“Is it true that you’ve invited a man to book club?” Bella asked, her face a perfect mask of fake horror. “Men never come to book club, not even Colin.”
“According to Missy, Colin is terrified of romance novels,” I said. “What would be the point in asking him?”
“While Xander Stone is, of course, known for his love of romance,” Missy said sarcastically.
The three of us were in the new tearoom on the corner, ostensibly for lunch but today lunch consisted of Christmas spiced tea and mince pies. We’d started frequenting this particular café when it opened in the summer and hadn’t looked back. It played classical music, served every tea imaginable and the most delicious baked goods and Ellie, its owner, was a frequent visitor to the bookshop – although I hadn’t managed to convince her to join the Die-Hards yet. (“I’m more of a fan of thrillers to be honest,” she’d said.) I liked it here because it was new and contained no memories of Joe or any of the other things that I was trying not to think about.
“Have you run mad, Meg?” Bella asked dramatically. “You’ve avoided men for as long as I’ve known you and now, when you finally speak to one, it’s the man you described as the rudest person on earth.”
“I’ve explained that,” I said. “I think there’s more to him.”
“Well I suppose there’s more to everyone than the way they present themselves to the world,” Bella mused. “He is a brilliant writer after all, but who cares really? He’ll be gone next week and then…” She paused, narrowing her eyes at me. “Unless of course you’ve…”
“I just think that beneath the surface he’s not as confident about his work as you’d think,” I interrupted, knowing exactly where Bella was going and not wanting to have to admit to the fluttering feeling I experienced whenever I was near Xander Stone. “He reacted quite strangely to Colin.”
“Everyone reacts strangely to Colin,” Missy said, mouth full of mince pie.
“This was different,” I said and explained what had happened. “And when I told him that all the tickets to the launch had sold out he seemed, well… he seemed nervous.”
“Really?” Missy looked sceptical.
“It was only for a split second, but it just made me wonder.”
“He never seems nervous in his interviews,” Bella said. “He always just seems a bit full of himself.”
Missy nodded in agreement. “There’s a lot of rude people out there, Megan, and most of them are just plain rude. Why should he be any different just because he writes books?” Missy had a very cynical attitude towards her fellow humans. It was, she claimed, the reason she read books where the people could be trusted to act in a certain way. I’d always suspected that Missy’s cynicism was also an act and after what she’d been through at such a young age it was hardly surprising. It protected her from having to deal with that again. But was it healthy? I suspected not, but I also suspected that hiding myself away from the world and refusing to talk to men was equally unhealthy, so I didn’t dwell on it too much. We were both just trying to stop ourselves getting hurt again.
“I don’t know,” I said, breaking the crust of my mince pie into crumbs and not looking at either of them. “I was just intrigued I guess, plus he was so rude about romance novels that I thought he should come to book club to be brought down a peg or two.”
“Maybe he’s a Darcy,” Missy said thoughtfully, leaning her chin on her hand as she stared dreamily into the distance. Missy might love an ice hockey romance but her heart would always lie with Fitzwilliam Darcy. (“Imagine if Darcy had played ice hockey,” she’d said one night after too many cocktails. “You’re drunk, Missy, go home,” Bella had responded.) “You know, all dark and brooding and socially awkward. He doesn’t mean to be rude but he just doesn’t know how not to be.”
“Rubbish,” I replied. “Besides, I’ve never bought into the whole Darcy myth – you know that. Rude is rude and I’m not saying Xander Stone isn’t rude, I’m just saying that there’s more to him.”
“I’ll never understand how you can prefer Bingley over Darcy,” Missy said.
“Bingley is kind and sweet and funny and he’d do anything for Jane,” I replied. Just like Joe, I thought to myself. “Not everyone wants a Darcy. They aren’t as attractive in real life as they appear on paper. Darcys are difficult and you’d have to spend your whole life—”
“You’re both veering off the topic and I have to go back to work soon,” Bella interrupted the almost-daily Darcy versus Bingley discussion.
“What is the topic?” I asked.
“That you’ve invited Xander Stone to book club and I want to know why.”
“Because he’s been very derogatory about romance novels and I want us to show him how important they are.”
“And that’s the only reason, is it?” Missy asked, draining her mug and raising her eyebrows.
“Of course it is.”
“It’s got nothing to do with you having a big old crush on him?”
“What?” I replied, horrified. “Of course I don’t have a crush on him.” I tried not to remember the way his smile had made me feel or how, whenever I thought about that smile, my stomach fizzed a little in a way it hadn’t done for years.
“Oh my God,” Bella said. “Look at you. You do have a crush on him!”
“Don’t be so ridiculous.”
“You’re blushing, Megan, which means you’re lying.”
“I saw you with him in the bookshop the other day,” Missy said. “Cosied up in the corner, whispering to each other.”
“We were planning the book launch – as well you know.”
“And you’ve been constantly checking his Wikipedia page.”
I sighed and held up my hands. “OK, that I’ll admit to.” I had spent a little too much time researching Xander Stone online since I’d accidentally invited him to the book club. Not that my research had told me much that I hadn’t already known, but I could now recite most of his Wikipedia page off by heart thanks to my almost constant virtual stalking. He was born Alexander Daniel Stone in 1987 in East London, the eldest of five siblings. His father had died when he was a teenager and he’d dropped out of school when he was sixteen to try to earn money for the family. He’d been boxing since he was a kid and turned semi-professional not long after leaving school, combining it with whatever other work he could pick up. At some point he also found time to go back to school to complete his abandoned A levels and then an English degree as well. It was while he was doing his degree that he’d started writing the book that had become Boxed and which had catapulted him to seemingly overnight fame, fortune and success, and had secured him one of the biggest advances for a debut novel that had been seen in years.
“It’s not because I have a crush on him though, I’m just interested in him as a writer, particularly as I am counting on his book launch to be a success for the shop.”
“Yeah right.” Bella laughed.
“It’s time to go back to work,” I said, standing up. “I have to talk to Ellie about the food for the book launch anyway.”
“Megan, it’s OK to have feelings for someone else you know,” Bella said as she put her coat on. “Whether or not that someone else is Xander Stone. It’s been three and a half years.”
I nodded, not meeting her eyes. “I know you both worry,” I said quietly. “Mum does too. But I’m fine, I promise. Now both of you go back to work. I’ll settle up here and talk to Ellie.”
*
I walked the long way back to the bookshop afterwards. As I walked past the Minster I noticed that my bench was free and I took the opportunity to sit down. It was a crisp, cold afternoon with a clear blue sky and the Minster looked magnificent in the watery sunshine. I took a breath and leaned back, thinking about the conversation I’d just had with Bella and Missy.
While I wouldn’t exactly call it a crush, there was no denying that there was a definite attraction. But stronger than the fizzing, popping feeling I got in my stomach whenever Xander was in the vicinity, I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt. I never thought I’d notice another man again after Joe and I’d been quite happy to disappear into a quiet spinsterhood, safe in the knowledge that nobody could ever measure up to my husband.
The last time I’d spoken to Joe’s mum she’d told me that if it was the other way around Joe wouldn’t have spent his whole life living like a monk and he wouldn’t have expected me to be joining a convent. But Joe’s mum didn’t know the truth; she didn’t know that I hadn’t been there when Joe died like I’d promised him I would be. Even thinking about Xander’s smile felt like a betrayal, and when he had sat down on the bench next to me the day I’d invited him to come to book club, it had felt as though Xander had been pushing the very memory of Joe to one side, as though he was pushing him off the bench.
This was our bench, mine and Joe’s. We’d even had our wedding photos taken here. It wasn’t Xander’s bench.
What would you do, Joe? I asked silently. Was his mother right? Joe had always grabbed life with both hands and everybody loved him. Would he have spent three years shut away in a bookshop?
I absolutely didn’t have a crush on Xander Stone but perhaps that fluttery feeling I got whenever he smiled was a wake-up call, a reminder that I was still here even if Joe wasn’t and maybe, just maybe, I needed to start living again.
When I got back to the bookshop Missy was standing in the romance section, shelving books.
“This is an unusual sight,” I said. Missy rarely ventured out of the back office. (“I’m a self-employed accountant,” she’d say. “Not a bookseller.”)
“I was waiting for you,” she replied. “Come with me.”
I followed Missy into the office, which was a converted storeroom at the back of the shop. Everyone could use it whenever they needed to but it was Missy and me who spent the most time in here as we were the ones who ordered the stock and balanced the accounts (as much as that was possible – some months the accounts didn’t balance no matter how hard we tried). It was warm and cosy in the office and I sat down on the wing-backed chair that I’d bought on eBay but which had turned out to be too large for the shop’s reading nook. There was just about room for it in the office if one didn’t stretch one’s legs out too much.
“Bella and I,” Missy began. “We didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable before when we were teasing you about Xander. I’m sorry, I know how hard you find all this.”
I leaned against the back of the chair. “It’s OK,” I said. “I know I need to get on with my life. I know I can’t hide out in the bookshop forever. I know Joe wouldn’t have wanted that.”
“Would you have wanted that for him, if it had been you?”
“Of course not,” I said. “It’s just hard sometimes. You should know that more than anyone.”
“I know that,” Missy said quietly. “And I know that sense of loss never truly goes away. But eventually it just becomes part of you, part of the baggage that you carry with you – like other people carry divorces or redundancies. It gets easier; life gets easier. I promise.”
“How long was it for you?” I asked. “Before you started dating again?”
“Oh I started dating as soon as my plane landed in London,” Missy replied with a wry smile. “But we’re all different, and to be honest I wasn’t ready and I wouldn’t really recommend doing what I did.”
Missy had arrived in London just before her twentieth birthday, ten years ago, running away from a heartbreak that no nineteen-year-old should have had to deal with. She’d given up a place at Yale, much to her parents’ disapproval, to move to Boston with her high school sweetheart, until he’d died in a motorbike accident a year later. Unable to face her parents, Missy had set out on a grand tour of Europe but, after several months in London dating unsuitable men, she’d moved to York and never got any further than that. I didn’t know much more about Missy’s past and Missy hardly ever talked about it. What she was saying this afternoon in the little office at the back of the bookshop was almost more than she’d ever said before.
“But you’re comfortable dating now,” I confirmed.
“I am, although it’s been a while since I met someone who I preferred to spend time with over you and Bella,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean we should tease you. I am sorry, Megan.”
“You weren’t wrong though,” I admitted quietly.
“What?” Missy’s eyebrows shot up. “You mean you do have a crush on him?”
“Shhh,” I said, pressing my finger to my lips. “The whole shop doesn’t need to know and it’s not a crush, it’s just…” I trailed off.
“If his author photograph is anything to go by, he is very good-looking,” Missy said. “I’ve only seen the back of his head so far but I presume those cheekbones aren’t photoshopped.”
“They are not photoshopped,” I confirmed.
“Well, I’m looking forward to meeting our Mr Stone properly in that case – a romantic hero at our book club. Imagine…” She sighed dramatically. “Although I promise to only look. I’ll leave any touching to you.”
“I have no intention of touching him.” I laughed. “I’ve told you, it’s not a crush. It’s just the first time I’ve really acknowledged that another man is attractive since Joe and it feels strange to acknowledge that, as though I’m cheating on his memory.”
“Grief is such a peculiar thing,” Missy said. “But take it from me, it’s perfectly normal to find other men attractive or even to have crushes on them.”
“You said you’d stop.”
Missy held up her hands. “I know, I know,” she said. “But not even a little crush?”
“He’s extremely rude.”
“I thought you said that was shyness.”
“When he smiles it does make me do a bit of a double take,” I admitted, trying not to think about that fizzing feeling in my stomach again.
“Aha!” Missy squealed. “Bella was right.”
“Bella was not right,” I said, but I did wonder if Bella was a little bit right. “And even if she was, Xander will be gone by the weekend. I don’t even know why she’s so obsessed with me finding love again when she’s so perpetually single.”
“About that,” Missy said.
“What? Has Bella met somebody?”
Missy nodded slowly. “A six-foot-four Viking called Norm with a PhD and who currently works with her at the Jorvik Centre.”
“Norm?”
“Short for Norman.”
“Six-foot-four? But Bella’s only five-foot-one!”
“I know! Opposites attract.”
“But why didn’t she tell me?” I asked, feeling disappointed that my friends didn’t feel they could confide in me. “Do you both feel that you can’t talk about dating in front of me?”
Missy screwed up her face. “I guess,” she said in a small voice. “A little bit.”
“God I’m so sorry,” I said. “I really do need to stop playing the unmerry widow, don’t I.”
“You don’t have to be merry if you don’t feel like it, but…”
“I need to learn to live a little bit again.”
Missy nodded and held up her finger and thumb. “Just a little bit,” she said.
“I know I’ve been really self-absorbed,” I began.
“Grief does that to you. It’s perfectly normal.”
“Maybe, but I hate the idea that you and Bella can’t tell me stuff.”
Missy didn’t say anything for a moment and then she sighed and opened her laptop.
“Well, if you’re in the mood for being told stuff,” she said. “We really need to talk about the bookshop accounts.”
I groaned internally.
It was time to face the music.