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Anthony Crowley wasn’t quite sure what drove him to this little bookshop, but he was really glad he’d stopped.
The day had been horrible, at first. His stepmum was sick again, and those days visiting were always rough. He enjoyed seeing Bee, but their husband Gabriel was there, naturally, and he wasn’t always the most pleasant to be around.
He needed a distraction, something he could bury himself in— if he could find something new to pad his office’s shelves, that might allow him some sort of peaceful evening— so he entered the shop and asked after anything they could have on astrophysics. Finding the second edition of Eddington’s book on relativity already thrilled him, but oh this gorgeous man that helped him… Anthony wanted to take him to dinner, learn more about this pretty man who’s so happy and flustered, but a bit of anxiety holds him back from asking, replacing the question he really wants to ask with “Well, thank you,” and a bright smile.
He set off again, he had parked a ways away—
“Oi! I mean— excuse me! Stop!”
The bookseller had followed him— oh, that was his own book, he really shouldn’t have mentioned that he’d written it.
The man— Asa Fell, apparently— kept talking, though.
“I need you to write down your number too, for me…. so I can ask you to dinner.”
Oh, Asa was so flustered and Anthony wanted this so badly. “I’ll wait for you. Where are we having dinner?”
Anthony learned a lot about Asa that night— that he favors red wine, that he uses words like “scrumptious” and “squiffy,” that he was a teacher who came to Soho two years ago. Anthony also learned that he wanted to see that smile every day for the rest of his life.