Bookish and the Beast - Ashley Poston Page 0,13
my biceps.
I don’t believe for a second she came into this house searching after a random stranger’s dog. What kind of person does that?
None that I know.
Well, except Darien. Probably. If the dog wore a Starfield costume or something.
The girl accepts the cup of tea gratefully as her father says, “Really, I’m sure we can pay for the book—”
Elias begins to wave him off when his phone rings. He excuses himself for a moment as he fishes it out of his back pocket, and answers. “Ah! Thank you for calling on such late notice. We’ve had—an incident,” he says as he quickly moves into the library and closes the door behind him.
She wilts a little beside her father. He drums his fingers on his knees nervously, and then he stands and says, “May I use your bathroom?”
“Second door to the left,” I say, pointing down the hall toward the foyer, and he leaves.
When we’re alone, the girl takes a tentative sip of tea and wrinkles her nose. Elias makes terrible tea, which she seems to realize because she sets it down gently on the coffee table and pulls the towel tighter around her shoulders. There’s a birthmark on the side of her neck, but I can barely see it between the strands of her mousy brown hair. If she had a wire on her to record our conversations, it would’ve been ruined in the pool, but a video camera could easily take a swim. She could be hiding it anywhere on her person—in her jeans pocket, her shoe, her…
I glance at her chest, and quickly look away.
She doesn’t strike me as the type.
“I’m sorry if this sounds weird,” she says then, startling me from my thoughts, “but have we met before?”
Oh, that’s charming.
“You’ve probably seen me before,” I reply tightly.
“No, I mean—”
“Why’d you come in here?” I interrupt. “You saw the door was open, boxes in the foyer, surely you could guess the situation.”
“I…just did,” she replies, which isn’t a good reply at all. “I was looking for your dog. She came barreling into the road, so I stopped to try to get her. I thought she was lost or something.”
“And when she went into this house?”
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. She hesitantly glances down the hallway toward the bathroom, and finally settles on “…I don’t know.”
I run my fingers through my hair aggravatedly. “I don’t see what you people bloody want from me.”
“Nothing,” she says, surprised. “In fact, I really like—”
The door to the library opens and Elias steps out again, thumping his cell phone against his chest. He has a drawn look across his face that is never a good tell. About the same time, her father comes back from the bathroom saying, “That is a beautiful painting. Where did you get…” He trails off, though, when he sees the grim look on Elias’s face.
Elias presses his lips together and says, as if he’s delivering fatal news, “So, that book. It turns out it was, well…”
“A first-edition Starfield original,” the girl fills in glumly. “I know.”
Her father balks. “You must be joking. The only book in the Starfield-verse that has that kind of collector’s tag is…” But then he trails off and, peculiarly, he and his daughter exchange the same look.
They know something. About the book. Something secret between them.
Coming in here to look for my dog, my ass.
Elias hesitates and glances to me, as if I can somehow possibly get him out of whatever he’s about to say. I don’t know books. I have no idea what any of that means. I wrap my arms tighter over my chest and stand from the piano bench. Whatever, I’m going back to my room.
As I start toward the stairs, he says, “The worst part is, the owner of the house—which is neither of us—might want to press charges for the damages.”
I freeze at the bottom of the steps and glance over to them on the couch. The girl curls her fingers into the edges of the towel tighter, knuckles turning white.
Her father clears his throat. “How much are we talking here exactly?”
“Fifteen hundred,” Elias replies.
“Oh, dear,” he mumbles.
His daughter has gone pale, which is already quite a feat seeing as how she looks one shade off from a ghost already. “We…don’t have that.”
Her father, on the other hand, is already reaching into his tweed jacket. He pulls out a checkbook. “Fifteen hundred?” he asks to clarify. “Does anyone have a pen?”
“Dad!” the girl hisses.
He mumbles