SHELF LIFE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FOUR

The forecast had said scattered showers, which Ivy now understood to be meteorologist code for biblical event, given the way the sky had opened up somewhere around seven and shown no signs of closing.

She hadn't planned to be at the store this late. Neither, apparently, had Nash, who'd shown up at six-forty with a box of festival flyers and the vague, doomed optimism of a man who thought he could drop something off and leave in under ten minutes. That had been ninety minutes and one flash flood warning ago.

"I could just make a run for it," he said now, standing at the front window, watching Maple Street disappear under sheets of water. "It's not that far."

"It's four hundred feet of open sidewalk in a lightning storm. You'd arrive across the street looking like you fell into a lake, and then you'd have to reopen your shop wet, and honestly, the visual of that is the only thing getting me through this evening."

"Generous of you to think of my morale."

"I think of it constantly," Ivy said, and went back to the stockroom, where forty boxes of festival tote bags sat un-inventoried, because apparently the universe had decided that if she was going to be trapped with her rival for the evening, she might as well be productive about it.

Nash followed her in, which she hadn't exactly invited but also hadn't exactly not, and picked up a box without being asked, which she found more disarming than she wanted to admit.

"Tote bags," he said, reading the side of the box. "Between the Lines: est. six years of stubbornness."

"My grandmother's design. She had them made the year she opened the shop. Said if you were going to fail at something, you should at least fail with good merchandise."

"Did she fail?"

"No." Ivy pulled the tape off another box, more carefully than the question deserved. "She ran it for twenty-two years. I took over when she got sick. She died eight months after I did, so I don't actually know if she thought I was doing it right, which is either freeing or the worst thing that's ever happened to me, depending on the day."

She hadn't meant to say all of that. It had just come out, the way things do at eight-forty on a rain-drowned Tuesday when you're both trapped and slightly punchy and the only sound in the building is water on glass.

Nash didn't say I'm sorry, which she appreciated, because everyone said I'm sorry and it always sat there uselessly, like a coaster nobody needed. Instead he said, "What would she think? If she saw the shop now."

Ivy considered it, turning a tote bag over in her hands. "She'd say I over-order the literary fiction and under-order the romance, which is objectively true and I refuse to fix it out of spite. She'd say the reading nook needs new beanbags. She'd probably like you," Ivy added, before she could stop herself, "which is the most annoying part of this whole thing."

"Why's that annoying?"

"Because it would mean she was wrong about at least one thing, and she was never wrong about anything, and I'd have no idea what to do with that information."

Nash laughed — not the easy, performing laugh from the meeting, something smaller and more real — and sat down on an overturned crate like he had nowhere else to be, which, currently, he didn't.

"My sister had a health scare eighteen months ago," he said, out of nowhere, the way you offer something back when someone's handed you a piece of themselves and left you holding it. "Nothing — she's fine, she's completely fine now. But there was about a week where nobody was sure, and I spent it in a hospital hallway in Midtown, still taking calls from a job I hated, closing a deal for a skincare brand's rebrand while my sister was down the hall getting test results. And I remember thinking, very clearly, if she's okay, I am not doing this anymore."

"So you bought a bookstore."

"So I bought a bookstore." He turned the crate's edge under his palm, not quite meeting her eyes. "Which everyone in my old office thought was a supremely stupid decision, by the way. My old boss called it 'a very expensive midlife crisis with a great logo.'"

"He's not wrong about the logo."

"I know. I paid a lot for that logo."

"It shows." She said it without much heat this time, and he heard the difference, she could tell, because the corner of his mouth did the thing again — the almost-smile, filed away.

"I didn't do the market research," he admitted. "Didn't check who else was on the street, didn't think about it as competition at all, honestly, because I wasn't thinking like a businessman. I was thinking like a guy who needed to build something that wasn't going to end up in a hospital hallway making him feel like his life was a Q4 report. I just wanted to sell books and not hate my Mondays. I didn't think about who I might be stepping on to do it."

Outside, the rain had eased into something steadier, less apocalyptic, more like ordinary weather that had simply decided to stay a while. Ivy sat down on the crate across from him, close enough that their knees nearly touched, and found she didn't especially want to move.

"For what it's worth," she said, "I don't actually think you're trying to run me out. I think you're a guy with a very expensive midlife crisis and a great logo who happened to land forty feet from someone with six years of stubbornness and a chewed-up ballpoint pen."

"Is that better or worse than the villain version?"

"Honestly? Worse. The villain version was easier to be mad at."

He looked at her for a long moment, rain still ticking against the window behind him, and said, quietly, like it cost him something to say it plainly, "I don't want to run you out, Ivy. I want to figure out how there's room on one street for both of us. I just don't know yet if that's actually possible, or if I'm telling myself a nice story so I don't have to feel like the villain."

It was, she thought, the most honest thing anyone connected to The Gilded Page had said to her since the banner went up.

"Well," she said, standing, mostly because she needed somewhere to put the feeling currently taking up too much space in her chest, "the rain's letting up. You should go before it starts again and I have to watch you fall in a lake after all."

"Right." He stood too, close enough that the stockroom, which had never felt small before, felt suddenly and specifically small. "Thanks for the shelter. And the honesty. And letting me sit on a crate in your stockroom for an hour and a half emotionally unloading like you're my therapist."

"I'm billing you. Festival budget."

"Fair."

He picked up his now-thoroughly-unnecessary box of flyers, paused at the stockroom door, and looked back at her with an expression she didn't have a name for yet, though she suspected she'd be thinking about it later, alone, in a way she wasn't ready to examine.

"Goodnight, Ivy."

"Goodnight, Nash."

He let himself out into the damp, quiet street. Ivy stood in the stockroom a moment longer, surrounded by forty boxes of tote bags that said six years of stubbornness, and thought, with real alarm, that stubbornness might not be enough to get her through this festival intact.

Marmalade wound around her ankles, purring, entirely too pleased with herself.

"Don't," Ivy told the cat. "Don't you dare look smug at me right now."

The cat looked smug at her anyway.