Page 23 of Battle of the Bookstores

“Take whatever you need,” Eddie says. “And if there are any werewolves in the crowd…”

“I’ll send them your way,” I promise. Then, to Josie: “You want to come listen in?”

“Absolutely not.” She turns on her heel and walks off.

Smiling, I have a sudden urge to howl like a werewolf before heading back to the store with chairs for what promises to be an…interesting evening.

7

Josie

Knitting and Knotting?Gross. Ridiculous. Idiotic.

Intriguing?

Nope. I shut the thought down as I head out the door of Beans. This is exactly why I don’t read romance. It’s not—as one ex-boyfriend suggested—that I’m boring and closed off when it comes to sex (he was just bad at it). And it’s not—as my mother suggested—that I hate love and don’t believe in relationships (she was just bad at them).

Nor is it because I look down on the genre, as Ryan seems to think. I firmly believe there’s a book for every reader and a reader for every book—it’s just that romance doesn’t speak to me. I love literary fiction because it’s gritty, raw, and complicated, like real human experiences. No guarantees, no tidy conclusions.

No false hopes, either.

I’m shaking my head as I walk back into my store, where Georgia has arrived to help me set up for tomorrow’s event. She’s dressed like a seventies flower child thrust into the modern world—wavy hair parted down the middle, roundpink glasses, flowy sundress with no bra, Birkenstocks, and of course, her bedazzled pink cane.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, pushing her glasses up onto her head. “Your face is all red and blotchy.”

I pick up the sign I made to advertise tomorrow’s event. “What do you think?”

She knows I’m changing the subject, but she allows it. “The Literary Collective,” she reads. “A.k.a., the book club for people who believe the best novels are the ones that only make sense after being read three times.”

“Ha ha. At least it isn’t Knitting and Knotting, like at Happy Endings.”

She coughs out a laugh. “Like,thatkind of knotting?”

I eye her. “You know what it is?”

Her cheeks turn deep crimson. “I may have wandered through the Omegaverse on occasion.”

“George!”

“But not lately, given that I’m swamped with classes. Remind me again why I wanted to take summer term?”

She grabs a broom and I grab a dustpan, and together we start cleaning up the bits of drywall and dust left behind by the construction crew.

“To get your degree faster,” I say. “I told you to enjoy your last summer of freedom, but you didn’t listen.”

“I should have. I keep thinking back to when we were kids during summer break. Remember how we’d go to the pool at the JCC—”

“And the park.”

“And the library!” She smiles. “Your favorite.”

She’s right; our city library was a half mile from ourapartment, and we’d walk there together. We’d each take a backpack and check out the limit—fifteen books each.

“You’d get all those big chapter books, then go home and read for hours,” she says. “I loved when you read to me.”

I’m happy to hear that; I’m not sure she fully understands why I did it, though. Each book was a doorway to another world, transporting us away from the chaos at home. Reading wasn’t just an escape; it was a lifeline.

“You know who else could read for hours and hours?” Georgia says, leaning on the broom. “Mom.”

---