Page 21 of Battle of the Bookstores

“I’m not moving to the Cape.”

“You could commute.”

“Over three hours?”

“Please,” Gretchen begs. “You know we’d make a greatteam. And even if you win, the new store won’t be Happy Endings.”

They’re right—it’ll be a store that carries a bunch of genres I know nothing about. I sigh and shove my hair out of my face. “I’m not ready to give up.”

“Of course,” Gretchen says. “Just…think of me as your plan B.”

It’s not a bad idea to have a safety net that doesn’t involve moving back in with my parents. Boston has dozens of bookstores, but would they want a bookseller whose expertise starts and ends with romance? Then I think about my staff and how hard they’re working. Howthisstore feels like home in a way nothing else ever has.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I’ll think about it.”

“Bless you,” Gretchen says.

We say goodbye and I hang up. Iwillthink about it, but I’ll also channel everything I’ve got into this competition.

“Welcome to Happy Endings!” I say as two customers walk in—an older woman and a teenage girl. With any luck, they’ll be in and out before all the sex talk starts.

“Let me know if I can help you find anything,” I add.

“We’re here for Knitting and Knotting,” the older woman says, chuckling to herself. “So clever.”

My eyes go wide. “Indira!”

She appears moments later, wearing a black shirt that says:Introverted but Willing to Discuss the Omegaverse.

“We have a problem,” I say through a smile. “Remember how I said people might think this was a PG event?”

Indira follows my gaze and laughs. “I’ve got this,” she says, clearly not thinking about all the ways this can go wrong—including our store getting canceled. All it takes is oneoffended customer posting online, andbam!Forget profits, Xander won’t trust me if we get bad press.

I pretend to busy myself straightening a new display. Indira’s girlfriend works in visual merchandising, and she suggested moving things around to increase the average basket value per customer.

“Are you guys here for the event tonight?” Indira is asking.

“Yes!” the girl says. “My grandma taught me how to knit.”

I groan inwardly, wishing we had opted for a name that was less clever and more clear.

“And my granddaughter introduced me to the knotting trend,” the older woman says. “My late husband was an alpha, if you know what I mean.” She nudges Indira with her elbow, and I exhale in surprised relief as the woman’s granddaughter rolls her eyes.

I should know better than to make assumptions about a person’s kinks. Elaine taught me that. I wonder what she’d think of how the genre has evolved. I have no doubt Esmerelda the parrot would have gotten a kick out of it—that bird was especially vocal during the steamy scenes.

I chuckle at the memory of my “punishment.” In hindsight, I got off easy. Not only did I do a shit job of stealing the dirty book my so-called friends dared me to take, my oversized, clumsy ass knocked over a whole display of erotic glass figurines when I tried to make my escape.

Instead of calling the police—or worse, my parents—Elaine agreed to let me work off the damage. Every day for three months, I reported to the bookstore after school and read a romance novel out loud to her parrot. She said Esmerelda was lonely, plucking out her own feathers, and needed company.

Those afternoons at Happy Endings helped me discover my love of reading—and by proxy, I got the keys to a sex education other boys could only dream of. In the early days, I was so embarrassed by the words I was reading out loud—his quivering shaft of desire;her tender petals of feminine delight—that I forgot to be embarrassed by the fact that reading was such a struggle. The parrot didn’t care how slowly I went or if I mispronounced a word—she was just happy to have someone reading to her.

By the time Elaine informed me that my debt had been cleared, I was hooked—on the books, the stories, the customers, and yes, even the parrot.

Since I had no intention of stopping, Elaine started to pay me and give me more responsibilities. I kept working at Happy Endings through high school and college, where a kind professor suggested I get tested for dyslexia.

I always thought dyslexia meant switching letters around, but apparently there are a lot of different types. For me, reading feels like hard work, like I have to focus all my attention on every single letter of every single word. I make stupid mistakes with spelling, especially words that sound the same but have different meanings. And in general, I have trouble maintaining attention with printed words.

Once I got the diagnosis, it made sense why Elaine’s “punishment” helped me so much—reading aloud (to a persnickety parrot or quietly to myself) helped me understand—and enjoy—books for the first time since my mom read them aloud to me as a kid.

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