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The streets were quiet except for the sound of the rain. Caitlyn hurried down the block, crouched under her umbrella and trying not to slip on the wet pavement in her heeled boots. She wasn’t sure why these were the first shoes she thought to slip on when she left her apartment in a rush twenty minutes ago. She’d barely even remembered to grab her umbrella, so perhaps she hadn’t been in the best mindset to remember to put on something more waterproof or at least grippy.
Most of the shops along the street were dim, closed for the night. As Caitlyn approached the store she was looking for, the lights didn’t seem much brighter, and for a moment, her heart sank, fearing she’d missed their closing time. The bare-bones website had said they closed at 10 pm, which was already odd for a used bookstore, but Caitlyn had chosen to trust it. But if she’d come all this way tonight only for it to be closed…
The shop had what looked like a handmade sign in the window with the shop name: The Last Page. To Caitlyn’s relief, an OPEN sign hung on the door and she could see light peeking through behind the sign in the one solitary window. She folded her umbrella closed and pushed into the shop.
A bell jingled as the door shut behind her. She moved to shake out her umbrella but realized there wasn’t an entry mat. And there were books stacked on the floor next to the doorway.
“There’s a basket on the side,” came a lazy voice from somewhere behind a shelf. “You can leave your umbrella there.”
“Oh. Thank you.” Caitlyn found the white basket to her left and placed her wet umbrella inside it, next to the only other umbrella in there. A red polka-dot one that looked rather cheery next to Caitlyn’s plain blue one.
She took a moment to take in the store. There was a certain vibe to expect from a used bookstore, she knew that much: stuffed shelves, books arranged in no particular order, the warm smell of old pages. But this store looked rather like a truck carrying books had tipped over and spilled its contents into the room and no one had bothered to try to clean it up. The shelves were stuffed, yes, but not just squeezed in together—the shelves that Caitlyn could see had books stacked horizontally over others standing upright. Some hung slightly off their shelves as if someone had pulled them out to check the blurb on the back and then never pushed them back in.
And then the piles .
Piles and piles of books, stacked on the floor, in front of shelves, against the wall. There was a worn sofa off to the side, tucked between two overfull shelves, yet one would be hard-pressed to actually find a spot to sit on it because of the piles of books spread across it.
Caitlyn cleared her throat and stepped carefully around the shelf nearest the door to find the checkout desk. An employee sat behind it, their head bent over their phone.
“Excuse me,” said Caitlyn. “I wonder if you could help me find something.”
The person hummed. “I can’t guarantee I’ll be much help, but I might be able to—”
Caitlyn froze when the bookseller lifted her head. The bookseller also froze.
If Caitlyn had been paying attention before, she’d have recognized that hair. How many other people in the world could have that exact shade of deep pink? In fact, she should have recognized the voice when she first came in. How could she have ever forgotten what that voice sounded like?
“Vi,” Caitlyn said. She almost said Violet , but she didn’t think she had the privilege of using that full name anymore, so she cut herself off.
Vi’s eyebrows furrowed. “What are you doing here?” Caitlyn tried not to stare at the scar on Vi’s top lip, tried not to remember how that felt beneath her own mouth, on her tongue. “Thought you were still at Piltover University.”
“I was.” Caitlyn nodded. “I mean—I am. You work here?”
Vi gestured at the desk with a hand, wordlessly giving her answer. “It’s my dad’s place.”
Caitlyn waited for more explanation, but Vi provided none.
“Oh,” Caitlyn said after an awkwardly long silence.
“So what are you looking for?” Vi asked, all business. She rested her elbows on the counter.
Caitlyn’s gaze instinctively went straight to Vi’s shoulders. So broad. Her arms—Vi wore a short-sleeved shirt, and beneath the hem of the sleeves her strong biceps swelled. A quick flash of memories left Caitlyn breathless for a moment. Those arms on either side of her head as Vi held herself up over her. Caitlyn’s fingers curling into those arms as Vi pressed her against a wall. Kissing those shoulders fresh out of the shower, tracing the tattoos along her shoulders and back—
“Uh,” said Caitlyn, hoping her thoughts didn’t show on her face. “I’m looking for the fourth edition of the Twin Cities Historical Guidebook.”
Vi quirked an eyebrow—the one with the scar. “The fourth edition?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You came to a used bookstore in Zaun at 9:30 at night to look for a thirty-year-old book?”
Surprised, Caitlyn asked, “You know the editions of this book?”
“My dad runs a used bookstore,” Vi said with a shrug. “You pick up random information like that.” Briefly, so briefly Caitlyn wasn’t even sure if she saw correctly, but Vi’s gaze scanned over Caitlyn and her eyes seemed to soften. “What do you need such an old edition for?”
“It’s for a class I’m teaching,” Caitlyn explained. “In the syllabus I had a link to an online version, but it seems the publisher took it down. So I want to make scans of the chapters my students need.”
Vi blinked, and Caitlyn wondered if she’d overexplained.
“Well.” Vi sighed. “I can’t say for sure we’ll have it. But I could show you where the local history books might be.”
Caitlyn gave a relieved sigh. “Oh wonderful. I was wondering how this shop is organized.”
“Oh, it’s not,” Vi said with a short laugh. “It’s chaos. But I can tell you where those books usually tend to be.”
Caitlyn checked her smart watch, frowning. “You close in twenty minutes. Will that give me enough time to browse, do you think?”
“Hmm,” said Vi, which sounded like neither a yes nor a no. She reached beneath the counter and produced a small handheld lantern. “Look in the third aisle from the left side of the store and sort of towards the back. You’ll want to take this with you. The lighting in here isn’t great and it gets darker the deeper you go.”
That sounded rather ominous, but Caitlyn didn’t mention this. She took the lantern from Vi, said, “Thank you,” and embarked on her trek through the bookshop.
The shop was far, far larger than it looked from the front. When Caitlyn finally found what she assumed was the third aisle from the left (“aisle” seemed like a rather generous word for the arrangement of shelves, so she just hoped for the best) she wasn’t quite sure how far she needed to go to get to the middle. As Vi had said, the store was darker back here, lit mostly with a few single bulbs here and there. Between that and the lantern Vi had given her, Caitlyn couldn’t see very far ahead of her anyway.
She scanned the shelves as she went. There were plenty of interesting titles. Nonfiction that snagged her attention, like Early Airships and Forensics from the 16th to the 18th Century , but that would have to wait. She was on a mission and short on time.
But the shop felt odd. Not just empty, but like it was just in the middle of something. Like the shop existed outside of everything else. Neither this place or that place. There was just outside, where Caitlyn had just come in from, and then this shop.
Caitlyn reached a break in the shelves, a spot that looked like an aisle that ran perpendicular to the one that she was in. But just as she stepped forward, someone else came around the corner.
Caitlyn yelped.
“Sorry,” said Vi.
Trying to compose herself, Caitlyn straightened, but in taking a step back to readjust herself, she tripped.
Vi caught her with one strong hand around Caitlyn’s bicep.
“You okay?” she asked in that warm, sweet, husky voice.
Caitlyn blinked, hoping she didn’t look as flustered as she felt.
“Yes,” Caitlyn said.
“These piles are everywhere.” Vi knocked her shoe against the pile Caitlyn had tripped over. “I basically grew up in this store and still can’t get around without knocking things over.”
“Why do you keep all of them?” Caitlyn asked without thinking. “Can’t you donate overstock, or stop accepting books for a while?”
“That would be a question for my dad.” Something passed over Vi’s face. “Anyway. I forgot that we keep a lot of older textbooks and things in the basement, so maybe your thing could be down there. Come on.”
If it were anyone else asking Caitlyn to follow them into the basement of a dark bookstore late at night, she’d have politely declined and escaped the place as quickly as possible. But this was Vi, and Vi had once been Caitlyn’s everything. So she followed her.
A short trip through the maze brought them to a staircase. Caitlyn followed Vi down into a cellar that was far smaller than the rest of the shop upstairs, but slightly better lit. Vi turned off her lantern. Caitlyn followed suit.
“Older books that might be kind of important, my dad keeps down here,” Vi explained. She stepped around an armchair with a sunken cushion and fingered the books on the shelf beside it. “A history guidebook of Piltover and Zaun sounds like something he’d consider important.”
“Right,” Caitlyn agreed.
She knew she should be searching the shelves herself, but she could not stop looking at Vi. Her side profile. That nose with a bump on the bridge, an injury Vi said she got during her stint in juvie. Her long—impossibly long—eyelashes. The freckles dusted across the top of her cheeks and across her nose—the freckles Caitlyn had loved to kiss. Especially the one just on the bridge of her nose. A piece of Vi’s back tattoos snuck up onto her neck from beneath her T-shirt.
“Fourth edition, you say?” Vi asked.
“Uh.” Caitlyn’s voice cracked. Vi was looking at her. “Uh, yes. Do you see it?”
She walked closer to peer over Vi’s shoulder, but Vi was still facing her instead of the shelf.
“Why are you looking like that?” Vi asked, her voice suddenly quiet.
“Like what?”
“You’re just… looking at me. Like you’re waiting for something.”
Vi was so, so handsome. Her gray eyes were so beautiful and so warm. Those same eyes had looked at her fondly across tables at the library during late night study sessions, had greeted her first thing in the morning.
“I wish I hadn’t left you.” The words tumbled out of Caitlyn’s mouth before she even realized that was what she was thinking.
Vi’s expression was something in between sad and hopeful, and it made Caitlyn’s heart ache.
“Then why did you?” she asked.
“I don’t know, I—” Caitlyn struggled for words. “I was scared?”
Vi said nothing.
“Anyway, I…” Caitlyn turned away, ashamed that she’d revealed her own feelings like this. She was just here for a book. “I had no idea your dad owns a bookshop.”
Shrugging, Vi said, “There’s a lot you didn’t know about me.”
Their eyes locked. The book forgotten.
“Well, I’d like to know,” said Caitlyn. “Tell me everything.”