301 votes
She’ll allow it. It’s just a poll. At least it gave her a good laugh.
Admittedly, few books on the table displays are familiar to her. As she walks through, she spies a few classics that conjure thoughts of GCSE exams and BBC adaptations, but none of the displays of fresh fiction really grabs her attention. There’s a chart of bestselling books on the wall, and she spies a new book by an author she read years ago on a summer holiday.
She takes the book from the shelf but it slips out of her clammy grasp, landing on the floor with a deafening thud. Bloody hardbacks. She mouths a sorry to the bookseller, who simply raises his eyebrows over his glasses and gives her a tiny shrug like ‘What can you do?’
Typically, it has slid under the shelf, so Haf has to bend down to grapple for it. As she stands up, there’s one of those horrible slow-motion moments where she realises she has hooked her enormous backpack onto the table behind her and also stood up far too quickly. There’s a large bang as the table crashes back down, sending a whole display of books careening to the floor.
Fuck.
Haf carefully replaces the rescued hardback and shucks off her backpack and coat and leans them gently against a bare bit of wall.
The table is miraculously still standing, but around her is a landslide of books. On hands and knees, Haf gathers books into her arms. Most of them look undamaged, thank goodness. She ferries them from the floor into little piles on the table above her until she’s got them all, and roughly clambers to her feet.
‘You dropped this.’
She always thought the phrase was a cliché, but her heart actually does feel like it skips a beat as she looks up at the woman in front of her. Two books are cradled against her with one arm, as though she’s trying to warm them up with her emerald green wool coat. Her other hand grips a sleek black walking stick with a curved handle like a question mark and a gold foot.
‘And these two. And that one as well,’ she says, pointing with her stick to one at her feet. She smiles with a sharp half-smile that you might at first glance think was fake, but it reaches her amber-brown eyes.
‘Thank you,’ Haf croaks, taking the stack from her and then rescuing the one from the floor. ‘It’s a bit of a catastrophe, isn’t it? Hopefully, I’m not barred for damaging the stock... and the shop, I guess.’
Needing something to do with her hands, Haf starts putting the books into matching piles.
‘Oh, I don’t know, you’re probably doing him a favour by offing some of his stock,’ she whispers. She picks a paperback by one of those car guys off the telly, the kind of book that’s aggressively For Men. ‘This guy’s a real arsehole. A good dent will probably improve the content. Or maybe they can send it back to be pulped, so no one has to read it. You might have done a great service to literature.’
Her voice is deep, slightly raspy and nearly whispered from cherry-red lips. Haf could wrap herself in the sound.
It’s been a long time since she’s flirted with another girl. She feels rusty, awkward, nervous.
Back when she was newly single, Ambrose and Haf had braved a regularly held queer meet-up at a nearby pub. But they’d both quickly realised neither of them liked regular commitments or organised fun, as nice as everyone was, so they never went back. There’s one queer bar in town that she’s never been to, and despite being a very online person, dating apps fill her with a very specific kind of dread – how do you market yourself to dates when you feel like a clam that got left out on the side too long a good 90 per cent of the time? At least her Twitter bubble is filled with awkward weirdos like her. You could meetanyoneon a dating app. Normal, well-adjusted people. Terrifying.
‘Certainly, can’t make it worse,’ Haf answers, hoping there hasn’t been a huge gap of silence while she tried to remember how to flirt.
‘Really, I think we’d be doing a public service to just kick it under the shelves. What do you think?’ Her eyes sparkle with mischief and secrets.
‘Ma’am, are you trying to peer-pressure me into committing a crime?’
She laughs, and it is music. ‘Only a little one. Tiny, really.’
Haf glances over at the cashier, who looks entirely unbothered by their calamity. ‘I think on this occasion, I’ll be good and tidy up the mess I made with my enormous backpack.’
‘Wow, you aren’t kidding. Are you going on an expedition?’ the stranger says, eyeing up Haf’s luggage. ‘North Pole, perhaps?’
‘Something like that.’
Together, they manage to roughly reform the display of books, matching the other tables’ pyramid layout with the biggest piles in the middle. Haf can’t stop looking at her out of the corner of her eye. She’s careful, straightening the edges with her delicate fingers and making sure the shiniest copies are at the top. Her rich dark hair falls forward over her face, like a river of dark bitter chocolate.
‘Thanks for helping me. And I promise that when I do plan to engage in petty crime, I’ll be sure to call on you.’
In reply, the woman winks. Shefucking winks.A natural, no-squinting wink. Haf melts.
All the air has been sucked out of the room and only they exist. What do you say to someone who has just winked at you? But she said she’d call on her. Now would be the right time to ask for her number, but the words dry in Haf’s mouth. This woman looks so beautiful, so put together. What does Haf have to offer but a gigantic backpack and the occasional awkward comeback?
The woman picks a book off the shelf and reads the back, and Haf feels a sense of loss, like she missed the moment to keep talking to her. What would it feel like to be touched by her? For this woman to appraise her, stroke her, whisper things against her ear. What would it be like to kiss those nearly smirking lips, to bite softly on the lower one?
Snap out of it, she thinks, taking a deep breath.
