty bar.”

Nile thinks about her hometown, the way some of her favourite parts of Chicago are slowly becoming unrecognizable due to the way gentrification was blowing into town, neighbourhoods consumed by unfriendly steel and glass and chrome structures instead. “So what can be done?”

Booker shrugs, the ghost of a smile on his face. “Appreciate the fact that Merrick doesn’t realize that King Lear has been in the public domain for hundreds of years and for someone so goddamned cheap, we got him to pay full price for a book he could have legally gotten for free? That’s kind of fun, no?”

“You and I have very different definitions of fun,” Nile says, but finds herself smiling, too.

“It’s the little things,” Booker says, going back to his puzzle and crossing out another wrong entry. “Pettiness is one of the most simple joys in this world.”

Nile’s not sure if she wants Booker to be wrong or right about that.)

six.

Nile learns about the lore of the store in bits and pieces, in dribs and drabs. Today’s piecemeal history lesson is being hosted by Copley, who’s in for the afternoon and diligently doing budget projections for the next quarter, or what Joe and Quynh have jokingly and affectionately referred to as “cooking books,” only to be met with Copley’s solemn “we’ll see how funny you find it when we’re investigated by the IRS.”

(Personally, NIle has no stake in this standoff but secretly thinks that both things could be true: Copley might actually be allergic to fun, but getting investigated by the IRS also sounds like a major vibe killer.)

Copley seems to appreciate the company at least, beyond the lazy cat curled up in his lap. She’s pretty sure the cat’s name is James; she was never formally introduced, but she does remember Andy calling out for him last week and getting annoyed when she had to come looking for him, unmoving from where he had been happily twining her way around Copely’s ankles and leaving a trail of fur clinging to his corduroy pants in his wake.

Between crunching numbers, Copley explains how they’re able to keep the place afloat despite the thin margins: that Andy owns the building because of a rich ex-husband who had bought her a restaurant. When the husband was no longer in the picture, Andy had decided that the restaurant didn’t need to be either, and had sold it in order to buy the building that she then converted into a bookstore as a labour of love: a sprawling storefront downstairs, and a rickety flight of stairs that lead to a smaller but cozy space, big enough to be a small office.

“It used to be the storeroom, you know,” Copley says, looking around the back office and making a face at the haphazard and claustrophobia-inducing piles of books surrounding him. It’s a wonder any of them are ever able to find anything back here. “I wonder why Andy doesn’t use the space to store the books anymore. Guess it makes sense to want to make the workplace fully accessible, but it’s a shame to waste the space like that.”

A shame indeed, but Nile knows the real reason why, as told by a cackling Quynh: that Nicky had fallen down the stairs one time years ago while ferrying books up and down, and Andy, who despised paperwork, had to fill out workers comp forms. Moreover, Nicky being out of commission had caused a domino effect of nonsense, up to and including the disappointment in the eyes of their weekly book delivery person who wasn’t greeted by Nicky to shoot the shit with.

(“Never again,” Quynh’s impression of Andy irritated after three minutes of small talk was actually quite impressive. “If I have to steal or kill, as god is my witness, I’m never letting Nicky fall down the stairs again.”

“I...don’t remember that from Gone with the Wind,” Nile had said.)

“So what’s up there now instead?”

Copley shrugs. “Booker?”

Oh, right: Nile remembers Booker mentioning that he was squatting upstairs, the implication of estrangement from his wife and kids, but he hadn’t volunteered any more than that, so Nile hadn’t asked. “At least the commute isn’t so bad?” Nile volunteers.

“Always a bright side, I suppose,” Copley agrees, and then scrapes back his chair, knocking over a stack of books as the cat in his lap yowls in protest, and not for the first time, he and Nile lament the precarious and eccentric misuse of space in the store’s backroom, and Nile supposes there are worse ways to pass an afternoon.

(interlude)

Nile’s pretty sure that the bedroom in her new shared flat is probably a converted walk-in closet, but it’s private and the rent is reasonable and her new roommates are nice enough, so she focuses more closely on the latter two facts and less on the first one when she calls her mom on Monday evening, suddenly awash with waves of homesickness.

“That’s not so bad then,” her mom tells her. She sounds tired, but happy to hear from Nile. “Do you miss living with Dizzy?”

“No,” Nile lies. “That’s what she gets for leaving me for a man. I don’t miss her at all.”

“That sounds incredibly truthful, and I believe you not at all,” her mom says around a laugh. “And how’s the new...ish job?”

“It’s...good?” Nile hedges. “I like the people there. I like some parts of the job. I don’t like other parts.”

“Like what?”

Nile thinks about this for a moment. Her intention had been to only share the good parts, but she’s never been able to lie to her mom, and she loves her so much for that. “Like...am I good at it? I don’t know. And what if my boss sells the building to the developer bro who keeps coming in to douche it up and buy the place to turn it into condos, do I lose my job? Do I move back in with you? And what if I accidentally set fire to the hair of the next person who comes in and says they can buy the book for cheaper on Amazon, just a little bit?”

There’s a long pause on the line, long enough that Nile’s briefly and irrationally worried her mom’s hung up on her laundry list of grievances, until her mom’s voice, softened now, filters back through the line. “You know you can always move back home right? Not living in New York anymore, that’s not a failure, okay? I want you to think about what you want, what’s best for you. But I would also love to have you here. Your brother would too.”

“Really?” Nile asks, focussing on the last part, because it’s easier to think about that than the unconditional love radiating from so many miles away. “Because when I texted him about my new job, his response was, and I quote ‘Oh, you like books? Then name every book.’”

Nile’s mom just laughs in response. “That sounds about right. You know that’s just his way of telling you he loves you. He misses you.”

“He misses me taking him to shows, you mean.”

“Potato, Po-tah-to. But I can’t help but think you’re trying to change the subject on purpose, sweetheart.”

Nile sighs. “Okay, so. What if I don’t know what I want?”

“I think it’s hard to think about what ifs. I’m not saying don’t think or worry about the future, but I think there are things that are out of your control. So if you want to be there right now, be there. And if you can’t anymore, or if suddenly some idiot man buys your work because he’s a jerk, you always, always have a home here, okay? There’s no shame in that, either in struggling or in coming back to rest and struggle less. There’s no wrong choice here.”

“Okay.”

“As for if you’re good at your job, and while I don’t know anything about social media or marketing, maybe I’m biased, but it doesn’t sound like your boss would keep you around if you weren’t.”

“I…” Nile thinks about this for a moment. “You’re probably right about that, actually.”

“I know I’m right,” her mom tells her. “And as for the third thing...well, maybe try not to set anyone on fire.”

“But Mom. Just a little. A singe.”

“I’m not bailing you out of jail,” her mom says sternly.

“That’s a lie. You totally would,” Nile says confidently. “You love me.”

“I do,” her mom agrees. “But don’t tell anyone else. I have a reputation to maintain.”

“Don’t tell anyone you love me or that you’d bail me out of jail for committing premeditated arson?” Nile teases, and laughs when her mom makes a scandalized sound on the other side of the call.

(They talk for another hour, her brother cameo-ing in for the last twenty minutes when he comes home from work, and all of them laugh over Nile’s anecdote about Nicky staring blankly at a customer who had asked about a novelization of The Passion of the Christ. When she hangs up the phone, she finds herself feeling better, more sure of herself than she’s felt in weeks.)

seven.

For the most part, Nile likes working on Wednesdays, because that’s usually the day of the week that Quynh brings in her fresh pastries to sell. Lately, she’s really glowed up her puff pastry game—when Nile tells her so around a mouthful of apple turnover, Quyhn just gleefully lets her in on her secret: how she’s worn down Nicky until he had finally shared his foolproof recipe with her.

Andy is fine with them selling pastries alongside books, saying that she wants them to diversify their portfolio—whatever that means—Nile’s pretty sure she’s just parroting something she heard Copley say once. The pastry sales would probably be a great pairing with selling coffee from the fancy coffee machine that sits in the front of the store, inherited from the previous owners, but it only works some of the time, and Booker seems to be the only one who can reliably make it brew lattes that don’t taste like burnt socks.

(When Nile laments about this to Quynh, Quynh’s eyes just narrow a little and she makes a comment under her breath that sounds like something about even broken clocks being right twice a day, but then doesn’t elaborate. Nile, a little taken aback, doesn’t ask for clarification.)

Nile actually really likes working with Quynh: she’s funny and smart, with a sharp and sometimes biting edge to her humour that Nile actually finds hilarious. Years ago, her mom had given her the advice to never share too much information with a colleague, for fear of it being used against her on a bad day, but Nile finds it hard to hold back with how much she genuinely loves learning about Quynh, despite her being married to the literal boss. Quynh is Nile’s absolute favourite rare personality type to interact with: practically shameless but somehow still without emotional vampire tendencies.

She learns that Quynh speaks four languages and loves her family very much, even though they’re not entirely sure about what she does for a living, which leads Quynh to sometimes worry that maybe she should actually be helping out with their family business instead, torn between what she wants to do and what she thinks they want her to do. She learns about how Quynh and Andy met (“Oh, I homewrecked her marriage. Just kidding, we met in an ASL course. We were the two rough kids in the back of the classroom.”), all of her feelings about Notes of a Crocodile (“A masterpiece, Nile. A masterpiece!”), and the fact that she has a phobia of drowning, which almost seems strange to Nile, since Quynh doesn’t seem like someone who would be scared of anything.

“My girlfriend has that same phobia,” Nile says without thinking.

Quynh brightens a bit at that from where she’s dusting a shelf during a lull in customers, no one in the store but the two of them and the snoozing cat, napping in the middle of Joe’s latest front window display. “What’s her name?”

“Oh,” Nile says, and can feel her cheeks heating up. “I mean my ex. Uh. Jay?”

“I’m sorry,” Quynh tells her, softening a bit with sincerity. “Was this recent?”

“Yeah,” Nile tells her, reaching for a pen to doodle mindlessly on a scrap of receipt paper. “It was mutual. She was going on tour, and we thought it would be easier not to do long distance?”

Quynh squints at her. “Like...the military?”

“Oh, no, no,” Nile says hurriedly. “Like...CATS? The musical? She’s a dancer.”

“So you broke up because she’s dancing in a cat costume every night across the country?”

“When you say it like that, it sounds...kind of ridiculous. But...” Nile trails off.

“But?” Quynh prompts.

“But I didn’t want to hold her back, I guess?”

“If you love someone, set her free?” Quynh intones, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah, something like that.”

“I’m not judging, because your choices are your choices, and that’s perfectly valid,” Quynh tells her. “But you’re allowed to be happy and make choices that contribute to that.”

It’s Nile’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Quynh says with a note of finality, like ending a subject and starting another. She pauses in front of the staff picks shelf, peering carefully at her own selections. “Hey, what’s this copy of Quichotte doing on my shelf? I would never!”

“I think that was from last time Merrick was in, and he moved some stuff around?”

“Ugh,” Quynh says with feeling. “Of course he did. What a sad, small man.”

“Do you not worry about him? Like, that he’s going to do something weird to try to buy the building out from under Andy or whatever?”

Quynh shrugs, and comes back to the counter to squirrel away the cleaning supplies. “Nah, maybe in another universe, he’d be more ambitious and scary. Luckily for us, in the world we live in, he just smarms in every couple of weeks and asks the same questions. We give him the same answer, he leaves again with his hot sidekick. It’s actually kind of helpful in marking the passage of time, since it’s always like oh hey, it’s been two weeks! Plus he comes in so often, I don’t know if he’d know what to do with himself if Andy actually ever decided to sell.”

Their conversation has to take a pause when a customer walks in and requires both their attention when he tells them that he’s looking for a book with a blue cover and “The” in the title. Though in the moment Nile sees her own desperation to hide the hellfire in her eyes with her best customer service smile mirrored on Quynh’s face, not for the first time does she feel the gratitude of having this shared experience and having found these people.

eight.

It’s a series of unfortunate events, one after another: Nile opening a box of recently delivered books and selling it to an excited teenaged customer who had profusely thanked her at least six times after the fact. Later that afternoon, Nile had thought nothing of it as she amplified the post from the same customer who had tagged the store in her Gen Z aesthetic bookstagram photo, noting the angles for her own future posts on the store account.

Joe’s doing the shift with her today, picking up a rare eight-hour to cover for Nicky, who’s selling at a children’s library event. Joe’s absolutely working on his PhD thesis during customer lulls, but he also lets Nile pick the music and he’s pretty good company, so Nile doesn’t mind so much as they work in companionable quiet to a soundtrack of female covers of Bleachers songs.

Andy blows in through the front door looking a little more irritated than usual. “Hey,” she says, pulling up her phone. She waves the screen at the two of them; it’s the regrammed post from earlier in the day. “Did one of you make this sale?”

”Me,” Nile says, exchanging a quick look with Joe, who just raises an eyebrow but makes no move to close his book. “Why?”

“Great,” Andy bites off. “I’m going to go call our sales rep and get chewed out for breaking embargo to sell a book three days early.”

Nile can feel the blood drain out of her face. “Oh...oh my god. Andy, I didn’t know.” When Andy doesn’t reply, Nile plugs on: “I’m so sorry. What can I do to fix this?”

“Pray that this doesn’t get our account with the publisher frozen?” Andy turns away to dial the phone. “Take fifteen, Nile. Please.”

Andy’s tone doesn’t leave room for argument, so Nile swallows her pride and nods. She grabs her phone, stuffs the tangle of headphone wires into her pocket, and heads outside to the little parkette of green space at the end of the street to metaphorically lick her wounds.

She sits down heavily on an empty bench in the weak sunshine and stuffs the earbuds into her ears. After taking a deep breath, she allows herself the indulgence of flipping to the last playlist on her phone, the one she’s saved only for when she needs it the most. The one that reminds her of life before this: the song from the year after she was born that her dad used to sing her, his do-do-do-dums octaves below the original; the remix of that Beyonce song that always had Dizzy and her joyfully screaming along with GODDAMN GODDAMN GODDAMN at the top of their lungs as they bombed down the freeway in Dizzy's rusty old used car with the windows rolled down. The song Jay and she used to play when they were lying in bed together on lazy Sunday mornings, Jay in nothing but an oversized t-shirt, face-to-face with Nile, smiling, whispering baby b-b-baby don’t blow me away before licking her way into Nile’s mouth. The song changes again and she closes her eyes. More memories. Longing for a past that’s long past.

Everything she had before this, everything she misses.

She startles out of her reverie by someone knocking gently on the back of the bench and stares for a moment before the world snaps back on its axis. She tugs out her earbuds, lets them fall into her lap.

It’s Joe, his shirt a little tight in the biceps; a lazy, friendly grin. “You good with company?”

Nile shrugs and he takes that as permission, hands her one of the paper cups in his hands—she peers into it: hot chocolate. “Aren’t you supposed to be on shift?”

“Nah,” he says, settling beside her on the bench. “Andy kicked me out on break too and closed the store for a bit. She likes to do those phone calls when no one else is around. She said she’d text us when she’s ready for us to come back.”

They sit like that for a long moment in silence.

Finally, Nile offers Joe one of the earbuds; he takes it with reverence, pausing to uncoil the knots. “You don’t do wireless?”

“I lost them and they were expensive,” Nile says. “This is all I got.”

“Guess I know what we’re getting you for your birthday,” Joe says. “What are we listening to?”

Nile shrugs.

“Full on in the bell jar, huh?” Joe teases gently.

Nile doesn’t want to laugh, but can never deny Joe anything, even his attempts at trying to cheer her up, so she says exactly what she knows he wants to hear: “I am, I am, I am.”

Joe’s grin widens, so Nile takes it as her cue to continue. “A gays only event, I guess,” she says.

He holds his hands out for a fistbump. “Oh, I never actually asked. You too? Or just a Brockhampton fan?”

When Nile stares at him in disbelief in response, and he reaches over to gently nudge her shoulder instead. “You. Know Brockhampton?”

“Nile, I’m 33, not a thousand,” Joe says blithely, carefully polishing the earbud on his sweatshirt before tucking it into his right ear.

“Sorry,” Nile says, meaning it only a little bit and stuffs her earbud back into her left side and presses play.

They sit like that in companionable silence, until the last Do you love me, love me, love me fades away into the next song.

After the intro, Joe sits up straighter. “Oh!” he says, pleased. “Chance the Rapper. I love this song! Actually, the entire album’s great!”

“Chicago for life,” Nile agrees, nodding her head, and they both keep nodding along until the song crescendos into the Juicyfruit jingle. “You know, I came out to my brother to this song.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. My brother and I went to Coloring Book World, and it was incredible, just him and me surrounded by all this music and inspiration and...love, I guess? And then this song came on, and I just felt like I...couldn’t, like, not tell him, y’know?”

Joe nods, wrapping a companionable arm around her shoulder. “That’s really wholesome. My sister and I came out to each other when we were watching Mad Max: Fury Road in my parents’ basement and realized that we were both into every single lead, without prejudice.”

Nile turns to look at him carefully to see if he’s kidding. He holds her glance, taking a serious sip from his own drink. “Seriously? Even the pasty-ass war boy?”

“Nile. Sweet, wonderful Nile. I mean this is the kindest possible way, but have you met Nicolo, the love of my life? My very own Ferdinand the Bull?”

“Who’s Ferdinand the Bull?”

“Do you not know about the picture book? About Ferdinand the Bull who was too gay to function and wanted to spend all his time smelling flowers in a field?”

“Obviously not,” Nile says, finishing the dredges of her hot chocolate.

“I’ll get Nicky to show you one day! But back on topic, turns out a pallid skin tone? Not a deal-breaker.”

“Okay. But also, wait, was it not weird for you that Furiosa totally looks like Andy?”

Joe throws his head back and laughs, his laugh so infectious that Nile can’t help but crack a grin, too. “Yes. It was very confusing for me when Nicky started working here, even more confusing when he got me a part-time gig here as well, but especially for my sister the first time she came into the store. Quynh thought it was very cute.”

Nile feels herself sobering up a little bit at the reminder of real life. “Is Andy really mad?”

“Andy’s always a little bit mad all the time about something,” Joe says like it’s not a big deal.

“But I really fucked up..”

Joe shrugs, and tugs out his earbud, handing it back to Nile. “It’s just books. No one died. And hey, it’s a learning moment for all of us, we’ll just all be more careful about communicating strict on-sale dates.”

Nile takes out her own side too, coiling and uncoiling the wire around her fingers. “Do you think I’m going to get fired?”

“No,” Joe says definitively. “She’ll probably be very Kim, there’s people that are dying about the whole thing. Half the time I wonder if she even wants to be running a bookstore anymore, you know? Anyway, we all really like working with you. In fact, you’re probably the only one everyone likes working with, these days.” His phone buzzes and he looks down, squinting at the screen. “Speaking of which, we should probably get back.”

Joe stands up and gestures for Nile to follow, leading her back to the store before she can ask him what he means.

(Andy, true to Joe’s prediction, is remarkably zen when they get back to the store and waves dismissively when they ask if everything’s sorted and proceeds to never bring it up again, but does aggressively scrawl Sharpie pink EMBARGOED, THIS MEANS YOU NILEs in her terrible handwriting all over applicable boxes, and Nile supposes this means that she’s forgiven.)

nine.

As the weeks turn into months, Nile finds herself settling more easily into a routine. Her mom told her and her brother once, when it had finally sunk in for all of them that their dad was never coming home again, that human beings have an uncanny ability to adapt to any situation, even though it might sometimes feel impossible. And she was right about it, too: like how her family figured it out all those years ago, Nile finds it easier as she figures out her job, comes to expect Merrick skulking around ineffectively every couple of weeks, and gets used to listening to Dizzy badly sing songs at her across Facetime instead of in person, and doesn’t feel as compelled to scroll through Jay’s Instagram every day, just to see how she’s doing—she’s not pining. She’s not.

As she also gets to know the interpersonal dynamics of her team, she also comes to a strange and startling realization: she’s pretty sure her coworkerss, specifically Joe and Quynh and Nicky, don’t speak with Booker. Andy certainly never shifts them together, and has even taken to giving Copley the odd shift to circumvent having any of them as just a duo with Booker in store at any given time.

Nile’s seen Joe, who’s never had a thought that didn’t come out of his mouth—reinforced by the time he had a ten minute monologue about what kind of sandwich he wanted to buy for lunch—sit next to Booker in stony silence as they both chewed morosely at their food, and she’s worked a shift once with Booker and Nicky, in which Nicky remerchandised the entire children’s section rather than make small talk at the front of the store with Booker. Quynh’s been baking more pastry experiments than ever, but never brings them in when Booker’s on shift.

She watches as Joe sneaks a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude onto Booker’s staff picks shelf. When Andy calls him out for starting shit, he insists it’s due to a lack of South American representation, which results immediately in Andy swapping out the 736 page Annie Proulx hardcover on her own shelf for a newly landed copy of Little Eyes, making sure to maintain eye contact with Joe the entire time.

(Later that evening, when she’s safe and sound in bed, Nile googles Little Eyes to avoid sending Jay a u up? text, and discovers that it’s a novel by a Chilean author about surveillance. It’s the most oddly specific flex Nile had seen in awhile and not for the first time, she decides that she fucking loves these nerds.)

“Hey, Nicky?” she asks one night, a few weeks later when she’s closing with just him. It’s been a good evening, steady, and in the lull, Nicky had given in to Nile’s cajoling and showed her a copy of Ferdinand the Bull; she had almost felt bad at how hard she had laughed over such a sweet, wholesome picture book classic.

He finishes tallying up the till, making a note of it, before looking up at Nile with a smile and his undivided attention. “Yes, Nile?”

Nile toys with how to be tactful in her line of questioning, but has come to realize that with Nicky, it’s often more appreciated to go for the most direct approach. She hopes that Booker can’t hear them, since he’s audibly stomping around upstairs where he’s still squatting. “Why don’t you like Booker? You and Joe and Quynh? I think he’s really lonely. He could use a friend.”

Nicky stares at her for a moment, in that unnerving way he sometimes does. “I cannot speak for both Joe and Quynh, but I can make a guess that they feel similarly as me, and I can definitively say that I don’t hate him.”

“You don’t?”

“I don’t,” Nicky affirms. “But I am very angry with him, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Why?” Nile can’t help but ask.

For a moment, she’s worried that she may have overstepped, but Nicky just shrugs. “Did you ever read his book?”

“What, The Old Guard? Yeah, it was fine. Why?”

“No,” Nicky says patiently. “I mean the novel, Misery Loves Company.”

“Not yet, no,” Nile says. “But I gotta say, it is weird that y’all don’t feature it more in the store, even though you have the shelf with The Old Guard, and Joe’s poetry chapbooks, and Lykon’s fight-climate-change zines.”

Nicky shrugs again, this time the ghost of an apologetic smile on his lips. “When you get the chance, read the novel. I think maybe that will help everything make more sense. Do you want to turn off the lights in the back while I finish closing up in front, and then I’ll walk you to the subway?”

Nile knows an end to a conversation when she hears one, no matter how polite. She makes her way to the back, but not before grabbing a copy of Misery Loves Company—as long as she reads it and slips it back onto the shelf without creases or stains, while she’s pretty sure Andy will notice, she probably won’t care.

ten.

Merrick’s been coming by the store more often, the essence of smugness wafting and the perpetual presence of Keane shadowing him whenever he walks in. Nile would be more perturbed by Merrick’s existence if she wasn’t so busy these days--on top of Bookshop Bookshop’s total social media rebrand, much to Andy’s chagrin, Nile’s also been assisting Quynh with her ever-growing number of community events in the bookshop space and helping out Nicky with his LGBTQIA+ Own Voices book club for youth that runs every two weeks. When she had told him she wanted to help out because she wished there had been a book club like this for her to go to when she was growing up, he had thanked her so profusely, Nile would have given the world to him in that moment had he asked.

(She’s still not completely clear on what Nicky’s backstory is. She’s pretty sure that he and Joe got together in college—when Joe had moved back out east after graduation, Nicky had followed, and she knows that Nicky doesn’t talk to his biological family who live in Italy anymore because he had once mentioned it pretty casually in conversation, but that Joe’s family has basically claimed him as one of their own. Nile likes Joe’s big, boisterous, New Jersey-obsessed family; the first time she had met Joe’s father was when he came into the store and loudly proclaimed that the store was in a lucky location because it was only a 35 minute drive from Jersey City. One look at Joe’s face had told her that he had been a hundred percent serious.)

Despite her schedule though, Nile can’t help but notice that when Merrick, trailed by Keane, saunters in, sometimes instead of Andy coming out to dismiss him, she will leave the store with him instead. Occasionally she has Copley in tow, the bookshop cat letting out a short screech of displeasure and a swish of a fluffy tail at being so cruelly left behind in the store mid-scritch by his favourite person. She’s not the only one who’s noticed, either: as the weeks go by, she notices that her coworkers also seem to be getting a little squirrellier, seemingly a little nervous about what could be happening behind the scenes at the store.

(“As least he comes in with Keane,” Quynh comments over post-work pints at their hole-in-the-wall pub on the end of the street. “He may be working for a terrible man, but at least he’s easy on the eyes.”

“Oh, thank god,” Nile says, sighing in relief. “He’s weirdly hot, right? I thought I was the only one.”

“Wow, the terrible taste you both have in men,” Joe says. “Couldn’t be me.”

“Really?” Quynh challenges him. “You don’t find him even the tiniest bit hot?”

Joe just scowls. “I bet he eats crackers like an asshole.”

Quynh waves a hand dismissively. “He’s harmless. They both are.”

Nile thinks about bringing up the weird meetings Andy seems to be having with Merrick and Keane with an ever-growing frequency, but Joe and Quynh have already moved on to a new topic—sourcing local materials to make pronoun buttons to give away to staff and customers at the store—and it feels like the moment has passed.)

eleven.

When Nile finally gets the chance to sit down and read Misery Loves Company, she does it with a generous glass of wine from the bottle she bought from the bodega down the street. She ends up accidentally finishing both the bottle and the book in one sitting, unable to look away as her eyes grow larger and larger with every page flip, fascinated over how the book isn’t as bad as Nicky had implied it would be.

Somehow, it’s worse.

help, she texts Dizzy, thankful that her phone’s predictive text is hopefully at least bringing a semblance of coherence to her drunk typing. a cis het white guy at work wrote a super boring melodramatic book and its probs about all my queer coworkers and everything is stereotypes and cliches and its kind of offensive and i think he stole parts of their actual LIVES for the book and i told of them it was weird of them not to be talking to the writer before i read the book i didnt know!!!! dIZZY AM I THE ASSHOLE.

Dizzy’s response comes in almost immediately: lololololololololololololol, followed by a K-Pop meme.

Nile’s shift the next day isn’t until the afternoon, but she’s still feeling a bit hungover by the time she walks into the store. She props herself up behind the cash and tries to fight the urge to bury her head in her arms for another nap.

When Andy emerges from the backroom with a stack of books in her arms, she takes one look at Nile and immediately cracks a grin. “Rough night?” she asks in lieu of a greeting.

“You could say that,” Nile says, deciding that there’s no use in trying to pretend she’s not hungover, not in front of Andy. She reaches into her tote bag, stashed under the desk, and pulls out the book. “I read this last night. Wow.”

Andy’s smile shifts into something resembling sympathy. She takes a look around the empty store, and deposits her armful of books on the counter. “I’m going to go get us some coffees. I guess you have questions.”

“Couldn’t we just make coffee on this fancy machine here?” Nile asks, gesturing at the machine behind the cash.

Andy’s already halfway out the door. “You think I know how to use this thing? You read the book, there has to be some reason we keep Book around.”

When Andy comes back, two extra large black coffees in hand—“Trust me, it’ll help,” she says, when she notices the face that Nile makes after her first gulp—she takes a deep breath and lays out the whole thing, stopping only when customers come in that need assistance or want to settle at the cash. It’s so unlike usual, how even though so many of her coworkers are close to each other, all their flirtations have always been afterhours; how all gossiping has mostly taken place off-site.

Andy takes a deep breath and starts from the beginning, and Nile appreciates how she seems to be doing her best to sound impartial and objective. How Booker’s short story collection, The Old Guard had been published by an independent press to rave reviews and a smattering of attention at awards season. How that had led to a two-book deal with a multi-national publisher. How, despite how much he loves his wife and kids, he was too caught up in his writing and career to be a good husband and father and due to no one’s fault but his own suddenly found himself on the outside looking in. How he had crashed on Joe and Nicky’s couch for months, frantically trying to meet his deadlines by finishing his first novel at their kitchen table.

When the book was published into the world, it had been almost universally panned for its unnecessarily convoluted plot, for its cliches, for its overwriting. The book, about two interracial queer couples in New York and the lives they led, was considered a commercial failure, and Booker had quietly moved out of Joe and Nicky’s place and into the space above the store. This was over a year and a half ago.

“It was pretty bad,” Andy says, quietly. “I don’t know what he was thinking. All that stuff about how Joe and Nicky met, that all really happened and he didn’t ask them if he could include that, I know they told him that as their friend. And all that stuff about Joe’s family. They don’t care that Joe hasn’t figured out what he wants to do in five years yet, it was shitty of him to insinuate otherwise, especially since he was so clearly writing about him.”

“How does Quynh feel about all this?” Nile wants to know.

Andy sighs. “We don’t talk about it. I know she’s angry, because what he wrote about her is shitty, too. The one time we did talk about it, I think she was upset because it feels like that’s how he sees her, you know? And there’s no getting away from that. And I think the worst part is, it’s like...she’s my wife. We’re supposed to talk about things. And I think it makes her angry that she feels like we can’t talk about this.”

“Because you sided with Booker?”

“I didn’t side with Booker,” Andy says carefully. “I’m just not angry about it, the way that the rest of them are. And they’re entitled to how they feel. I think it’s funny how much Booker seems to think about my ex-husband, because before this book, I hadn’t even thought about him in years. I think the whole situation just makes me feel really tired, because I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, and I don’t know how to fix it. And I know that a lot of this was brought on by himself, but I can’t just let him drown, and I know that Quynh and Joe and Nicky wouldn’t either, but it doesn’t seem fair to foist that on them, not when they’re the ones who are hurting too. So I keep him employed and give him a roof over his head and I hope that he’ll make better decisions.”

Nile thinks about this, about how she’s not sure if she would have taken Andy’s route, but also how they’re all just trying to do their best, even if they’re not always sure what that might be. “None of that sounds easy,” she finally says.

“Sure isn’t,” Andy agrees. “Not to silver lining this, but the bright side is that you’ll never have to read the book ever again.”

“You couldn’t pay me to,” Nile says. “I’m going to need to read at least three sci-fi novels to cleanse my palette after all that.”

“His next novel’s actually coming out in a month and a half,” Andy says. “Let’s hope it’ll be less fucked up.”

twelve.

Nile’s hangover’s mostly gone halfway into her shift, fading a little bit into the manageable discomfort of a dehydration headache instead. She’s watching Andy’s bizarre brand of customer service from across the room (her clenched teeth “thank you, but no” in response to a customer trying to recommend her a copy of The Penelopiad, and then again when she’s asked if the store will match with prices on Amazon) when Booker comes down the stairs, looking less wilted than usual, his shirt clearly recently ironed.

“Hey,” Nile says. “You look great! Where are you headed?”

Booker smiles, almost a little shy. “Dinner with my wife and kids.”

“Oh! Hey, that’s great!” Nile enthuses. “Things are good?”

“Getting there,” Booker says. “I hope. I’m trying.”

“Crying your best?” Nile asks, happy for him.

“Something like that.” Booker looks down at the counter, and his face does something complicated when he sees the copy of Misery Loves Company sitting there. “Were you reading that?”

Nile considers him for a moment. “I don’t want to bring down the mood on a big night for you—”

“—no, you’re fine,” Booker interrupts. “It’s bad, hmm?”

“I mean…” Nile trails off, unsure of how to proceed.

Booker chuckles, though not unkindly. “I lost almost all of my friends because of this book. I was in such a bad place when I was writing it, so I wanted to write about something that wasn’t shit at the time.”

“Your friends?”

“My friends,” Booker affirms. “It...kind of backfired though, I guess.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Nile says.

“I really fucked up. You know, sometimes I wish I had never written it. That I could just...take it all back?” He shrugs. “I wish I knew what I could do to fix it all.”

“You could try apologizing,” Nile jokes, trying to lighten the moment.

“They wouldn’t want to hear that, I think,” Booker tells her.

Nile can feel her jaw drop the instant she realizes that he’s not kidding. “Wait, you’re telling me you never tried apologizing? Like...you never told them you were sorry?”

Booker stares at her. “Should I have?”

“Well, are you?” Nile counters his question with a question, mystified at the sudden turn this conversation has taken.

Booker looks like the most ridiculous lightbulb has just gone off in his head. “Yes.”

“I can’t believe you right now,” Nile says incredulously. “Why are you like this?”

Andy chooses that moment to saunter back over, finally done with helping the needy customer who seems to be carefully considering the jacket copy of a small pile of books. “Book,” she says. “You’re seeing the wife and kids tonight, right?”

“Yeah,” Booker says. “You got some advice for me on how to make this right, boss?”

“Nah. You know what to do. For starters, don’t be a weird asshole. And secondly, don’t go empty handed,” Andy notes, and walks around the desk to fetch a package that she pushes over toward Booker. It’s a beautifully wrapped box of pastries and a pile of books for his three kids: a YA graphic novel, a cheerfully illustrated early reader about the perfect summer day, and a copy of a Rick Riordan book.

“Nicky said to tell you that the Riordan isn’t Own Voices, but he won a Stonewall award for its great trans representation. He picked the books out himself, you know,” Andy says, surprisingly gently. “Quynh made the pastries. And the wrapping paper was handmade by Joe.”

Andy adds a small box of ‘Sorry I’m Such an Asshole’ balloons on top of the pile with a cheeky grin. “And those are for your wife. Copley’s suggestion.”

Booker doesn’t say anything for a very long moment, blinking rapidly at the offering sitting in front him.

“Have a little faith, Book. We’re all rooting for you. So go get ‘em,” Andy says, and Nile fights the urge to say I told you so.

thirteen.

Nile thinks that Booker must have at least tried to take her advice because over the next few weeks, she sees him slowly being ingratiated into the fold of the store, giving them more freedom with shift groupings and offering a general increase in satisfaction of bookshop morale. (She’s not privy to any of the conversations, except for the time she overheard Nicky very seriously talking to Booker in the office—I know it’s hard. I know you were hurting. I know it’s not easy, but you have to tell us. Try, next time, okay? Please. I’m gay, not psychic—Nile had walked right back out quickly to give them their privacy.)

Joe, in particular, seems especially joyful at these changing tides of fortune. He’s delighted to have someone to roast books with, frantically scribbling down Booker’s suggestions of books he hates into his Burn Book.

(“Burn Book?” Nile asks, half-afraid of the answer.

“A notebook that’s a list of books I hate so I remember that I hate them,” Joe tells her. “Obviously I don’t believe in the literal burning of books, so a Burn Book will have to do.”

“And why do you make Nicky hang on to it for you?”

“Because that’s the safest place! I’ll never forget where it is!”)

Things between Booker and Quynh seem to have reached a tentative truce, too: they both still seem wary of each other, keeping a polite and safe distance. Nile doesn’t know what he’s said to her, but Quynh announces that they’ll be hosting the book launch for Booker’s upcoming novel—he can stay or he can go, but it’s happening—and the way his ears pink with pleasure is an indication that this was a pleasant surprise he hadn’t been anticipating.

Andy seems to take this all in with obvious satisfaction, stroking the wriggling bookstore cat in her arms like a supervillain; Nile thinks she could get used to this.

fourteen.

The more event planning that Quynh does in her role, the lighter and more joyful she seems: I’ve decided that I’m done worrying about what my family’s expectations are of me. I know that’s easier said than done. But this is what I want to do, and I’m good at it. So I’m going to try and remember that this is fine, she suddenly tells Nile one day, as they’re cleaning up and closing down after a book launch. Nile almost drops a folding chair on her foot in her haste to wrap her arms around Quynh in a bearhug.

Quynh’s new devotion and delight for her job also means that she’s now actively seeking more opportunities for events in the store--her new big idea: weddings, which Nile discovers when she’s immediately stopped by Quynh on her way to the office.

“Nile, you agree with me, right?” she opens without preamble, surreptitiously obstructing Nile’s path.

“About what?” she asks warily.

“Joe and Nicky should get married in the store. It would be fun and also good for publicity!”

“You!” Joe points at Nile. “Don’t agree with her!”

Nile cocks her head, considering. “It would be pretty cute though!”

“Seriously, Nile,” Joe says, wagging his finger now. “Don’t test me, I will switch your entire staff pick shelf for Orson Scott Card books, so help me.”

Nile puts up her hands in surrender, giving in.

Quynh pulls an exaggerated pouting face. “But why not?”

“Lots of reasons! Firstly,” Joe says. “My family would invite everyone they knew and there would be too many people on my side of the room and Nicky’s would be empty. That’s horrible!”

“We, your mutual friends, could sit on his side,” Quynh offers. “Problem solved.”

“No, that would make it look like I don’t have any friends,” Joe protests.

Quynh rolls her eyes. “Why do there have to be sides, anyway? Can’t everyone just sit in the middle?”

“I have friends!” Joe yells, startling the patrons in the children’s section.

“Okay, okay, you have friends,” Nile placates. “We’re your friends! Can we do this at an indoor-voice volume, please?”

“Also,” Joe continues as if he hadn’t been interrupted, but does thankfully lower his voice. “As you both know, my family loves Nicky. My beloved father, in particular. What if my own dad does a bait and switch and tries to marry my husband at my very own wedding in my place of work?! I would never live that down.”

Record scratch moment. “Wait, what?”

“What?” Joe repeats.

“Your what?” Quynh demands.

“Oh yeah, the third thing,” Joe says and looks very pleased with himself. “Nicky and I eloped last week. I win!”

“This wasn’t a competition!” Nile says, when Quynh has nothing to say in response, still shocked.

“I know,” Joe tells them smugly. “And I still won.”

(“Why are you all giving me the silent treatment and not him?” Joe whines, later, after Quynh had refused to pick him up anything from her bakery run and Andy had texted him a series of angry-looking emojis. Booker had literally laughed in his face on his way out the door to take his kids to the park. Copley had solemnly shaken Joe’s hand and offered his most sincere and buttoned up congratulations. “It takes two to elope!”

Nile squints at him. “Only one of you likes to narrate to us his entire thought process about all his Elena Ferrente conspiracy theories in great details, and that’s the same person who decided not to tell us about the life changing event that took place last week.”

Joe looks properly chastised. “I...cannot argue with that. Although I maintain that she and Banksy are probably the same person. It’s just the truth!”

Nicky’s the one who ends up texting their wedding photo to the group chat, a blurry, unflattering selfie in front of a courthouse because he still hasn’t figured out camera angles in this day and age, but they look so happy in it that Nile spends the rest of the afternoon unable to keep the grin off her face.)

fifteen.

Copley’s been taking more shifts at the store lately in addition to his capacity as their part-time accountant; Nile’s not sure if this is intentional, but she’s learned not to question the methods to Andy’s madness months ago. Besides, he seems content enough in his increased role, so who is Nile to question it? She likes Copley, his calm energy a good balm for the more eccentric personalities of her other coworkers.

“Hey Copley, how do you know Andy?” Nile asks him, interrupting the companionable silence they’ve been working in, a playlist of Coldplay’s greatest hits (Copley’s choice, which Nile had side-eyed hard) softly twinkling in the background.

He looks up from the printed-out spreadsheet in front of him—budgets again, he always seems to be working and reworking the budget these days; Nile has no idea what this means, how she could even ask—and considers the question. “Andy and I go far back, sort of by chance. My wife and I were some of her first customers when she opened her restaurant years ago. We kept in touch over the years and were friendly.”

“She used to own the restaurant, and now she owns the store? Andy’s super-rich, isn’t she? Like...one percenter? Is she The Man?!”

Bless Copley for his serious considerations to her half-kidding questions: “I would find it odd if a billionaire were running an independent bookstore literally called ‘Bookshop Bookshop’ in a small Brooklyn neighbourhood, but who can really say.”

Nile thinks this may have been Copley’s version of a joke, but she can’t be sure, so she just nods instead. “So how’d you end up working with her?”

“My wife died,” Copley says, matter-of-factly. “She was sick. It wasn’t unexpected, but it was hard. I kind of shut down for a while, quit my job, wasn’t doing much. Andy asked me to help with number crunching with the store. So I did and it was good. The work wasn’t hard or super-demanding, and I liked the people who worked here. Plus, my wife was a voracious reader, so it just felt...right. So here I still am.”

Nile’s not sure what the best answer should be to this. Settles on, “Copley, I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” he says. “It gets easier though, you know? Not better. Just easier.”

“I know.” Nile takes a deep breath, forges on: “Listen, I know it’s not the same thing, but I remember how hard it was for my family when my dad died, how sometimes I just wanted to talk about him, like proof that he was here, you know? So if you ever want to do that about your wife, I’m here for it, okay?”

“Thanks, Nile,” Copley says, sounding sincerely grateful about it. “I appreciate that and will keep that in mind.”

“Of course,” she tells him. “But also, in the meantime, if you’ve been here for so long, especially if you’re actually working in the store now, why don’t you have any staff picks yet on the shelf?”

Copley turns to look at the shelf. “Joe keeps asking me about that too. It just seems like a lot of responsibility, I don’t know what to choose. Any ideas?”

Nile doesn’t know what to recommend to someone who might love the Coldplay of books. “Maybe...something your wife loved?” she suggests tentatively instead.

Copley seems to consider this. “That’s not a bad idea at all.”

“We’ll make space for her,” Nile tells him. The smile that Copley gives her in return is a small but genuine thing.

(interlude)

Adulthood is just an annoying series of compromises, Nile thinks, full of melancholy at the fact that her best friend is 530 miles away rather than on the other side of a flimsy screen partition from Wayfair. They haven’t talked in six days, which is five and a half more than usual, due to conflicting work schedules and actual adult responsibilities, which is actual horseshit and when they finally manage to Facetime, Nile says as much.

“It’s been a really long time since you seen me, don’t know why I’m so hard to reach,” Dizzy sings at her, her smile as crooked as ever, and Nile can feel any residual frustration at the entire situation melt away.

“Because you left me to move to fucking Ohio,” Nile can’t help but point out anyway, while grinning in response.

“I’m not taking comments or criticisms at this time, Freeman,” Dizzy says.

“Sorry,” Nile says, raising up a hand. “My bad.”

“Adulthood is a scam,” Dizzy says. “I can’t believe we live in a world where you’re more than five minutes away from me at any given time.”

“You know that for as much shit I give you for going to Columbus, I’m happy for you, right? That you did something for yourself, that you thought would make you happy?” Nile pauses. “You are happy right?”

“I can’t believe this, but honestly? Yeah, I think I am.” Dizzy drops her voice down to a stage whisper. “I actually kind of love it here.”

Nile laughs. “Who would have thought? Deandra Ali, happy in Ohio.”

“Shut up, you’re making it weird,” Dizzy says.“But you’re gonna visit?”

“Obviously,” Nile agrees. “Since apparently we’re getting married. Two of my new friends from work eloped a few weeks ago. We’re going to be even cuter than them.”

“Walking down the aisle to our song,” Dizzy sing-songs. “But I like it up here so much, I might settle down—”

“—so don’t let me down,” Nile finishes the lyric for her, because she knows that will delight her, and she’s almost immediately rewarded with a squawk of glee.

“What about you? You doing okay in The City without me?”

Nile thinks about this for a moment, wants to answer honestly because Dizzy’s always seen through her, always knows the truth. ”Would you be mad if I said ‘yes’?”

“No way! I want you always to be okay, whether or not I'm there, you know that right?”

Nile does know that. It’s one of her favourite things about Dizzy. “I was thinking, though.”

“Okay?”

“I don’t know what I want to do with my life. I know that I really like my job right now, and the people I work with. I like New York okay. And while there’s people I miss, I don’t regret moving out here. But what about things I do know I want in my life, that I regret not doing? Like I don’t need a man or a woman or any person in my life like that. But—“

“—but you miss Jay,” Dizzy fills in the gap that Nile leaves in her musing.

“Yeah,” Nile says. “Does that sound stupid?”

“No,” Dizzy says. “The two of you didn’t break up because things were bad or whatever, you broke up because you thought you should. You don’t know what you want to do with your life, and that’s fine. But you know who you want in your life while you try and figure that out, right? And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“When you put it that way, it sounds so simple.”

“Because it is,” Dizzy tells her, uncharacteristically gentle.

Nile smiles. “What did I ever do to deserve you?”

“I’m the best,” Dizzy agrees.

sixteen.

“What did you want to be when you grew up?” Nile asks over brunch, because they’ve reached that point of their friendship now—brunch buddies at some overpriced hipster Brooklyn cafe on a Wednesday afternoon.

Joe laughs into his third cup of coffee; Nile’s not sure how he hasn’t already vibrated to the moon. “You know, I’ve never known? It’s why I’m still in school, I’m hoping it’ll eventually come to me.”

“Because you’re trying to figure out what you like?”

“It’s the opposite,” Joe says. “I like so many things, it’s why it’s so hard for me to focus. I think it’s always been this way for me. It’s why Andy lets me do the front window displays, I want to do it all. She knows she has to keep me busy. I’m cursed, I genuinely don’t know what I would be doing right now if we didn’t have the store.”

Nile laughs, putting down her fork. ”What would you do in an ideal world?”

“I don’t know,” Joe says. “I think I’d still want to do it all! Paint, write, edit, anything creative. Abolish late-stage capitalism. Anything, everything, I just have to keep changing it up.”

“Because your interests keep changing?”

Joe nods. “Everything but Nicky. He’s the constant, I’m always interested in him.”

Nile makes a fake barfing noise because Joe somehow always brings out her inner-child; this just makes him laugh.

“Same question, what would you do in an ideal world?” Joe asks.

“I like what I’m doing right now. But what if this isn’t what I want to be doing in five years?” Nile tells him.

Joe considers this. “Personally I think that’s just fine. You don’t have to be doing the same thing in five years. Plus, you can take the things you’re doing right now that you like and are learning and take them to the next thing while ejecting the not useful stuff out of your brain forever. It’s a win-win scenario!”

“But what if I don’t know what I want to do with my life?”

“A lot of us don’t,” Joe says. ”You’re so young, and I’m not even saying this in an infantilizing way. Like objectively. There’s lots of time to figure it out.”

“Listen, I only moved to New York because my best friend did. I broke up with a girl I really liked because it was easier than not breaking up with her. I feel like I should be growing and learning, but I’m just standing still right and I feel like that’s okay, but is it? What if I’m just getting this all wrong?!”

“We’re all getting it wrong. We're screw-ups. I'm a screw-up and I plan to be a screw-up until my late 20s, maybe even my early 30s,” Joe says, and then looks expectantly at Nile.

Nile blinks. “Is that supposed to mean something to me? Are you quoting something?”

“Nothing? Misfits? Nathan? The character who turns out to be immortal?”

“Must have been before my time,” Nile says.

“Oh wow,” Joe mutters under his breath. “Kids these days.”

“I’m, like, five years younger than you. Don’t ‘kids these days’ me,” Nile says, squinting at Joe.

“Six,” Joe replies. “That one year makes all the difference.”

“Regardless,” Nile says. “Hey, but...you know you’re not a screw-up, right? Like all that you just said applies to yourself too. I think it’s really cool that you’re figuring it all out in your own time, for what it’s worth, I respect the hell out of you.”

Joe smiles. “That actually does mean a lot, Nile. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Nile says, and lifts her coffee mug to clink it with Joe’s.

“But also,” Joe says suddenly. “We still need to backtrack for a moment. A girl, you say?”

“All of that, and this is what you hyper-focus on?”

“My heart wants what my heart wants, Nile,” Joe says. “Tell me about her.”

Nile sighs, giving in. “Her name’s Jay, short for Jordan. I really liked her, we broke up when she went to do CATS. It seemed like the right choice at the time, and now I’m not so sure.”

“You dated a cat named Jordan?” Joe says.

“No, Jay’s in CATS. She’s a dancer,” Nile says. ”And I guess I’m not as over her as I thought I was, but I’m not sure what to do about that.”

Joe considers this for a moment. “You know you deserve to be happy, right? Whatever that means or however that looks.”

“My best friend said the same thing last time we talked,” Nile says. “I know.”

“She sounds smart, your best friend,” Joe notes.

“Thanks, I have great taste in people. I’m not going to tell Dizzy that though, it’ll just inflate her ego. She already knows she’s dope.”

“Do what you must,” Joe says gravely, using the last of his toast to sop up the remainder of the Hollandaise sauce on his plate.

seventeen.

Andy’s been meeting more often with Merrick these days, to the point where Nile’s ready to make a twenty-slide Powerpoint presentation to show her all the reasons why she shouldn’t sell to his condo corporation, beginning with GENTRIFICATION BAD and ending with the fact that she really does love the terribly named Bookshop Bookshop, and sees how much their community seems to like it too.

Nile loves the carefully and lovingly curated books in the store, and she loves how they’ve turned the store into a community meeting space. She loves that this is somewhere she feels welcome and at home, and maybe others do too, and she loves that this has become a place of exchanging ideas. It’s the avalanche of words she doesn’t mean to say, but does while Andy’s trying to break down another empty box with a dulled boxcutter and laments out loud what the point of all of this even was anymore.

“I just meant this literal cardboard box,” Andy says mildly. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, god, I don't know, sorry,” Nile says, a little embarrassed. “It’s just been a day, I guess.”

Andy gives up fighting with the box for now. “It’s okay. You know, you came into our lives at a point when I was really questioning what I was doing, with the store and everything. I’m glad you love the store. I’m glad you found us. I’m glad we found you. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take this box out to the back alley and shank it. Hopefully it’s recycling day.”

“Nicky wrote it on the shared office calendar,” Nile manages to point out.

Andy shakes her head. “I told him I’m not reading that thing, I’m more of an instinct kind of gal,” she says, and then she’s off, leaving Nile in her perpetual post-Andy haze of wait what just happened?

eighteen.

“Hey,” Nile says to Nicky on a day when they both get off mid-afternoon. “Are you free right now?”

“For you? Always,” Nicky tells her. “What do you need?”

“I was wondering if I could take you out for an apology coffee.”

Nicky tilts his head to the side. “Apology for what?”

Nile sighs. “I read Misery Loves Company. And...yeah. Sorry.”

“Oh,” Nicky says. “Oh, Nile. Thank you. I am fine. No need for an apology, but I would be happy to have coffee with you!”

They end up at a coffee shop a few blocks over, definitely not the one that Joe always goes to—I love the man, but he drinks swill, Nicky says mildly—and grab seats on a bench outside, sitting side-by-side in the weak afternoon sunlight.

“I feel like that part in Magic Mike XXL, you know?” Nile says suddenly, turning to look at Nicky.

Nicky laughs. “Where he goes around fixing everyone’s lives? Yeah, Joe said you talked to him.”

“You saw Magic Mike XXL?”

“Quynh wanted to go,” Nicky says a little defensively. And after a pause, “It’s also possible I enjoyed it so much that I saw it a few more times without her.”

“Relatable. So?”

Nicky takes a sip of his hot drink. Shrugs. “There’s nothing to fix. I have a good life. I have a job I like, and friends I like, and I live with my favourite person. We have a cat. We’re thinking about getting a dog. It’s good.”

Nile grins. “That’s awesome. So your life is pretty much perfect, huh?”

“Nothing’s perfect,” Nicky says. “You read Booker’s novel, right?”

“Yeah. Pretty fucked up.”

Nicky pauses. “Well, the thing is. He wasn’t wrong. About me, at least.”

“What do you mean?” Nile wants to know, furrowing her brow. The book hadn’t been kind to any of them, but the depiction of the xenophobic internalized homophobia of the Nicky stand-in had been particularly troubling to read about.

He shrugs. “When Joe and I first met, I’m not proud of the person I was back then. You wouldn’t have liked me. I didn’t like me. It’s a wonder that Joe and I ended up together,” he says. “And of course we had told all of this to Booker in confidence of friendship, which was upsetting to read on the page after the fact, but he wasn’t wrong.”

Nile thinks about this, digesting. “You said you were angry.”

“I was,” Nicky agrees. “On Joe’s behalf. Of course he doesn’t need me to be angry for him. But besides how Joe’s depicted in the book, to be reminded of how things were, it’s difficult not to be hurt on his behalf to see it exposed like that. It’s a wonder that things worked out the way they did at all.”

“I don’t think Joe sees it that way,” Nile says. “He loves you.”

“He does,” Nicky agrees, smiling. “And I work very hard to be a man who deserves that.”

“Ugh, you’re both so gross,” Nile tells him.

Nicky just laughs. “What about you, Nile?”

“What about me?” she asks.

“I’m sorry you got dragged into our work conflict,” Nicky tells her. “It wasn’t our intention, but it also wasn’t fair that you got dragged into the crossfire.”

“It’s okay,” Nile says.

“I don’t want to devalue how you feel, but it’s also not your job to fix all our problems,” Nicky says thoughtfully. “Nile, do you know the book Sidewalk Flowers?”

“No. What’s it about?”

“It’s a wordless picture book,” Nicky says. “It's about a little girl who goes for a walk while picking flowers that she sees growing in the cracks on the sidewalk. Halfway through the book, she starts giving them away, to a dog, to a homeless man, to her mom and siblings.”

“Okay,” Nile says. “And?”

“And at the end of the book, she keeps the last flower for herself before walking back out into the world,” Nicky says, and then pauses meaningfully to look at Nile.

Nile stares at him for a long moment before breaking out into a wide smile, her heart full of affection for this earnest man sitting beside her. “Why are you like this?”

“I’m just saying, Nile,” Nicky says, a fond smile on his own face as well. “Make sure to save some of that care you give to all of us for yourself too, okay?”

They finish their coffees that afternoon in a contented, companionable silence.

nineteen.

When Andy schedules an all-staff meeting on Halloween at 10 AM with a note on the door saying the shop would be open late that day, because she clearly doesn’t give any fucks about anything, Nile’s feeling more than a little anxious about what the news could be and decides to show up in a costume to at least bring a little levity to the situation. She decides on a Starr Carter getup from The Hate U Give, red hoodie and kicks and all. When she saunters into the store, Nicky immediately lights up and beelines over for a high five.

It seems that Nile was’t the only one with that thought: Joe and Nicky are in matching tweed jackets (“We’re Frog and Toad!” Joe exclaims—Nile’s not sure if they had obtained the jackets explicitly for the day or if they’d previously owned matching tweed jackets; she’s learned not to ask when it comes to the two of them), and Copley shows up in a Where the Wild Things Are t-shirt, perching a tiny paper crown on the floofy store cat’s head, which stays on for approximately five point four seconds before he runs away, complaining about the indignity of it all.

“What are you supposed to be?” Nile asks Booker, who stumbles in from upstairs, looking like he has just woken up.

“Disillusioned writer, one week before book launch,” Booker replies around a yawn.

The boos from both Nicky and Joe are loud and audible. “I would have respected you more if you had showed up as a literal book,” Joe points out.

Even Andy seems to have gotten into the spirit of things, in a poofy white dress that seems to match her wife’s red version. “And um. You are…” Nile says, racking her brain. “Mrs Havisham in Great Expectations?”

Andy squints at her. “Just how old do you think I am, Nile? Tread carefully.”

Nile’s unintentional meep sound is thankfully overshadowed by Joe’s perpetual lack of self-preservation: “Charles Dickens’ metatext says that she was scarcely forty!”

Copley steps in smoothly before the situation can escalate further: “Are the two of you the two versions of Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ music video?”

Quynh looks delighted, making some vague sweeping gestures with her arms and spins around a few times. “Is this the most genius couples book-adjacent costume of all time or what?”

Joe looks mystified. “How did you get that right away?”

“I’m British,” Copley says. “You have no idea how many times I’ve heard that song.”

“Anyway,” Andy says, her tone flat and unreadable as always. “Can we start the meeting? There’s going to be some changes around here, kind of significant changes. And I think they’ll affect all of you who’ll be sticking around.”

That gets the attention of everyone in the room, as a sudden silence settling over them all. When no one says anything, not even Andy, Nile finds herself speaking up, her voice small: “Are you selling the store to Merrick?”

“What?” Andy says, and she seems genuinely shocked. “Oh my god, no. Why would you think that?”

Joe and Nicky stare back at Andy with the same incredulity on their faces that Nile knows is currently on her own. “Why wouldn’t we think that?” Nicky asks.

“But we’re doing the opposite of selling to Merrick,” Andy says, still seeming surprised.

Nile finds Booker hard to read sometimes, but even he seems surprised by this news. “Boss, I think you’re going to have to work on your news delivery a little bit.”

“I’m not selling to that weasel, are you kidding me?” Andy says, indignant now.

“Then why have you been meeting with him so often?” Nile wants to know.

“Oh,” Andy says, as if it were obvious. “He keeps taking us out to lunch to try and impress me into selling to him. Who am I to say no to free food?”

Nile looks over at Copley, who at least has the decency to look a little guilty. “What about our whole talk about you not being sure about what you were doing? I thought you didn’t want to keep the store anymore!”

Andy looks a little horrified at that. “I am genuinely sorry if you were worried about your job! In my defence, I’m not good with words! I’m a reader, not a writer or talker!”

“So what’s the plan then?” Nicky speaks up, seemingly the first one to be able to digest the new information, Joe still looking like the Pikachu surprised face meme beside him.

“I want to expand,” Andy says. “I want us to start a small press, upstairs. It’s been a privilege to grow with all of you, such a weird and creative group of people. I want to work with all of you for as long as we can, and I know that we can’t do that if we stay stagnant. And besides, what better way to stick it to the condo bros than stay where we are but...with more potential?”

“Isn’t that risky?” Joe finally speaks up, uncharacteristically cautious.

“Do you want to try editing? Acquiring? Putting things out in the world?” Andy counters.

“Well, yeah, I do,” Joe says. “But how are we going to do that?”

Andy gives a rueful shrug. “I mean, we’re still some time away from having everything laid out. But Copley’s been working on the numbers, and we think we can make this work.”

(Nile catches Copley’s eye at that—One percenter, she mouths. Copley turns away, looking like he’s trying not to laugh.)

“And you’re right,” Andy continues. “There is a degree of risk to this. Think of it this way, though, no business lives forever. Like eventually everything dies, right? But we’re here right now. That has to count for something. And that’s not so bad.”

“You may also want to consider working on your pep talks,” Booker says. “But I’m in.”

“I love a plan that’s rooted in spite,” Joe announces. Beside him, Nicky nods. “We’re in.”

“Me too,” Nile says. “This sounds like it could be really cool. And I kind of like that it’ll piss off Merrick, too.”

“Good,” Andy says, a note of something in her voice that Nile hasn’t heard before--she thinks it might be...genuine delight? “Though, Book, I think you’re eventually going to have to find a new place to stay.”

“Way ahead of you,” Booker tells her, and the meeting ends with an overlapping chorus of congratulations for him.

(“So you knew all along?” Nile asks Quynh, nudging her halfway through their shift.

“Well, part of it,” Quynh admits. ”I didn’t know until last week about the publishing house part, but I wasn’t kidding when I said that Andy wasn’t going to sell to him. I wouldn’t lie to you! Her spite-motivated life plans are like sixty percent of the reason why I married her. The other fifty is her excessive love for pastoral Westerns and the fact that she’ll eat spicy food with me.”

“That’s more than a hundred percent,” Nile points out as Joe comes to lean on the desk, listening in on their conversation.

“I’m gay, I don’t have to be good at math.”

Nile squints. “Why do people keep saying that to me?”

“Nicky’s very good at math,” Joe offers.)

twenty.

It’s the night of Booker’s book launch, ten minutes to showtime, and Nile should be mingling with the modest crowd that’s begun to gather, but instead, she’s standing in the middle of the store, blinking once, twice, thrice, at the beautiful, smiling woman standing in front of her.

Jay.

“I thought you were still on tour,” Nile says, and then mentally kicks herself for such a greeting.

Jay doesn’t seem to mind. “We got back last week. It’s good to be home.”

Nile has so many questions, so many things to say, but what comes out instead is: “How did you know I was going to be here?”

“I got six separate emails telling me to come to this launch at the place you worked,” Jay says. “I didn’t even know you were working here, it’s nice. But actually only one person gave me the address.”

“Yeah, that tracks,” Nile says, her heart beating wildly. “Who sent it to you?”

“Your friend, uh, James?”

The cat? Nile wonders, but that seems relatively unimportant right now. Instead, she asks, “Do you wanna...go somewhere and talk?”

“Yeah, I really do,” Jay says. Her smile goes soft; she looks amazing, even better than Nile remembers, and Nile can feel her knees go weak.

“Okay, well. Uh. Just let me go...tell my...coworkers?”

When Jay nods, Nile turns around to make her way over to the shelves where her coworkers, her friends, are doing a terrible job of pretending they’re not eavesdropping. “I gotta go see about a girl. Sorry Booker, I think I have to dip on your launch. Break a leg?”

Booker looks not at all disappointed, if the shit-eating grin on his face is any indication of how he’s feeling.

“Is that Jorrrrrrdan?” Joe sing-songs, because though he’s a grown-ass man, sometimes Nile forgets that he has the emotional maturity of a nine year old.

“Jay, yeah,” Nile says, and can feel herself blushing.

Quynh peers around Nile, not even a little bit discreetly. “She’s cute!”

“Follow your heart,” Booker adds in a deadpan.

Nile wants to tell them all off, but decides there’s currently more pressing things at hand: “Also, who sent an email to Jay as the cat?”

Andy furrows her brow. “The cat?”

“Yeah,” Nile says. “Jay said she got emails from everyone but only one had an actual location and it was the store address. She said it was sent from a James?”

Copley clears his throat. “Surely, you know that I have a first name?”

“I mean...I do now,” Nile says, fortunately over-ridden by Quynh’s incredulous cry of “Your name’s James?!”

Joe looks positively betrayed. “If your name's James, then who's the cat?”

“Macavity,” Copley says firmly. “Obviously.”

“Obviously,” Booker parrots with sarcasm, and that sets the rest of them off into the logistics of naming cats, and Nile takes this as her cue to mock-salute and take her leave.

“Nile, wait!” Nile hears Nicky say loudly behind her, and she turns to watch him pluck a flower from one of the bouquets that he had bought and tucks it behind her ear with a grin. She throws her arms over his shoulders and squeezes him tight.

And then, when he lets her go, she takes Jay’s hand; allows herself to be pulled through the door by Jay and led outside into the world.

[end]