Splinters of You (Retired Sinners MC #1) - Anne Malcom Page 0,17
as many questions as she could in the five-minute interaction, and I managed to not answer a single one.
I did not make a friend.
But I did make it through the trip without murdering anyone.
The bar beckoned me, with the promise on whisky the grocery store didn’t carry and a certain intriguing bartender that almost certainly wanted to have sex with me.
Tempting.
But I went to the bookstore instead.
Because I sure played the bad girl in a lot of ways, but I somehow let a little goodness—or maybe it was cowardice—survive along the way.
I knew the second the bell trilled over my head inside the bookstore I’d made a mistake.
A man wearing a fucking sweater vest glanced at me over the top of his glasses, smile at the ready. “Welcome!” he all but yelled in my face.
Fuck.
Another Chatty Cathy.
I nodded at him with a tight smile, hopefully communicating I wanted to be left the fuck alone.
“Can I help you find anything?” he asked as I went against all my better instincts and continued into the store. It wasn’t even voluntary. The smell of dust, books, it drew me in like a hand emerging from the darkness and clutching my neck.
“No, thank you, I’m just browsing,” I said without making eye contact.
The store was much larger than it portrayed on the street. I expected it to be poky, stifling, claustrophobic. Or maybe I hoped it would be, because then I would have a totally valid excuse to Prime all my paperbacks without the guilt that came with not supporting a local bookstore.
But instead of a closet-sized hovel, shelves stretched back into shadows, promising to swallow up anyone who dared ventured further in.
I loved it immediately.
“You’re new in town.”
I loved almost all of it.
I picked up a random book. Shitty cover. Nice title. Unknown author. “Yeah.”
The shuffling of cheap shoes on the faded carpet told me this guy was not getting the picture.
“New York, right? Bought Emily’s place?”
I nodded, keeping my chin all the way down, and yet I still saw him enter my peripheral. I really wanted to read this book. Unknown authors were my favorite. I didn’t know what to expect. A steaming pile of shit, or a gem. Either one was inspiring.
“Horrible thing that happened to her,” he said, almost as a rote response. Which I’m sure it was. A town like this, where everyone knew everyone, it would be almost a ritual to mutter some kind of melancholy sentence in order to make sure you never got over the drama of it all. It would be the only drama that they had of this magnitude. They had to somehow stretch it out like a starved cow meant to feed hundreds of people.
I didn’t respond, just put the book back and walked further down, hoping he wouldn’t follow me. Which he fucking did.
“Sally wouldn’t give me your name, wouldn’t give anyone your name, it was all very secretive,” he continued, having recovered from his sad “talking about the dead girl” tone.
I gritted my teeth.
“I managed to extricate the detail that you were a rather well-known author,” he said. “And I consider myself somewhat of an expert of well-known and unknown authors. You wouldn’t grace me with the title of your first book, would you?”
That got me.
Firstly, when strangers extracted the fact I was a writer out of me—an act I considered akin to a dentist pulling out a tooth without narcotics—one of the first questions they asked, without fail was, “Have you written anything I might’ve read?”
Like what kind of absolute asshole must you have to be to ask a question like that.
You’re pretty much asking “are you famous enough for me to pretend to care about you and your books?”
If there wasn’t that question, it was endless others like they felt the fact you’re an author gives them some kind of odd carte blanche to your life.
So usually, when people didn’t recognize me—which was getting rarer and rarer, thanks to social media that this bookstore owner obviously didn’t have—and asked me what I did for a living, I got creative. Dolphin trainer. Social studies teacher. Sex worker. FBI agent. Whatever I felt like at the time.
All of those things came with less interrogation than the “author” title.
But this man’s question was the first I’d gotten. He didn’t want to know about me, per se, but my books.
“Skeletons of Sunshine,” I answered without even properly deciding to. He had appealed to my vanity over my art.