Who We Could Be - Chelsea M. Cameron Page 0,21
of the night. I shot out of bed, fumbling with my covers.
“Come in,” I thought I said, but it might have been gibberish because I was still half asleep.
“Hey,” Monty said in a soft voice. I was instantly alert.
“You okay?” I reached out to her and she sat on my bed. She didn’t look like she’d been sleeping.
“Yeah, I was thinking. My honeymoon was all paid for. Hotel and everything. I can’t get the money back for TJ’s ticket,” she didn’t even flinch when she said his name, “but I could get one for you. We could go together. Get out of town for a week. What do you think?”
“Fuck yeah, I’m in.” I didn’t need to know anything else. I’d forgotten even where she was going, because I hadn’t wanted to put any thought about Monty leaving me and going off with him. Now that wasn’t happening, I was all too thrilled to take his place, so to speak.
“It’ll be a bestfriendimoon,” I said, pulling the term out of my ass on the spot.
“Sure, why not,” she said, and yawned. “I hoped you were going to be in. Since I can’t do much else with any of the leftover shit.” I’d helped her return the gifts to the senders. I told her she could keep them, but she wanted to stick to accepted etiquette. She could heal and grieve in whatever way worked for her. Monty had also gotten money as gifts and she had plans to donate what she didn’t return to charity, which I also had questions about, but I did my best friend thing and didn’t make any comments.
“Okay, I should go back to bed.” Part of me wanted to reach out and stop her. To pull her into bed with me like we had when we were kids and whispering secrets late into the night under the covers, listening for my mom’s footsteps in the hallway.
I didn’t ask her to stay, because why would I? We’d been a lot smaller when we’d shared this bed and there wasn’t a reason to do that now. She had a huge bed in the guest room, all to herself.
I swallowed the question as she stood up and headed toward the door.
“Night, Ford,” I said.
“Night, Cin.” She closed the door and I breathed for a second. Her scent was still in the air for a few moments, but she wasn’t here anymore.
THE NEXT DAY I WAS tweaking a display of Maine-centric gifts when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I jumped and turned around to curse the person out and found Monty holding a frozen coffee out to me.
“Don’t do that, Ford. I might have punched you.”
She handed me the coffee with a raised eyebrow. “So you’re telling me that you would punch a customer who tapped you on the shoulder?”
I sucked on the icy drink. “Probably not.”
“Is there one of those for me?” Ron said, coming over to us.
“Sorry, next time,” Monty said, giving him a quick hug. He and Bill adored her and were always saying that she should take over the shop when they retired.
“Where’s Bill?” Monty asked. You almost never saw Ron, who wasn’t much taller than me, without his hulking husband Bill, who had never met a flannel shirt he didn’t like. Bill always looked like he should be out in a remote cabin wrestling bears and chopping wood, not carefully arranging antique books under glass with white gloves like he did every week. He had a degree in archival science and had worked for several museums before meeting Ron and moving to Maine and starting the shop. He didn’t say much, but whatever he did say was always worth listening to.
“Out hunting treasures,” Ron said with a fond smile. Bill traveled all around, searching for rare and hard-to-find books, and rescuing some from people who weren’t sure how to care of them. He and Ron often taught bookbinding classes in the evenings as well.
“He has my list?” Monty said, and Ron patted her arm.
“He has your list.”
Monty had a list of rare books that she would give one of her arms to have, and Bill always made sure to see if he could find them for her. They had a cute relationship and were both in charge of the local book club that met at the library once a month.
“How are you doing?” Ron asked, concern in his eyes. I felt a bolt of frustration for Monty, because even though the question was