.

thing. Or, at the very least, that you could get the same enjoyment from them.

      It wasn’t that I didn’t like new technologies. I did. I read ebooks almost as often as I read paper books. It was that it felt like the difference between masturbating and having sex. Masturbation was fun, but it was certainly not the same as having another warm, aroused body pressed against you.

      Just the thought made me think of Kyle, and I shivered a little.

      ‘Aha,’ Lily said, pointing one ring-laden finger my way. Her bright-blue, perfectly kohled eyes flashed at me. ‘You were having sex.’

      ‘I said I was sorry.’

      ‘You didn’t,’ she said.

      ‘I’m sorry?’

      ‘It’s fine. I’m only a little jealous.’ Lily handed me the change bag from the bank. I started counting bills into the register while she leaned on her elbows on the counter. ‘Really,’ she said. ‘I mean … who wouldn’t want to be here opening the store we own together while you’re off getting pinned to the bed? Me, I’ve run through every vibrator in my toy box at least twice in the last week, and I’m still bored out of my mind.’

      ‘What happened to that –?’ I gestured with my stack of bills. Apparently I couldn’t think of names and count fives at the same time. ‘The girl with the motorcycle. She was –’

      ‘No,’ she said, tugging one shiny red curl between her fingers. It sproinged back up perfectly when she let go. ‘Just no. Don’t even go there.’

      Lily had the worst taste in women. Not physically. They were always hot as hell. But emotionally they were always just shy of bat-shit crazy. Some of them weren’t even shy of it. I’d hoped the new girl would be different. She’d had a motorcycle, sure, which hadn’t boded well for Lily in the past, but she’d also seemed nice enough. And she’d clearly been into Lily. She’d even come into the store and bought a book, some ancient tome on early motorcycles.

      ‘Women suck, but I’m fine,’ Lily said.

      Despite her brave words, she was hurting. Lily believed in true love and happy ever after more than anyone I’d ever known. It sucked that she had such a hard time finding it. I wanted to offer her something. Condolences. Dating advice. The number of a totally hot girl who would be just perfect for her. But considering how screwed up my own relationship was at the moment – even the fact that I was suddenly thinking about Kyle in terms of something as serious as a relationship was a sign of things being way, way off-kilter – I wasn’t in any position to offer her anything beside a heartfelt ‘I’m sorry’.

      She waved a hand at me, her nails perfectly polished in a blue-black hue that somehow matched her shirt exactly. Some days I dreamed I would wake up and have the kind of put-togetherness that Lily did. The horrible thing was I’d seen her get ready for things. What took her five minutes would have taken me five hours and turned me into a wailing mess with nail polish all over my bathroom and mascara smeared across both cheeks. She just had those skills somehow. I swear women like Lily are born knowing how to get their hair to behave perfectly just by looking at it sternly in the mirror.

      An old boyfriend once asked me if I kept my face natural because I wanted to show off how I looked without make-up or because I was lazy. I didn’t have the courage to admit that I kept my face ‘natural’ because I didn’t know how to do anything else with it.

      Lily raised her hand again and flipped off what I imagined to be a whole wall of former exes. The blonde biker chick. The beautiful volleyball player who’d had a penchant for threesomes. The teacher who’d shown up at Leather Bound in her glasses and her button-up cardigans, but who Lily said fucked like a wildcat in heat. And those were just the ones I could remember recently.

      ‘Fuck love,’ Lily said.

      ‘Fuck love,’ I said. Right now, I couldn’t agree more. Love, or maybe the lack of love, seemed to screw everything up.

      ‘Maybe you just need a quickie,’ I said. ‘A loving fuck to say fuck love?’

      This time she flipped me off, her throaty laugh filling the front half of the store with sound. ‘Seriously? Last time I did that, I almost ended up in Vegas saying “I do” to a vegan wiccan in front of a guy who didn’t look in the least like Elvis. Worst. Quickie. Ever.’

      I laughed with her, even though I felt my own throat close up a little as she went on.

      ‘I mean, can you seriously ever see me getting married? Little white dresses for both of us? House with a picket fence? Adopting kids or fighting over who gets to be the biological mom? Jesus.’

      Can you see me getting married? I thought. Because I certainly can’t. And, oh, Lily, my life is a little fucked up right now.

      I’d never wanted to get married. I could easily give my entire life to a bookstore that was barely making ends meet, but couldn’t seem to handle a relationship that required anything more than delicious sex and maybe dinner a couple of times a week.

      I used to think I just hadn’t met the right person, but now I wondered if something was wrong with me. Maybe I should think about getting married. Everything in my life was good, even if it was sometimes a little staid. Leather Bound was almost making enough money to keep us afloat. Lily and I worked well together. Kyle’s work as a tattoo artist was getting recognition. Our sex was great.

      ‘Actually,’ Lily said quietly after a moment. ‘Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.’

      For a second I thought I’d been speaking out loud. My hands shook as they slipped the bills into their proper places in the register.

      ‘OK, stop talking,’ I said. ‘Or I’ll have to start the count over again.’

      It wasn’t entirely true, but I needed her to be quiet because my heart was thumping too hard in the hollow of my chest and, every time Lily said one more thing, I wanted to cry. Uncertainty and confusion do that to me sometimes. It’s the little things that get me. When things are big and bad, I’m all strong and stoic on the outside. But when they’re small and confusing and complicated, well, just bring on the tears.

      When our friend Conrad died a couple months back, I didn’t cry when he announced that he was sick, I didn’t cry at his hospice bed and I didn’t cry at the funeral. But when he shipped us a box of all the books he’d bought from Leather Bound over the years with a note thanking us for all the beautiful stories we’d given him, I fell down on my knees and wept until I’d ruined the letter with my tears.

      Unwilling to think about that, I decided I’d tell Lily about my morning. Maybe she’d have more insight into the situation than I did.

      ‘Hey, Lil,’ I started. ‘Kyle asked me to –’

      At just that moment, the front door opened, and Lily and I both looked up in surprise.

      My first thought was a very articulate ‘I thought I locked that.’

      My second thought was simply, ‘Yum.’

      * * *

      Despite the fact that Leather Bound is a brick-and-mortar store, we don’t get a lot of early-morning walk-ins. Probably because we only stock rare and old books. Obscure first editions and things signed by dead people are our speciality. So, things that people don’t typically browse for. They call ahead, see if we have what they want and, if we do, they come by and pick it up. If we don’t have what they want, I do my best to get it for them. It’s something I’m known for, finding the obscure.

      When we do get walk-ins, they’re one of two kinds. The first is older men – book dealers, collectors, professors, the generation that still likes to fondle the books and eschew all technology, including the phone if they can. Lily calls them our Grounders, because she’s afraid to get up on a ladder in her short skirts, in case she gives one of them a heart attack.

      The other kind are the Velvets. Also Lily’s name. They come in, usually looking