Page 4 of Comfort Read

The taller woman, who must be Frankie, cries, “Sage! There you are. So glad you’re in here, I thought maybe I was too late and one of the locals had kidnapped you. Sorry to be running behind, but traffic was hell.” She doesn’t seem concerned by the absolute baldness of this lie—there’s only so hellish traffic can be in Cedar Falls—and Sage doesn’t even seem to clock it. He just rolls his eyes and follows her when she gestures towards the interior shop and says, “Come on, come on, let’s look around! Get into the spirit of the thing! And as you’re getting into the headspace, let’s remember: We want to appear…” She pauses, clearly in wait.

Wearily, his voice suggesting it’s far from the first time, Sage says, “Relatable, approachable, and like a human being.”

“Good job, Sage! That’s right.” Frankie says this in a tone Kit more closely associates with people talking to their dogs than famous actors. He stares, fascinated, as she continues. “And we don’t want to appear…?”

Sage sighs. “Unhinged, cold, standoffish, intoxicated, or—ugh, Frankie. Do I really have to say the last part?” In an undertone that Kit only hears by sheer force of will, he adds, “I mean, did you listen to any of the voice notes I sent you? My self-esteem’s not exactly at an all-time high today.”

“Your self-esteem is fine; you’ve been called the sexiest man alive in multiple publications. I simply don’t own a violin small enough to help you here.” Frankie glances down at her nails when Sage lets out a soft hiss noise of annoyance, unbothered. “Also, it is the most important part of the whole thing, so, yes, Sage. You do have to say it. Go on.”

To Kit’s surprise, Sage shoots a half second’s steely glare back at him before replying. Kit feels this is unfair—what did he do? Other than make himself look like an absolute idiot in front of the most famous person he’s ever met, but it was only himself he humiliated, not Sage. He finds himself biting down on the strange urge to shout out, “I’m innocent!” without even being sure of his crime.

But then Sage turns away and sighs again, even more heavily than the first time. He intones, with a gravity that’s obviously sarcastic, “I don’t want to appear to be a hostile alien from the planet Condescending Bastard.”

Kit makes an absolutely heroic effort not to laugh, and almost succeeds. A sound does escape him, but it’s brief and easily turned into a cough when Sage—perhaps more justifiably this time—glares at him again.

Still, Frankie seems pleased, crying out, “By Jove, I think he’s got it!” She slaps him on the back and, with a glance at Kit, lowers her voice below audibility, leading Sage away toward the shelves. Her hand lingers between his broad, well-muscled shoulders, obviously used to steering him. Kit’s eyes linger there, too, for several beats longer than he intended, so he doesn’t fully notice that the younger woman is still standing in front of the counter until:

“Hey.”

Kit jumps at the sound, and turns to see her, and the small, knowing smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “Uh—hi. God, sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. He has that effect on people. I brought my mom to set a few weeks ago, and she almost walked into a pole.” She grins when Kit laughs ruefully, and offers him her hand. “Jaelyn Williams. I’ll be handling filming and production today. Are you the owner?”

“I am, yeah. Kit Forrest.” They shake, and clawing his way back to the professionalism he’d intended to kick things off with, Kit adds, “What do you need from me? I’ve got beverages and snacks, but admittedly they’re mostly for children? Sorry. Usually for these things I run to the store first, but this one was pretty last-minute, so you’ll have to make do with juice boxes and Goldfish crackers.”

Jaelyn’s fading grin flares again, but she shakes her head, waving a dismissive hand. “Nah, you’re all good—I’m all set there. Mostly what I need is for you to show me where your electrical outlets are, so I can work out where to put Sage for the shoot.”

Obligingly, Kit takes her on a quick tour of the bookshop, or at least the first floor. The main room is easy enough to get through: With the front door set at one side, the checkout counter on the other, and every inch of available wall space lined with books, the space between has shelving laid out with generous paths for customer browsing. When Kit had worked here in high school, this part of the shop had been a labyrinth, so many shelves crammed into it that a person could get genuinely lost or claustrophobic wandering around. One of his first tasks as the new owner had been spacing those shelves out and redistributing the inventory so that only their most popular sections—literary fiction, mystery, sci-fi, world history, fine arts, romance, and self-help—were kept up here. He’d nearly ripped his arms out of their sockets dragging shelves around, and then repositioning chairs and couches and quaint antique lamps to sit underneath the windows, but he thinks the effort was worth it.

Kit pulls Jaelyn into the side rooms, too, the ones that used to be offices and closets, where he puts books with stock that can fit entirely in the smaller space. There’s a poetry room, and a bibliography room, and a room for used paperbacks that always smells dusty. And he shows her the Children’s Corner, a space of which he’s particularly proud: Once the firehouse’s kitchen, the room is now full of beanbag chairs, brightly colored posters, art supplies, and puzzles. Counters that were once used for food prep now feature an assortment of plastic vegetables and toy pots and pans, with little stepstools to help the younger children reach them, and the still-working sink is regularly used in demonstrations and experiments in the programs Kit hosts for the local children.

It would be fun, showing her around, if it weren’t for all the visible issues with the building: cracks in the masonry and places where it’s crumbled away, buckets catching the slow drips from the various leaky spots in the ceiling, gaps around the window frames where air whistles through. Plus, he has no choice but to do as she requested and show her where the outlets are, which he does with an internal sigh. He also explains, as briefly as he possibly can, which ones are safe to use, and which ones will a) not work at all, b) risk a fire, or c) trigger a chain reaction that three electricians have called “baffling,” and that, when witnessed, makes it hard to imagine the shop isn’t haunted by vengeful ghosts.

Jaelyn takes this all in with an equanimity that both pleases and surprises Kit. She nods at every stop, and, in exchange, tells him that she’s working on a movie with Sage called Last Cowboy Standing. It’s being shot in a few locations, but the primary set is in Ithaca, and they’re here to shoot some content for socials, which will be released to drive ticket sales when the movie comes out. In a low voice, she confides, “Everyone else did theirs ages ago, but Sage and the director have had some… creative differences. We’re all crossing our fingers that things go well today, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Sage is a great actor, but he kinda sucks at this.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m really not.” Jaelyn’s expression goes wry, and she adds, “I mean, he’s not the worst I’ve ever seen, but it’s not great. Might be a long morning.” She gestures to an outlet near a window and a bay of fiction shelves and says, “That one was good, right? No fire? No ghosts?”

“No fire, no ghosts,” Kit confirms, and gives her a thumbs-up that seems to entertain her. When she starts pulling equipment out of her cavernous bag, he turns to go do what he usually does when someone is shooting at Sawyer’s: avoid the area of the shop they’re using, and attempt to catch up on his never-ending to-do list.

But the thought of Sage being bad at filming anything gnaws at him, curiosity growing with every passing breath. Surely Sage has been interviewed hundreds of times, and by more hostile interrogators than his own publicist! For God’s sake, this is the same man who played Vic Vickrum, the brilliant, charismatic teenage detective in Gowanus High; who stunned as rockstar Axel Gunner in Face the Music; who captivated viewers across the country in Good Fences from the time he was only nine years old. This should be as effortless for him as that always was, or at least always looked to his charmed, adoring audience.

And sure, okay. It’s possible that Kit was one of those charmed audience members. That’s possible. Maybe he’d followed the man’s career, a bit, way back in the day. Perhaps he might even have been ravenously obsessed with Gowanus High when he was a teenager, and watched every episode multiple times, and spent more than a few late nights neck-deep in very specific corners of the internet theorizing about it. High school was so long ago that anything might be true—who can remember? Certainly Kit doesn’t, and if he did, he’d pretend not to.

In the end, he goes to the back room to restock the depleted supply of paper bags at the counter, an important and critical chore. If he happens to pass within hearing range of where Frankie and Sage have huddled up between the History and Cartography sections, so what? That’s perfectly innocent. There’s only one logical path to take from the counter to the back room, and Kit’s merely taking it, just as he always would. The fact that restocking the paper bags is a task that usually falls to Allison because he hates doing it so much is immaterial. It’s not like he’s trying to eavesdrop on the internationally famous movie star who has unexpectedly shown up in his bookshop! That would be very wrong.

Whether he’s trying to or not, however, Kit succeeds in eavesdropping. As he passes them he hears Frankie say, “—could still be worse, in my opinion. He’d said he’d see you in December and give you a decision then, that’s not a no⁠—”

“It’s not a yes!” Sage sounds like he’s struggling to keep his voice low. “And even the maybe was conditional! Based on what I said! But what I said, and this is the important part, was not remotely true⁠—”

“Oh, stop panicking, that’s fixable. For one thing, I’m sure there are hundreds of people who⁠—”

“What, like ask a fan? No. I’m not subjecting some random person to hell as a punishment for liking my work!”

“Then we put out a discreet casting call, an⁠—”

“Are you insane? It would get leaked! I’d be a laughingstock and Wayne still wouldn’t⁠—”