Chương 10: Chapter Nine

I made one more stop before home. The Dusty Page was wedged between a dry cleaner and a nail salon on a block I'd walked a hundred times without really seeing. The sign was hand-painted in beautiful calligraphy that had slightly faded. This was one of the small treasures you would miss if you were looking at your phone, which I usually was. Today though, I was looking at everything. A bell jingled as I pushed open the door and the smell hit me immediately.

Ink and old paper and with it something warm and cinnamon with a hint of coffee. If I could recreate smells like I could colors, I would want every candle to smell like this. The store was narrow but deep and stretched much further back than I expected. A fat orange tabby cat was asleep at the register, one paw draped over the edge like he'd fallen asleep on his shift.

"Don't mind Hemingway," A kind voice called out from behind the shelves.

"He's very busy doing nothing." The man who emerged was slightly stooped, with white hair and wire rimmed glasses sitting crooked on his nose. He wore a cardigan over a button-down, and rolled both sets of sleeves to the elbow. Behind his ear was a classic yellow number 2 pencil. His face was story of joy as laugh and smile lines covered his every feature.

"Can I help you find something or are you the browsing type?"

"Browsing, I think. But can you point me toward notebooks or journals?"

"Right around the corner here, if you make it to crosswords you've gone too far." I smiled and walked in awe through the jungle of trinkets, book marks, pens, and everything you could ever want in a book. Amazingly I only was about five foot away from where I started when I ran straight into journals. There were journals of every size and shape and I was deciding between a shimmering purple when a shimmer of gold caught my eye. It was a really nice supple leather.

The pages were creamy and thick enough that ink wouldn't bleed from one side to the other. And the gold embossed font reflected the store lights almost as if a quest item was showing itself to the player.

'Hello I'm here. Come pick me up,' it seemed to call. In an elegant swooping font the cover read, "Definitely Not Evil Plans." I laughed as my fingers ran over the cover. This was exactly what I wanted. This would be the perfect place to recount my process and journey in getting superpowers. And then, maybe, getting a little bit of revenge. I decided that the rest of this store needed to be investigated and so I found the older man again and asked, "Where is your fantasy section?" He eyed me.

"Fantasy or romantasy?"

"Either" I challenged with a smile. He chuckled, "Fair enough, head on back this way. Take a left at mysteries and past scifi, dragons will show you the way." He smiled and the laugh lines deepened into something warm and I immediately wished I had a grandfather like this man.

"I'm Art by the way. If you need anything just holler. Or don't. Sometimes getting lost is the best way to find yourself." This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it I wandered the shelves that were organized in a way I can only describe as "whimsically" and with almost no relationship to the Dewey Decimal System. Hand-painted signs pointed to different sections, "Dragons and Destiny", "Heartbreak and Healing", "Definitely Judge A Book By These Covers."

I found the fantasy section and stopped. The Throne of Light Series was all there with a sign that read, If you only read one Romantasy series this decade, make it this one. -M"Ah, I see you've found my guilty pleasure." I turned. Art had materialized beside me a stack of books in his arms.

"Don't mind me. Just restocking some things."

"You've read these?" I asked, holding up the first book.

"Three times through." He attempted to push his glasses back with a shoulder.

"My wife got me hooked. She was a fantasy reader. I was more of a Hemingway man, hence the cat. But Margaret insisted and Margaret was always right about books. And about most other things too. A sad smile overtook his jolly features for barely a moment.

"I'm on the last one," I said.

"Audiobook. The narrator is incredible. I've listened to it almost three times through."

"Oh the narrator is a treasure. But, you should try the physical copies. There are footnotes that the narrator misses entirely." He jostled his stack of books and set them down on the ground so that he could pull the third book off of the shelf and flipped through. Sure enough at the bottom edge was a footnote from Celeste's point of view that I'd never seen.

"Wow," I said.

"I had no idea."

"That's what bookstores are for." He said with a knowing smile before tapping a finger to his nose and leaving the stack of books behind as he walked away. I glanced down and had to catch my balance. The stack of books were all educational things. Cookbooks, sewing, how to do origami, and on the top was a book about code deciphering. Codebreaking & Cryptograms: A Handbook of Codes, Ciphers And The Key To Secret Writing.

Impulsively, I grabbed all four hardcovers of The Throne of Light series and the codebreaking book. After checking out, I waved to Art and Hemingway, promising to visit again soon and left feeling lighter than I could ever remember feeling. Back at the apartment, I had to make an unknown number of trips up the stairs to my apartment with armfuls of impulsive retail therapy. Once it was all unloaded I stood in the middle of the mess and tried to figure out where to start.

I decided to start with the groceries, which only seemed logical and unpaused the audiobook on my phone. I let the narrator's voice fill the silence as I unpacked.

"Careon's hands were cold as ice as they wrapped around her throat.

'You thought you could escape me?' He growled.

'You thought you could run?'" Damn this guy is a fucknugget I do not understand the booktok obsession over him. I laughed for the third time as the once plain and unpopular girl turned heroine and subject to a reverse harem struggled to escape only to once more flee to the arms of the very obvious not-villain whom she hated for the entirety of book one. I loved these books, the trashier the better. I plugged my new toaster and coffee maker in, ignoring the pamphlets that came with each.

I mean, come on, a toaster has, like, one button and a lever. Who needs a manual for that? As my coffee brewed and my breakfast, (more like late lunch now,) toasted I began emptying things from bags and putting them away.