Chapter Text
It was a nice day.
All the days had been nice. It had been rather more than a week since Anthony had moved to Soho, and he was beginning to think it was just what he needed. It wasn’t a big, bustling city, it wasn’t what he was used to, but it was what he needed.
Things had been difficult since the publishing of his first book. He had lost inspiration, lost his muse—and it was difficult to write about the stars in a city where they were dim and muted.
They weren’t like how he remembered them. They weren’t the same stars that pushed him to keep writing even when he was running off of four hours of sleep, or when he was stuck on an explanation that just didn’t transfer well into text, or when his first draft was deleted and he had to start everything over. They weren’t enough for him. The city, somehow, wasn’t enough for him.
Satan knows how Anathema could tell. She was the one who had dragged him out here in the first place, uprooting their lives when she claimed they all needed a ‘change of scenery’ out of the blue—and that since she was his editor, she certainly knew best. Anthony, desperately looking for an excuse to get away, immediately agreed. He needed a fresh start.
So they’d packed their things; Anthony, anything in his house that he could get his hands on in the limited time they had to prepare for the move, and Anathema, all of her thick books, strange family heirlooms, and Newt, her confused puppy of a boyfriend.
Anthony’s fresh start had begun just yesterday, when he had wandered into an unassuming bookshop just a ways away from his new flat.
He’d barely made an effort to unpack or really get acquainted with the neighborhood at all, and he was starting to get fidgety. All he really wanted, and the main reason he wholeheartedly agreed to abandon the home he’d grown familiar with was so that he could regain his motivation — he needed something, anything to be his catalyst. Rapid change, and rapid results; it echoed like a mantra in his mind, and he knew it didn’t solely refer to his writing.
When Anthony found himself mechanically typing ‘bookshop’ into his GPS like a man possessed, he paused. To call Anthony a reader would be a lie. He had never even read his own book, but he had imagined that it was similar to certain actors who alleged that they had never watched the shows they had starred in.
The fact was, Anthony and books never agreed with each other. He would certainly call himself a visual learner; his first book had nearly comprised of more graphics than words before Anathema had driven him to change it.
But this was meant to be his fresh start, wasn’t it? Maybe he could be the type of person who liked books, and small towns, and change. Maybe he could be the type of person who found comfort in it.
So Anthony decided then and there that he would venture to the bookshop. Hell, he might even buy a book.
What Anthony didn’t expect was that he would meet someone there, at the bookshop. Someone with gorgeous blue eyes, a charming demeanor, and an air of familiarity that Anthony just couldn’t quite place. Anthony could have believed he had run into him once before, if he hadn’t just moved here.
So he walked up to the man with a practiced ease of someone who was used to acting like he belonged in whatever space he’d managed to show up at, and gave him a vague description of the type of book he was looking for.
(If it was really just an excuse to talk to the man, he’d deny it and claim that it was due to the fact that he wouldn’t know the first thing about searching for books. It wasn’t technically a lie, after all.)
And if Anthony felt a twinge of disappointment when his own book was offered to him at half price by the refined bookseller, he tried not to let it show. Besides, it was forgotten as soon as the man had pulled out another book, one Anthony had been eyeing for some time.
He was delighted at the find, and the bookseller seemed to be, too; his face lit up, just as Anthony had feared—it made it much more difficult to avoid the fact that the man really was gorgeous. He looks like an angel, his mind supplied, a fleeting thought that Anthony tried his hardest to ignore. But he couldn’t, not as the man explained that the reason for his enthusiasm was simply because he had a book Anthony wanted, not when he said it so sincerely.
So the presumptuous thought continued to rattle around in his head; as the man handed him the book, as Anthony exited the bookshop, and especially when the bookseller asked him for his signature, and his number. When he’d asked him out.
“I’ll wait for you,” He had said, smiling widely. I would wait an eternity if I had to, his brain offered, but he didn’t voice it; it was simply another passing thought he could blame on giddiness. He didn’t know what it meant, or how important it would be. How could he?
There was no denying Anthony was being provided the fresh start he so desperately craved, even if that meant the beginning of something that he could never come back from.