First Chapter: Booklover
Chapter One: Where Jamie, one of our heroes, realizes he may have a book kink
“I can’t be . . . who you need me to be,” Raya whispered. Her voice traced and etched lines in my chest, as though her words were carving holes into my heart.
“I don’t need you to be anything other than yourself,” I whispered back.
She shook her head, tendrils of brown hair falling out of her short ponytail. I resisted the urge to sweep them away from her face. “You deserve more. You always have.”
“Don’t I deserve the one person in my life who makes me laugh? Don’t I deserve the person I want to see when I wake up in the morning?” I reached for her, hoping that if I could only—
Something wet pushes into my stomach just as Brett is getting his head out of his ass and realizing how much he loves Raya, and a moment later a flash of black and white is knocking Brett’s perfect grand gesture right out of my hands. “Darla!” I shout. I dive to rescue my e-reader from the hard cement floor of the barn where it’s landed. Good thing I have a case on it.
Darla just stares at me, unrepentant. Of course she does—she’s a cow. Chewing her cud and getting me to give up the hay I’m holding under my left arm are a lot more important to her than whether two fictional characters get their happily ever after.
Dad chuckles from a few feet away. “Jamie, I keep telling you not to read while we feed the cows,” he says. “Remember that book one of them knocked right into a water bowl when you were a kid? You were crushed. Your mom and I hunted for months lookin’ for a replacement.”
I grimace as I finish handing Darla her hay. She tilts her head at me approvingly. “Oh, I remember that. It was that out-of-print book I loved that I found at the used bookstore.” I cried for six days, and Mom and Dad never did find another copy. “You’re right. I shouldn’t be reading in the barn. But I need to leave for my book club meeting soon.” I’ve already read the book we’ll be discussing, Lost Cause by Alyssa Samuel, a few dozen times. But it’s one of my favorites, so I wanted to give myself a refresher.
“That’s right.” Dad glances down at his watch. “You better get going. Don’t want you to be late. Think you have time to come by later this week and help me out with the gutter cleaner? It’s been acting up again.”
I don’t have time, actually. I have a test in a few days and a paper that’s almost due, plus shifts at my on-campus library job. But I just paste a smile across my face and say, “Sure, Dad,” because this guy really did once call twenty-two bookstores after a cow tried to eat one of my paperbacks. He nods and waves me out of the barn, and I take off before I end up sucked into another set of chores that make me late for my meeting.
Mom and my sister Lissie are both out somewhere, so I have the house to myself as I shower and get ready to go back to Burlington. I live in the dorms at Burlington University, but with all the help my parents need on their dairy farm it sometimes feels like I still live back at home with them. My roommate Jeremy reminds me of this, while I’m pulling on a clean pair of jeans, by texting:
do u still live with me? Haven’t seen you in days. COME HOME PLEASE
I quickly message back:
Be back tonight. I have my first book club meeting this afternoon
My phone rings as I’m packing up my backpack. “Did you really join a romance novel book club?” Jeremy demands.
“Of course I did. I told you I was going to.”
“That’s cool, I guess. The one in that LGBTQ-inclusive bookstore on Church Street?”
“Yeah, Vino and Veritas.” Jeremy and I are both bi, and it didn’t take us long to find V and V after it first opened. I was a lot more interested in the store than Jeremy, though. I’m studying literature and I plan to become a librarian one day after I get my grad degree in library science. Jeremy’s basically majoring in sex and sleep.
“Maybe I should have joined too. Then I’d actually get to see you. I don’t understand why you want to talk about books on a Saturday, though. Don’t you get enough of that in class?”
“Nah. Most of the classes at Burlington U aren’t exactly focusing on the contemporary romance genre. The other lit majors would probably laugh their asses off if they turned on my e-reader.”
“Huh. Aren’t all books just books?”
Jeremy is naïve in the best possible ways sometimes. “Literary snobbery is weird, bro. Anyway, I should be back on campus in time for dinner if you want to grab some together. What are you doing this afternoon?”
“I should work on my stats homework. But I don’t wanna. I’ll probably see if Sheila or Robert want to hang out.”
I remember Robert from an awkward morning-after a few weeks ago. The other name doesn’t ring a bell. “Which one is Sheila?”
“I met her last night.”
She’ll probably be gone before I even get the chance to lay eyes on her. Jeremy and I are complete opposites in so many ways. I spend any free time I have reading novels about true love. Jeremy spends most of his free time trying to find his next hookup.
“I gotta go,” I tell Jeremy. “I don’t want to be late.” It’s a fifty-minute drive to Burlington from where my parents live in Morse’s Line, Vermont, and I really don’t want to miss this meeting. Plus, I don’t like thinking about how much free time Jeremy has compared to me. His family lives almost three hundred miles away, in Connecticut, and they pay for him to go to school, so he doesn’t even have a job. He can spend the rest of the day lying on the couch in our dorm room, studying or hooking up or reading or messaging or playing video games, with no fear that his father is going to call him and ask him for help with a broken gutter cleaner.
“Cool,” Jeremy responds. “Don’t get stuck behind any tractors.” Then he hangs up.
I really hope I don’t. That’s how I ended up late to a philosophy class two weeks ago.
The drive back to Burlington is mostly interstate. I flirt with the speed limit while I blast old Green Day songs and scenery of melting snow and mud rolls by me. March has definitely come to Vermont. We call this time of the year “mud season” for a reason. Winter fades away so slowly here that the snow we’ve accumulated for months becomes one with the ground and turns into globs of coffee-colored wet dirt everywhere you go. The mud piles freeze and then unfreeze, depending on the day. At least we’re past most of the worst temperatures of the winter. It’s a full forty-seven degrees today—practically balmy, and stubborn slits of sunshine are doing their best to break through a strong cloud cover. Just the fact that we’re above freezing temperatures is enough to have me breaking out in song with Billie Joe Armstrong. You really haven’t lived until you’ve milked cows in subzero temperatures.
I can’t wait for summer. Summer, in my opinion, is the very best time to be in Vermont. It’s when the whole state seems to wake up and come to life after a dark winter of hibernation. Summer here is swimming in rivers, paddle-boarding and boating on Lake Champlain, eating maple ice cream at Bob’s Creemee Stand, and green grass and hills as far as you can see. Winters in Vermont are long, so you have to drink in every moment of summer you can.
The only problem is that I haven’t told Dad yet about the job offer I got for this summer. Every time I try to open my mouth and say something, I see his face the day Aaron left. I envision the hard, wrinkled lines of sadness that pulled at his mouth and eyes . . . and then my lips just freeze up around the words. I still have over a month before I have to make up my mind about whether I’m taking the position or not, but the weather right now is reminding me that a month is going to go by quickly. I need to grow up and talk to Dad soon.
Not today, though. Today I get to sit around and talk about one of my favorite books on the planet in one of my favorite places on the planet. I steer the car off I-89 at the Burlington exit and pass the street I normally take to get to Moo U, which is what everyone calls Burlington University. Church Street isn’t far from the school, and it’s only a few minutes before I’m pulling my truck into a parking spot a short walk away from V and V.
Church Street is a pedestrians-only street, and every time I set foot on it, I stop and take a moment to just stare at everything around me. On the rare occasions I came here with my family when I was a kid, Church Street seemed wild and magical. Morse’s Line, where I grew up, is a super tiny town right on the U.S. border with Canada. Coming to the big city of Burlington was always an exciting adventure, especially if Church Street was involved. Right now I’m looking down a long, bricked street packed with stores and restaurants on either side. The iconic church that gives the street its name is a few blocks away, and I see more people moving in and around one another than I’d see in a year at the Morse’s Line Quick Stop. Signs are everywhere advertising musical events, sales, and the beloved Burlington Farmers Market. Church Street has always felt like a place of wonder and possibility to me. I thought that feeling might shift or fade once I moved to Burlington for college, but it hasn’t. If anything, it’s gotten stronger.
I draw in a breath and pull in the scents of The Maple Factory, a bakery and cafe that features maple in almost everything they make. Their crullers are delicious, and the place just happens to be right next to Vino and Veritas, so that’s convenient. I’m definitely grabbing a maple cruller after I’m done talking about Alyssa Samuel’s plot lines.
I quickly move through the groups of people surrounding me and step into Vino and Veritas. V and V is a combination bookstore and wine bar, with the books on one side of the space and the wine bar on the other. I’m a few months away from being able to order much in the wine bar, and I’m not sure it’s open for the day yet anyway, so I navigate through the entrance on my right-hand side and into the bookstore. The first breath I take inside of the store is almost as good as the one I just took outside. It’s that wonderful mix of old paper and leather and vanilla that every good bookshop smells like. That smell is part of the reason I knew I’d love this place the first time I ever walked in. The look and feel of it was another. Vino and Veritas is full of leather couches, soft jazz music, warm-looking old wood, and books everywhere.
I could spend every hour of every day here, if only I had that kind of time. Which I don’t. Because I’m a full-time student with a part-time job and a family that requires me to be on speed dial for dairy farm emergencies. It’s truly amazing I even made time for this meeting.
I pull my tuque (French Canadian for “beanie”—living right on the Quebec border does things to your vocabulary) off my head and start heading toward the circle of couches and chairs near the back where the inaugural meeting of The Booklover Club is supposed to take place. I make a quick stop at a shelf of new titles because the store’s got at least three that I’ve been meaning to read. I grab one of them, a nonfiction book about dairy farming, and I take a quick pause to wonder if my wallet can handle a bookstore binge. I’m still reading the inside of the jacket flap when I hear a voice behind me.
“Can I help you?”
I turn around and try not to do that thing Jeremy says I sometimes do, where I stand there staring at someone or something without speaking. In my defense, I think the problem comes from spending most of my childhood surrounded by cows. Sometimes I just forget how to people.
Especially when incredibly hot human beings are standing in front of me. Which is happening right now.
This guy looks exactly like Porter, one of my favorite book characters. He’s in Alyssa Samuel’s gay romance novel Lost Key, and right now I can’t help but wonder if he walked right off the pages of that book and into this store. The Porter lookalike in front of me has sharp, angular cheekbones sitting under hazel eyes and dirty blond hair and eyebrows. He’s got some scruffy wannabe-beard-but-it’s-not-there-yet hair around his chin that’s straight out of the Vermont tourist brochures. His head is covered by a pilling green tuque, and his skin is this olive tone that should be next to impossible for any white guy to have in Vermont in March. He’s wearing a flannel shirt and jeans, which is pretty much the stereotypical Vermont uniform, but somehow on him it manages to look cool and unique.
And as if all that weren’t enough? He’s carrying a stack of books.
Some men dream of seeing their perfect lover strutting around in hot lingerie or tiny speedos. I dream of my perfect lover naked, with a stack of books strategically placed in front of them.
“I . . . uh . . . .” I try to remind myself that I’d like to be able to come back to this store again, so it would be great if I didn’t make a total ass of myself in front of someone whose nametag suggests that they work here. Too bad I can’t read it—it’s gotten scrunched up in a crease in his flannel shirt. “I’m here for The Booklover Club?”
Up until now, the Porter lookalike has had a fairly neutral facial expression. Not angry or anything, but not really happy either. Now the corners of his mouth move up into an immediate smile and his eyes brighten with excitement.
“Hey, cool, man. I’m one of the founders of the group. Great to see more people are here for it. We’ll be meeting right over there.” He points to a circle of couches and chairs. “I’m just going to go grab us a cheese plate from the wine bar. I’ll be right over.”
I nod stupidly and put down the book I’m holding. He turns around, and now his butt is taunting me as it moves across the room.
I usually don’t mind that I never have time to date. I figure I’ll have plenty of opportunity for that once I get to grad school, which will probably be in a much bigger city with a much bigger dating pool anyway. And a lot fewer cows to potentially interrupt any plans I might have.
But right now, as I’m watching the guy-who-is-not-Porter walk away, I let myself wish for just a second that my life was different. Because it isn’t every day that your wet dream appears in front of you carrying a stack of books.