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Her eyes light up, and happiness shimmers across her face like a snail leaving a trail of slime in the sunlight. Okay, no. Bad, brain. That’s just terrible. Not snail slime. Definitely not snail slime. She’s so straight-up beautiful that I can’t tear my eyes away from her. I also can’t breathe. Or move. Or function. She’s a ray of sunlight, and it’s like I’ve never seen those golden beams before.
She rushes straight to a huge bookcase and immediately runs her fingers over the spines, her face a mixture of awe and reverence like one might have when coming face to face with a being they revere. For her, books aren’t just sacred. The written word is something more. Something that so often feels alive.
Granny is the one to elbow me. She leans in and whispers in my ear, her humor more than clear. “Pick your jaw up off the floor. It’s awfully dusty in here. Don’t want you to get a mildewy tongue.”
“Oh my gosh! Seriously! This is so cool!” Victoria is now piling books into her arms until she looks like an overloaded bookcase herself.
I rush forward, trying to take some from her, but in my haste, I miscalculate and step on her toe with my big clodhopper boots. She yelps, the pile of books wavers as she does, and then it collapses altogether, going down in a heap of dust and ancient covers. And Victoria. Because she goes down first, and the books land on top of her.
I drop to my knees, apologizing profusely as I remove books, digging through the pile to get to her like she’s been covered by an avalanche of more than paper. I wish that, for one second, my life could be disaster free, but when I remove two books from Victoria’s facial region, I find her grinning.
“Excuse me!” A tiny old lady hobbles over. She glares at us, her hands on her hips. “You can’t just abuse the things in here! Those are other people’s things we’re selling!”
“It was an accident,” I try to tell her, but she gives me an old lady glare more potent than even Granny can muster.
Granny steps forward, and no, she doesn’t brandish her Glocks, but she does save the day. “We’re taking all of those,” she informs the slightly peevish lady staring me down like she’s about to eviscerate my ass in senior citizen dragon fire. “Every one of them. And it was an accident. We’ll be more careful. You have my word. I’ll have my grandson take all these books up to the register for you. We’ll probably be taking a few furniture pieces, too, though we haven’t made our way up to them yet. And don’t you worry. If there happens to be an accident up there and someone gets crushed by a wardrobe, we promise not to sue.”
While the lady sputters at Granny, she just smiles calmly as though a shit spit storm of hissing indignation wasn’t being heaped her way. The reviews that said this place had super kind, helpful, and genuine people working here might be a little dubious, or maybe they didn’t have a book avalanche to trigger the wrath of this lady in particular. I try very hard to keep my laughter in as I dig Victoria out from under all the books. I heap my arms full, and I can still barely manage. I don’t know how she was holding half of those books. I guess she was determined, and my god, if that isn’t crazy sexy, super attractive, mega hot, hot tamale, I’m not sure what is.
In fact, my hand brushes up against hers while stacking books, and I know it’s hot, hot tamale south of the border. And a heck of a lot of tingling. And ball clenching. Just saying.
I carry the leaning tower of ancient texts to the counter. Once I set them down, I exhaled a sigh of relief that I didn’t break anything else. The sigh is immediately followed by a sneeze at the amount of dust raised.
“No sneezing in here!” This old lady is determined to haunt me like Victoria was saying her great-aunt might do to her house. She wags a finger in my direction. “There are things that your germy body fluids could ruin in here! If you sneeze on something, you buy it!”
I can practically envision Granny laughing my ass up behind my back. She’s probably enjoying this, even if she did give the old lady a stink eye and Granny-sass earlier for being a giant crab cake.
“If I look at anything, do I have to buy it too?”
At that, the old lady does a change-up on my ass and grins at me deviously. “Depends how you look at it. If you’re going to be looking at anything in this store wrong, then you’re going to have a problem with me. You hear me, sonny?”
