Page 38 of How to Find a Romance in a Bookshop

“Thanks,” said Petra, frowning at him. Mind you, she was tired.

Maybe it was a little bit nice that he had cared enough to notice.

Locking the door behind him, tiredness totally forgotten, Petra raced back up the stairs to the flat and—with deliberate control—made herself brew cocoa and put her pajamas on before allowing herself even a peek at the contents of the brown folder.

“‘Don’t stay up half the night reading’?” she repeated aloud, as she propped herself up comfortably in bed and slid out a slim sheaf of printed text. “Ha! In your dreams,” she told Ross in his absence.

Of course, the writing was beautiful.

And the premise was compelling too: A retelling of The Tempest from Caliban’s perspective. From the very first line, Petra was lost to herself. She was immersed in a way that had been eluding her for at least the last two increasingly difficult years. The only break in her compulsion to keep devouring the words on the page was when a particularly exquisite turn of phrase would cause her eyes to mist with tears. Blinking them away impatiently, Petra read on, but this—just the opening fifty pages or so—was all too brief.

She was left jolting back to reality as she shuffled the papers tidily together. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning. She stared, unseeing, at the indigo sky beyond the window, trying desperately to draw the language around her shoulders like a cloak rather than return to cold gray reality. Her mug of cocoa sat cool and untouched beside her with a layer of puckered skin on its surface. But what a ride! She, Petra, had been the first person to read those words, the first person to share Ross’s ideas, expressed with such sparkling language, since the world had read his first book. And now it was just her and Ross together in the universe. Joined. It felt more intimate than—well—intimacy.

Her phone pinged, and she scrambled to pick it up off the floor where it was recharging. Clearly, she was not the only one still awake.

Walk up to the bench with me tomorrow?

I’ll be there, she typed, hesitated, inserted a heart emoji, then pressed send.

There was a pause of several minutes.

Did you hate it? Yes or no?

Only Shakespeare’s words would do, thought Petra. “In dreaming, the clouds methought would open and show riches, ready to drop upon me, that when I waked I cried to dream again,” she typed before pressing send.

And then, Don’t leave me hanging, GIVE ME MORE!

Petra put down her phone and curled back up in bed, her head swirling with the beautiful, sorrowful images of longing and loneliness on the “island of strange noises” Ross had conjured.

Within minutes, she slept. And poor, oppressed, savage, beleaguered Caliban haunted her dreams.

Chapter Fifteen

Six hours later, Petra woke to find the haze-dulled sun was high in a pearl gray sky.

Oops sorry, she texted. See you at the churchyard in twenty minutes?

A thumbs-up came back so quickly that it seemed he had been waiting, poised.

Petra scrambled to dress and brush her teeth. Locking up the shop behind her, she risked keeping Ross waiting even longer so she could pop into Finn’s shop for coffee.

“Sorry,” she told him, as she approached the lych-gate to the churchyard where he stood, waiting.

She handed him his coffee.

“Well, you look like shit,” she blurted, clocking his pale face and his eyes that were puffy and shadowed.

Mind you, she probably wasn’t exactly looking radiant herself.

Sweetly, it seemed he was too gallant to reply, merely lifting his coffee to her in ironic salute instead.

It was still early enough to be misty as they went down into the valley, the cold clamminess touching their faces as if with ghostly fingers, but—as they climbed and approached the summit of their hill—they burst through the low clouds into glorious, yellow spring sunshine. By the time they reached their little bench, they were both sweaty and panting a little. Flumping down on the seat, they each peeled off an outer layer and then sat, catching their breath.

“So . . .” said Ross at last, without turning to look at her.

“So,” echoed Petra carefully, gazing out over the valley.

There was a pregnant silence, while she thought about what to say. “It’s beautiful,” she told him at last, her voice cracking at the memory of it. “Obviously. Your writing is assured . . . lyrical but—at the same time—spare and en pointe. The subject matter . . .” She paused, thinking. “Well, it’s stunning. Not the first Tempest retelling there’s been, naturally, and the whole Caliban thing? It’s a personal favorite of mine, I have to admit, but—yeah—it feels as if it’s very personal for you too?”