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Probably a bit of it all, in all honestly.
It likely didn’t help that the only thing I was ever really comfortable with talking about was books. Any books—romance, non-fiction, sci-fi, mystery, thriller… I could talk books until I turned into one, and the fact that I co-owned a bookstore didn’t even get away from it when I was ultimately asked, “So what do you do?”
I sagged back on the sofa.
That was it.
Twenty-six was going to be the year I put myself out there and got a date at least once a month.
Or maybe once every two months.
Hopefully.CHAPTER TWO – KINSLEYrule two: book boyfriends are not real.
sadly.One good thing about living alone was that nobody woke you up super early on your birthday, and nobody was there to cover your living room in an explosion of balloons that you would be popping for a week.
One bad thing about living alone was that your friends had absolutely no issue sending you a delivery of three large bouquets of flowers, five obnoxious helium-filled balloons, a teddy bear, and a box of chocolates before nine a.m.
Mostly because they didn’t have to wake up to it.
At least they didn’t send a sing-o-gram or whatever they were called. Holley had threatened it at some point, and the last thing I wanted was an acapella band outside my front door.
Honestly, I wouldn’t put it past them. Any of them.
It was the kind of shit they’d pull.
Luckily for them, the only florist in town didn’t deliver before nine in the morning, so they’d been saved from my night-owl wrath for another day.
I busied myself putting the flowers into vases. Apparently, I was the owner of six various vases that I couldn’t ever remember using. Hell, I wasn’t sure I even knew where they came from.
I definitely hadn’t bought more than one.
With the flowers carefully moved to their new homes, I set to finding them places around my little house to live. My house was actually my grandpa’s before he’d moved into his retirement community. He hadn’t wanted to sell it and all my money had gone into the bookstore, so he’d happily agreed to let me pay his miniscule mortgage and do whatever I wanted to the little two-bedroom house that I had so many wonderful memories in.
I was very lucky, very blessed, and very short on windowsill space.
I found places after doing some shifting around in my bedroom and the bathroom. My few windowsills were now much brighter than they had been this morning, and I found myself smiling at the burst of color that now decorated my house.
The balloons were a little jarring, but I’d long accepted that my friends were extra.
Which was ironic since they were all introverts.
Except maybe Saylor. She definitely toed the intro-extro-vert line.
I was most definitely on the introverted side—unless I was really drunk and rapping Kanye West. Despite what my friends would have everyone believe, it really was a rarity.
I put the chocolates in the fridge and turned on the coffee machine. I was awake now and while it was tempting to go and crawl back into bed, there were other things I could be doing with my time.
Like read.
But not the stupid book with the love triangle because I still wasn’t ready to finish it.
Fucking Alexandra and Will.
I added vanilla creamer to my coffee and took it out to the back porch. My yard was small but bright, thanks to my grandpa’s love of gardening that he’d passed down to me. I even had some tomato plants rambling up the fence at the side, and all three of them were now bearing large green fruits that were rapidly ripening. The blueberry bush at the bottom of the yard was also nearly ready, and I couldn’t wait for them to finish so I could take Grandpa a big bag of them.
Even though summer was almost over, color still exploded through the yard, and as the sun crept through the clouds and illuminated the flowers, I smiled.
It was quiet. Peaceful. The perfect place to wake up.
All I needed was a puppy. Or a cat. You had to walk a dog and that meant people would inevitably talk to you.
Hmm.
Maybe a rabbit would be more my speed.
I set my coffee cup on the wrought iron table that had been on the porch for as long as I could remember and pulled my phone from the pocket of my robe. After going to bed last night, I’d set a couple of things that I wanted to achieve this year and written them in my notes app, but the first one was screaming out at me:
Date regularly.
Which meant I needed to figure out exactly how to do that.
The problem was that I wasn’t the most confident person in the world. I’d seen Tori and even Saylor chat up a guy at the bar like they’d known them their entire lives, whereas I tended to screw it up with any guy who even thought to speak to me.
