Page 1 of Fireworks
1
Eiley couldn’t remember the last time she’d known this much peace. By noon on her first day of work at Thorn & Thistle Books, her usual, persistent soundtrack of jangling kids’ TV themes and singsong requests beginning with “Muuuum, can I …?” had been replaced by a blanket of quiet.
No, not quiet.
Silence.
She was certain that, in about two minutes, she would be wracked by terrible Mum Guilt for enjoying space away from her children. For now, with no customers scanning the shelves, she let out a content sigh, slumping over the bookshop’s yellow counter as she rolled the knots out of her shoulders. Or tried to. They were probably permanent now. Still, it might have been the first time she’d been able to breathe,reallybreathe, in well over seven years – and in her favourite place, wrapped in the woodsy scent of bound pages, she wanted to gulp down every second.
She had plenty of time to. If she thought about just howmuchtime before she picked up her nineteen-month-old, Saffron, from nursery, her usual anxiety, the one that neededher tethered to something always for fear she might otherwise float away, would probably return with a vengeance. So, she went back to her checklist instead.
Restock the biography section: check.
Process today’s online orders: check.
Stare eagerly at the box she was not yet allowed to open: double check.
Accidentally take advantage of her employee discount: triple, quadruple check. Her colourful stack of new purchases, all of them romance, were far too tempting to work beside, so she tucked them away under the counter and then refocused.
New window displays for autumn!
Eiley chewed the end of her pen. And there, as predictable as a rom-com’s third-act conflict, came the first jangle of nerves. Maggie hadn’t left any specific instructions onhowto decorate the displays, which left plenty of room to do it all wrong. She wasverygood at doing things wrong.
The owner had been nothing but kind since renting out the upstairs flat to Eiley and her three children last month, offering a chance to finally start rebuilding their lives after staying with Mum for so long. While Maggie had never asked for anything more than a generously low rent and flexible working hours in return, her hands grew clammy. She needed to do a good job – areallygood job – to prove how grateful she was for both the employment and their cosy new home.
Unlike her older brother, Fraser, who had set up his own business in carpentry and woodwork, she’d never been all that artsy. Or, really, all that anything. Motherhood had taken up the majority of her twenties, and now this new job was alreadyproving to her how useless she was at literally anything else. For instance, she thought she’d broken the cash register this morning when a customer’s purchase, two books, had come out at £53. She’d fixed the error eventually, after several minutes of getting sweaty and flustered while the shopper grew impatient. And she wasn’t great at customer service, either. One prim old lady had tried to make conversation about the unseasonably warm weather, and Eiley had only been able to stutter out “Do you like it hot? I don’t know if I’m built for heat,” in response, worrying the customer would somehow know exactly what kind of heat she had been thinking about with the romance stack still calling her.
Finlay, her ex, had always said she wasn’t cut out for a job like everyone else.Sorry, but you’ve got no common sense, love. Maybe he’d been right.
No, stop it, Eiley. She shook her head to erase those criticisms, instead heading into the stockroom to retrieve the box of autumnal decorations Maggie had told her about this morning – very hurriedly, as she’d been late for a meeting concerning one of the many other buildings and businesses she owned. She’d bought this one from her Uncle Stephen last spring so that he could enjoy his perpetual bachelorhood somewhere far sunnier than Scotland, but her landlady duties spanned way beyond Belbarrow. Really, Eiley’s low rent was probably a sign of pity, but Eiley wasn’t in a position to complain, nor could she afford to pay much extra yet.
On her way out of the stockroom, Eiley tripped over a pile of Miriam Margolyes memoirs and squeaked, “Oh, no! Sorry, Miriam!”
She placed the decorations down to search for damage, cringing when she found a tear on one of the hardcover jackets. Really, sorting out the mess in here should have been at the top of Maggie’s list, but perhaps she’d wanted Eiley to jump in at the shallow end. Still, as both a Miriam fan and a book lover, Eiley felt like she’d committed a murder and quickly hid the evidence with another misplaced tower of paperbacks, not without a gentle stroke of the ripped spine in the hopes it might feel her guilt and heal itself.
See? Good at doing things wrong. She’d be lucky if Maggie still wanted her by the end of the week. Making the window display gorgeously autumnal might be her only chance of impressing her boss.
“Okay. What do we have?” Sifting through the box, Eiley found all manner of decorations, from wisps of Halloween cobwebs to light-up pumpkins. “Harper’s going to love these,” she muttered amusedly, and then checked to make sure a customer hadn’t silently snuck in to overhear her talking to herself. Or to Miriam.
She lugged the box to the large, curved window, placing her hands on her hips as she eyed the empty sill. She’d already removed Maggie’s summer recommendations from the display shelf, so she supposed the first order of business – and probably the only order she might actually be good at – was curating some autumn reads.
She knew just where to go for those. Horror, first, mixing widely loved authors like Shirley Jackson and Angela Carter with some of her personal modern favourites:Mexican GothicandEyes Guts Throat Bones.
The real fun came when she moved from speculative fiction over to contemporary romance, a genre she hadn’t explored much until recently. She supposed she’d needed the comfort after the break-up, the certainty of happy endings slowly tugging her out of the misery left behind by Finlay’s abandonment. Now, she picked up paperbacks illustrated with burnt oranges and golds, smiling at the ones she’d already read and loved. Sometimes, she wished she could live in these pages, where people fell in love and stayed there. Where they could feel safe, taken care of, all while enjoying extraordinary … acts that shall not be named.Thatparticular area of Eiley’s life had more cobwebs than the decorations box.
A wave of what was it …regret? … washed over her, expected now but still difficult to resurface from, as she tried to focus on placing the books in the right spots. Hardbacks on the bottom, paperbacks on top. But those romance book covers were still staring at her, and she wondered if she should never have picked them up to begin with. They provided joy, yes, but also longing. With this new quiet settling over her, it was easier to notice that little rift in her chest, the one she suspected would never fully heal. It had been there before Finlay, but he’d widened the gap to an unbearable amount.
Goodness, she was pathetic, she told herself. She should have been happy. Shewashappy. Better off single. Who needed a drunk, unreliable partner, anyway? She had her children. Her family. And books. Lots and lots of books. Fictional boyfriends and girlfriends were far better than real life.
She dragged the revolving tiered shelves backwards and stepped up onto the sill, grabbing a garland of amber, yellow,and burgundy faux leaves to hang around the window’s border while pointedly tryingnotto remember what it might be like to lie beside somebody at night. To listen to the rhythm of someone else’s breaths. To—
Enjoy the sight of a very attractive,verylarge man.
“Coffee Giant is back,” Eiley said to herself on an embarrassingly elongated exhale.
All right, so romance books weren’t heronlymethod of escaping everyday life. There happened to be a tall, dark, handsome six-foot-something who had recently started frequenting Bel’s Brews across the street. Yes, yearning from a window was pathetic, and no, she didn’t plan to actually talk to him, but he did look remarkably like one of the love interests on her book covers, all strength and swagger.
At least from the back. She was still trying to decide what his face would look like. She always caught him either stepping inside the café or wandering down the street with a to-go cup, broad shoulders set back and one hand usually in the pocket of his jacket. Except he wasn’t wearing a jacket today, and she could see every rippling muscle stretching the black cotton of his jumper. Her stomach wriggled at the sight of sturdy, jutting shoulder blades and an unreasonably plump backside. His hand raked through chestnut-brown hair, longer on the top than the sides, and she bit her lip. Where had he come from? Her imagination, possibly? She’d known most of Belbarrow’s residents her whole life, yet she’d never seen him before a couple of weeks ago. She tried to convince herself that it was just novelty – the new face, or back, was why she was paying so much attention to him rather than focusingon bringing some autumn magic to the bookshop window for the last of the fair-weather tourists. It certainly had nothing to do with the thickness of his thighs, as demonstrated when he squatted to kindly pet Captain Angus’s scraggly Irish wolfhound, Doris, who was enjoying her weekly puppuccino while her quirky owner smoked his pipe. Nope. Eiley was an adult who would not be swayed by such superficial things.
