Quinn took a deep breath and looked into the camera as Ivy counted him down. When she nodded, signalling him to talk, he spoke. ‘Hello. Um… I’m, uh, losing my … no, I work at Kings & Queens, and well, it’s a great shop and I … my dad used to…’
He heard his own voice playback.
‘We ran out of time,’ Ivy said. ‘It needs to be quicker. And, action.’
‘Hello. I’m Quinn. I live here in Hay, and I’m the one that sells you your books here at Kings & Queens. Uh…’
His mind went blank. He stared at the camera, his mouth open, with no sound coming out.
‘Okay, it’s fine, actors have many takes. Take three!’
Ten takes later, and they still didn’t have a cohesive video. Quinn waffled and fumbled his way through the dialogue, trying to get all he wanted to say condensed into one tiny video.
After yet another failed attempt, he groaned.
‘I can’t do this.’
‘Yes, you can,’ Ivy encouraged.
‘No, I can’t. It’s not working. What the hell am I meant to say?’ He looked away, lost in thought. ‘This bookshop means everything to me. It’s my heart and soul. It’s run by me, for the community, and it’s a shop that people shouldn’t be without. And I’m being evicted, so they can turn it into a soulless corporate info centre for the castle. We’re about to lose my shop and I need people’s help. Otherwise, Hay loses something special. And you want me to getthatinto a short video? I don’t know how to do it.’
He looked back at Ivy to see her grinning.
‘What?’
‘Oh, I’m posting it. I got it.’
‘I wasn’t looking at the camera!’ Quinn said.
‘No, but you said what needed to be said.’ Ivy tapped a few buttons and then handed his phone back to him. ‘And now we wait.’
ChapterNine
Quinn woke up to his mobile phone ringing, blasting the voice of Mariah Carey’s famous Christmas song. He loved the song, but all he wanted for Christmas was to sleep.
And keep his shop. That was obvious.
‘Hello?’ His voice was thick with sleep.
‘Have you been ignoring all the calls?’
Ivy sounded excited on the other end of the line. Quinn sat up, the blanket falling from his body. He felt the chill in his apartment from the outside snow and drew the blanket over him again.
‘What calls?’
‘Quinn, our video, it’s gone viral!’
‘What?’
He put Ivy on speaker and listened to her talking about how the video reached almost two million views and was still rising. He found the video and read comments from strangers all around the world, people wishing him luck, asking him questions. The homophobic hate comments he got meant nothing to him. Instead, he dropped his feet over the side of the bed and realised what this all meant.
‘People know about me.’
‘The press has been ringing you.’
‘What?’
Quinn scrolled down the comments and saw the verified accounts.
