Everybody left the bookshop that night hooting with laughter at the fact Trixie had yet another new boyfriend.
“I wonder how long this one will last,” Bella said.
“I wonder how young he is,” Missy replied.
“Come on, you two,” Dot said, ushering the women out of the door. “Leave Trixie alone.” And with a flurry of goodbyes they were gone.
“You go up, Mum,” I said as I locked the door behind them. “I’ll finish off down here.”
“Are you sure?” she asked, and I noticed the flash of worry across her brow.
I smiled. “I’m fine, Mum, really.” I was fine, wasn’t I? At least a lot closer to fine than I’d been in a long time. I wanted my mother to stop worrying about me; I wanted to stop hearing the note of concern in my father’s voice every time he called. I knew why they worried. I knew what a mess I’d been after Joe died, and Mum and I had always been close, so she was bound to be concerned. But recently their concern had started to make me feel claustrophobic and I’d taken that as a good sign, another step forward, as though I was managing to finally get away from the cotton wool haze of grief I’d been living in for so long.
I listened to my mother’s footsteps on the stairs as she made her way up to the flat above the shop and I sat down for a minute under the lights of the Christmas tree and thought about how much my life had changed in the last three years. I still missed Joe so much and there were times when feelings of guilt and emptiness still completely overtook me, but the times when I didn’t think about him, when I didn’t feel empty and alone, were starting to be more frequent.
When Mum suggested I come back to York for a while I’d been concerned that the memories here would be as bad as the ones in London, but they were different, more distant somehow, less immediate – and I found myself able to remember the time I’d spent with Joe in York in a more gentle way, a way that didn’t feel like a punch in the stomach every time I woke up.
Besides, Taylor’s Bookshop had needed me, or at the very least it had needed me to give it some TLC.
“I don’t know what happened,” Mum had said when I’d been back a few weeks and had started examining the state of the bookshop, and – more importantly – the bookshop’s accounts, in more detail. “I knew something needed doing but time just got away from me somehow.”
But I’d known it wasn’t time that was the problem. When Dad had left for his ‘bigger life’ in London, not only had he abandoned his wife and daughter but the bookshop he’d inherited from his parents as well. Mum had never had very much to do with the bookshop when I was growing up – she’d spent her days in her writing room, so when Dad left she didn’t have any idea what to do to keep the business running and a roof over our heads.
I’d been working part-time in the shop since I was a teenager so I was able to help Mum out, and between me and Fred Bishop – Dad’s friend who’d worked in the bookshop for years – we were able to keep things ticking over. When it had come to choosing a university, I’d chosen York so that I could be nearby and continue to help out at the weekends. But when Joe and I had moved to London, even though Mum and I had spoken on the phone several times a week, I’d stopped thinking about the bookshop every day for the first time in my life and I hadn’t really realised how much it had been spiralling downhill.
The first thing I’d decided to do when I returned from London was to spruce the whole place up. I had money in the bank from the sale of our flat and, despite Mum’s protests, I’d used a little of it to give the shop a thorough makeover. I’d polished the wooden floors and painted the walls white. I’d painted the wooden counters and bookshelves sage green with teal accents and added a little reading nook with a couple of comfy chairs so that shoppers could sit down and browse through books. I’d had the outside of the building repainted as well, in similar colours, and had the logo redesigned by a local artist.
The bookshop stood in a row of shops on one of York’s pedestrianised streets near the Minster and had lots of passing trade, but the nicer the shop looked from the outside, the more customers we’d attract. Then I’d moved the dusty second-hand books, which had always seemed to take over the whole shop, into a section of their own, and divided the rest of the shop into more sections – classics, crime, non-fiction, horror, sci-fi, fantasy and, my favourite and most well looked-after and thoroughly dusted section, romance.
Once all that was done, I’d realised just how big the bookshop was. It had become so overcrowded with old books and too-big bookcases that I’d forgotten that we had the space to host bookish events and I became determined to turn the shop into a community space as well – hence the book club and the author launch parties, the latter of which were usually held in a section towards the back of the shop and set up in whatever way the author in question saw fit.
And then I’d set about finding a bookkeeper.
“We need a decent ordering and stock-taking system as well,” I’d said when Missy-short-for-Artemis had come for her interview. “I’ll be ordering a lot of new stock over the next few months and I need to make sure it’s catalogued properly.”
“No problem,” she’d replied, outlining different systems that we could use. “It’s one of my favourite things to do.” She’d grinned, and then she’d perused the romance section, introduced me to sports romances after we’d had a short but passionate discussion about whether or not Persuasion was a better book than Pride and Prejudice, and a friendship was born.
The shop was unrecognisable now to what it had been when I’d first moved back to York from London. As I looked around it, the Christmas lights twinkling, a sense of warmth and pride started to fill the empty hole I felt whenever I thought of Joe. My life would never be what it was and, despite what the ladies of the Die-Hard Romantics Book Club might think, I knew I was never going to meet anyone like him again, but I had the next best things. Friendship and books.
A loud and angry banging on the bookshop door interrupted my thoughts and I stood up to see who was outside at this time of night. It was very dark in the doorway of the shop and it took me a moment to recognise the shadowy figure on the doorstep. All my seasonal goodwill dissolved as my hackles rose again at the very sight of him.
“What on earth do you want?” I asked as I pulled the door open to the man from the supermarket.
“Megan Taylor,” he snapped, without greeting or explanation.
“Yes, that’s me.”
A startled look passed over his face, as though he’d just realised who I was. “You’re Megan Taylor?” he asked, trying to regain his composure.
“Yes and the bookshop closed hours ago so unless this is some sort of life-or-death emergency then can I ask you to come back tomorrow please?”
“But I want to see the inside of the shop,” the man said calmly, as though a stranger trying to get into a shop at nearly 10 p.m. was perfectly normal.
“Why?” I asked. I should have shut the door in his face but curiosity was offsetting my anger a little. “Who are you? And why do you keep bothering me wherever I go?”
“I’m Xander Stone,” the man said.
I felt my stomach drop as I looked away from him. Of course you are, I thought.
*
“You’ll have to excuse the mess,” I said as Xander stepped through the door, although quite why I felt I needed to justify the state of my bookshop to the rudest man on earth I didn’t know. “We have a book club meeting here on Thursday nights.” I’d decided not to turn him away – after all, I did still want him to launch his book at Taylor’s and I had promised Philomena he could come by any time. I had expected it to be during opening hours though.
Xander glanced at the empty champagne glasses and shrugged, his hands thrust deep into his coat pockets, before beginning to circumnavigate the shop floor. I watched him, not really knowing what to say. I presumed this was what Philomena Bloom had meant about him wanting to get the ‘lay of the land’.
“It’s very cluttered in here,” he said after a while. “Can we move that?” He waved his hand irritably at the Christmas tree before thrusting it back into his coat pocket.
“No,” I said. “As I explained to Ms Bloom when she first booked the venue, it’s the month before Christmas, it’s our busiest time of year and the shop will be Christmas focused. She said you wouldn’t mind.”
“Did she?” Xander replied, his back to me as he looked at the bookshelves. “You certainly seem to sell a lot of romance novels.” He said the words ‘romance novels’ in the same sort of tone that one would say ‘cat sick’.
Xander Stone he might be, but he was still the rudest man I’d ever met and I felt myself jumping to the defence of my beloved romance novels.
“Romance is one of the most popular and top-selling genres,” I said, trying not to sound quite as rude as him. The truth was the bookshop had barely been breaking even this year and I was desperate to turn things around this Christmas. If I was rude to Xander Stone he could just walk away and never come back and I needed his book launch to get people through the doors and buying books if we were to have even the slightest chance of surviving.
“Oh I’ve heard it all before,” Xander said irritably. He was standing so close to me that I had to tilt my head back to look him in the eye and my heart did a strange flutter in my chest. He really was very good-looking. I’d noticed that much in the supermarket – the way his dark hair fell across his forehead, those big brown eyes. He was, in fact, even better looking in the flesh than the author headshot on the back of his books suggested and I was surprised I hadn’t recognised who he was earlier. I suppose I hadn’t been expecting to see Xander Stone in a supermarket.
“Heard what before?” I asked.
“How romance keeps the industry going so that publishers can take a chance on people like me. But it’s just so…” He paused, waving that impatient hand at the shelves as though he was searching for the right word. “Formulaic!” he went on triumphantly. “Boy meets girl, girl either despises boy or finds a ridiculous reason for them not to be together, but they get together anyway and have eye-watering sex at around page 150 followed by a ridiculous misunderstanding at page 225 and then still manage to get a happily-ever-after no matter how nasty they’ve been to each other.”
“But those happy endings are important,” I insisted. “When a reader picks up a romance novel they know that happy ending exists. They don’t have to worry about what will happen and they can just get totally immersed in how it happens. Sometimes when life deals you a few blows that kind of thing is important.”
“Pure escapism,” he replied scathingly, as though wanting to escape from real life every now and then was a bad thing.
“You seem to know an awful lot about romance novels for someone who professes to hate them.”
He smiled a sort of half-smile that was full of smugness and shrugged. “Now when did I ever say that I hated them?” he asked. “Besides, I’ve always thought it was crime that kept the industry going.”
Xander turned his back on me again as he continued to peruse the bookshop. He moved over to the counter and started picking up things from the gift section – bookmarks, scented candles, mugs. Each time he picked something up and put it back again he flicked his fingers as though they were unclean.
“It’s rather elitist, don’t you think,” I said as I tried to lead him away from the gift section and back towards the centre of the shop before he smashed a mug.
“What’s elitist?” he asked, looking at me as though he didn’t quite know who I was or what he was doing in the shop. Was he drunk? Was that why he turned up so late? I tried to surreptitiously smell his breath.
“It’s elitist to be so snobby about books,” I said. “Just because somebody loves to read romance or crime novels doesn’t mean they don’t also love to read Ovid or Shakespeare or Dickens or McEwan – who all write about love by the way – or even you.”
Xander leaned against the wall and crossed one long leg over the other. And then he smiled a proper smile, not sneery or smug – and what a smile it was, even better than I’d expected. His grumpy, arrogant face lit up if only for moment. It almost made me shiver. Almost.
“And what about you, Ms Taylor,” he said. “Have you read any of my books?”
“I’ve read the first one,” I said, looking away from him. That smile was quite disarming.
“And what did you think?”
“Well I thought it was brilliant, obviously,” I replied. I wasn’t going to lie to him, even though it seemed to make him smile even more. Boxed had been one of the greatest postmodern novels I’d ever read – up there with Paul Auster and Jennifer Egan. I hadn’t thought it would be my sort of thing at all as it was about a young man growing up in the boxing clubs of East London and was supposedly semi-autobiographical, but I’d surprised myself by how much I’d loved it. “It’s a wonderful book,” I went on, hoping I didn’t sound as though I was gushing. “But just because you wrote that doesn’t give you the right to be snobby about genre fiction. Reading is completely subjective and most readers read all kinds of different books. Being a snob about genre is like pretending that reading on e-readers or listening to audiobooks is somehow not proper reading. It’s ridiculous.” I stopped, realising that I’d said far more than I’d intended and that Xander was still smiling at me.
“I wouldn’t have thought a bookseller would be advocating digital reading,” he said.
“It’s important to open reading up to as many people as possible. E-readers and audiobooks have made reading so accessible.” I thought suddenly of Joe’s mum, whose eyesight was fading. She had been embarrassed to borrow the large-print editions from the library so Joe had bought her an e-reader and shown her how to change the size of the font. How long had it been since I’d last spoken to Joe’s parents? I should call them more often.
“Well anyway,” Xander said, waving his hand impatiently in my face to get my attention. “This book launch. Whereabouts are we having it among all this clutter?” I presumed by clutter he meant the Christmas decorations as, since I’d been back, I’d always tried to make sure that the bookshop was spacious and airy. He should have seen what it was like when Mum was in charge.
I stifled a yawn. “Do you think you could come back another time for all this?” I asked. I was tired and wanted to be on my own with the Christmas lights and my memories again, as I had been before Xander Stone had marched into the shop uninvited. “Perhaps during opening hours.”
I watched Xander hesitate as though, just for a split second, he was unsure of himself, as though he’d suddenly realised how rude it was to turn up and start demanding things at ten o’clock at night. He rubbed a hand over his face and turned away from me again.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll come back in the morning.”