Page 4 of Ronen
“Ronen, how is this your life?” I muttered, pulling away from the curb and giving my Uncle Quinn’s bakery one last longing look, as my stomach growled noisily at me.
It was going to be a long day.
Chapter Two
Ronen
“Ohhhh,”Emily’s excited voice came from directly behind me, making me jerk a little. I was too tired for Emily’s nonsense.“Here he comes. Right on the dot. Really, Ro, you should just let the poor man in. It’s freaking cold outside.”
Without even turning to look at the ghost, I continued to check in the books I had pulled from the metal drop off bin this morning when I had come in. Though my gaze did stray to the view I could just barely see through the glass of the ornately carved doors down to the street. The ten long concrete steps leading from the doors to street level meant I had to crane my neck to see him, but sure enough, he was there.
Just like he was pretty much every single morning for the past year, since I had issued him his library card. The black Bronco with the big badge emblem on the side of the door, the word Sheriff in the middle of it, was parked directly in front of the library.
“How would you know if it’s cold or not?” The sound of the scanner beeping as I checked in a book made my black heart happy. “You’re dead. You don’t feel the cold.” Wrinkling my nose, I glanced over my shoulder at her. “Do you?”
Emily swung her black tight clad legs against the countertop she was perched on behind me.“Don’t be silly, of course I can’t. But it’s the middle of January and there’s snow and ice on the ground.”She tapped one red painted nail against her temple,“You’re not the only smarty pants here. Logic, my dear boy.”
“We’re the same age,” I muttered at her calling me a boy, turning back to my scanning. Completely ignoring the tall, broad, ridiculously handsome man whose face was now pressed against the glass door, peering in at me. Great, he was going to breathe and slobber all over my nice clean glass, making me have to clean it. Again. Honestly, how hard was it for people to keep their hands off the glass? Apparently, exceptionally hard, if I was to go by the amount of times I had to clean it in a day. “Well, if you were still alive, I mean.”
Emily giggled,“If I was still alive, I’d be old enough to be your mother.”
“A truly frightening thought.”
Keeping my head downward, I talked out of the side of my mouth, so it wasn’t noticeable that I appeared to be talking to myself. I really didn’t need Mason Caldwell to have a front row seat to me carrying on an entire conversion to what appeared to most people as an empty room.
“Facts,”she agreed.“Oh, let him in, Ronen! Look at that poor man out there. He looks cold. And maybe try to tame that hair of yours. You look like something the cat dragged in this morning.”
“He’s perfectly fine.” Ignoring her comment about my hair, which I may or may not have forgotten to brush as I couldn’t bebothered to care, I stacked the returned books on a cart next to me, ready to shelve. Tapping my watch, I held it up for her to see, forgetting that he could also see me and probably thought I was being super weird and showing my watch to empty space. Eh, I’d been thought of as odd on more than one occasion.
When you could see and talk to ghosts, it kind of came with the territory. I was used to it by now. Mostly.
Besides I didn’t give one flying fuck what Sheriff Mason Caldwell thought of me.
Liar, my honey badger huffed.
Hush, you.
“It’s five upon the hour,” I informed her, just in case she had forgotten how to tell time since she had died. “We open at nine. Not eight fifty-five. And my hair is perfectly fine, thank you.”
Had I brushed it this morning? I had barely gotten back to sleep when my alarm had startled me awake. I had stumbled into the kitchen to smack my Keurig into a cup of strong black coffee, carried it bleary eyed into the shower, and…nope, I had definitely not brushed my hair this morning.
“Five minutes is not going to end the world,”Emily huffed, swinging her dark brown tresses, cut in a stylish bob, and fiddling with the white silk scarf tied at her neck. Her mode of dress always reminded me of Daphne from the oldScooby-Doocartoons, but since Emily had died in the very early 1970’s, she was very much in style for the times.“And, would it hurt you to try to tame that mess of bed head into submission?”
“Nine is nine,” I replied primly, still completely ignoring the wide smile on Mason’s face.
He was grinning, his weirdly colored amber eyes, a mixture of light brown and gold, filled with mirth. He undoubtedly knew Iwas not acknowledging him on purpose. “And leave my hair be. It is what it is. I cannot be bothered to care about my hair.”
Glancing up at Mason Caldwell’s widely grinning face precariously close to my clean glass, I scowled at him, before going back to my scanning.
This was a dance he and I did every single morning. Except on Sundays when the library was closed.
Every morning, he rolled up in his SUV, taking the wide steps that led to the double doors that were older than both of us put together, two at a time. He would jiggle the lock, just to see if this would be the morning I might have unlocked the doors early. Then he would press his stupidly handsome, smiling face to the glass, peering in at me.
Sometimes the infernal man would even wave to me, to try to get my attention. He always had a stack of books to return, tucked under his overly muscled arms, waiting to drop them on my counter, then browse for more.
The man had a voracious appetite for books that I could truly appreciate, if it wasn’t for the one flaw that made me want to pull my hair out.
He was constantly losing books.
