Atramentum Read online

  It had been a long time since Joss had felt the heart-racing flutter of attraction that rippled in her chest now, and she cleared her throat as she pushed herself to her feet. She held out her hand and did her best to appear nonchalant as she said, “I take it you’re George’s mom?”

  The woman ran a hand through her hair and nodded. “Yeah. That’s my monster.” She smiled up at Joss as she shook her hand. “Thank you for catching her.”

  Joss chuckled. If anything, George had caught her, but she was more than willing to let that be their little secret. “It wasn’t a problem at all. I’m Joss Perrault.”

  “Maeve Dylan.” Maeve looked at the open trailer behind Joss and the pile of clothes strewn over the ground. “George tackled you, didn’t she?”

  “No.” Joss lied, feeling protective of her new four-legged friend. Not to mention her ego. “Not at all. I, uh…tripped over my shoelaces.” They both looked down at her feet, and Joss groaned, clearly caught as the laces of her trail running shoes were still neatly double-knotted. She smiled sheepishly and amended, “It was really more of an energetic hug.”

  Maeve chuckled and shook her head. “That certainly sounds like George. I am so sorry about this. If you take your clothes to the cleaner’s in town, I’ll have them put it all on my account.”

  “That’s not necessary.” Joss crouched down and gathered her shirts. The plastic covering them all had done its job, and they were as pristine as they had been before George ran into her. “See.” She held them up by the hangers and gave them a little shake. “They’re as good as new.”

  “Still…”

  The small crinkle between Maeve’s eyebrows was positively adorable, and Joss smiled as she shook her head. “If they need it once I get them out of these bags, I’ll take them in.” She hooked the hangers around her left hand and draped them over her shoulder. “So, you and George live up the drive by the lake?”

  “We do.” Maeve nodded. A small, apologetic smile curled her lips as she ducked her head and added, “I’m sorry about Helen.”

  Joss nodded. “Thank you.”

  “Are you her daughter?” Maeve rolled her eyes at herself and shook her head. “Sorry. I don’t mean to be rude, it’s just that you look like her and I haven’t seen you around before…”

  Joss waved off the apology. “It’s fine. Helen was my aunt. I was down in LA, didn’t make it back much because of work. But with everything that happened…” Her voice trailed off and she shrugged, not wanting to burden Maeve with the gory details of it all. “I decided to move back here and give running Atramentum a try.”

  “It’s a lovely bookstore,” Maeve said. “I’ve been in there a few times and have always found something wonderful to read.”

  “I can’t take any credit for that, but thanks. Maybe I’ll see you in there sometime.”

  Maeve smiled, the simple expression making her entire face glow, and nodded. “Maybe you will.”

  Joss was trying to figure out how to respond when she was saved by the throaty rumble of a truck making its way along her driveway. She sighed as a bright yellow paneled truck rolled into view, both grateful for the save and sorry that her time with Maeve would be coming to an end.

  Feeling like she needed to say something, however, Joss cleared her throat and explained lamely, “I ordered some new furniture for the place.”

  “Of course.” Maeve nodded as she reached for George’s collar. “Then we’ll get out of your way so you can finish moving in. Again, I am so sorry about this. And, please, if you need to take your clothes in to be dry-cleaned, have them put it on my account.”

  “It’s fine,” Joss assured her with a smile. “Really.” She reached out to give George’s head a quick pat goodbye. “Later, bud.”

  George licked her hand and then looked up at Maeve as the delivery truck stopped behind Joss’ jeep.

  Still gripping George’s collar, Maeve took a small step backward. “It was nice to meet you.”

  “Yeah.” Trying to appear nonchalant, Joss went to run a hand through her hair, and she groaned when her fingers stuck. She had pulled it back into a ponytail for the day, and had just screwed it all up in her failed attempt to be suave. She sighed as the chestnut-colored strands she had dislodged fluttered around her face. Smooth, Perrault, she mocked herself even as she replied, “You too.”

  Maeve smiled and waved as she turned to lead George toward the small dirt path she had come down on.

  “Ms. Perrault?” the delivery driver called out.

  Joss nodded as she set her clothes back onto the ground. She pulled the rubber band from her hair, and combed her fingers through the wavy strands as she put it back up. “That’s me.”

  He ran a finger down the manifest clipped to his clipboard. “You ordered a corner sofa, six bar stools, a television stand, coffee table, and a mattress?”

  Joss nodded. “Yep. That’s it.”

  “You wanna show me where you want all of this?”

  “Yeah,” Joss said, glancing at the path Maeve and George had come down as she led the delivery guy up to the porch, and she was sorry to see that her new neighbors had already disappeared back into the woods. She shook her head and refocused her attention on the burly deliveryman who was waiting for her to tell him where she wanted them to put everything. “It’ll all go in here…”

  Three

  Even though there were still boxes and bins scattered around the cottage waiting to be unpacked, Joss was at Atramentum by eight the next morning. She had arranged with UPS for all the deliveries that had been held over the last few weeks to be delivered that morning, and while she would have liked one more day to settle into her new life, she had work to do. With the peak summer season beginning in eleven days, she needed to make sure that the shelves were stocked and the store was ready for the glut of tourists and weekend-warriors that would soon be descending upon the town.

  Traffic on Summit Avenue behind her was light as she made her way up the sidewalk to the pale beige stone and glass façade of Atramentum. The wooden sign above the door—white circle with a bright fuchsia, typeset-style A in the middle of it that hung from a black metal bar—creaked as she slipped her key into the lock into the black front door, and she studied her reflection in the glass as she turned it over. Her normally vibrant, gold-flecked brown eyes were dulled, muted by the transparency of her makeshift mirror and the dim morning light, and her hair was a mass of flyaway strands tickling her face as it billowed with the breeze. The sleeves of her fitted flannel that she had rolled to her forearms were pulled closer to her elbows as she tucked her hair behind her ears, and the chunky steel Tag on her left wrist that Helen had given her when she graduated from UCLA slid as high up her arm as the loose band allowed. Her fingertips brushed against her dark wash jeans as she tried to shake her watch back into place, and she sighed as she pushed the door open.

  Right, let’s do this, she told herself as she walked into the store.

  Willy Shakes was sitting on the register near the door waiting for her when she flipped on the lights, and Joss smiled as she tossed her keys onto the counter beside him. “What’s shakin’, Mr. Shakes?” she asked as she scratched his head.

  Willy purred and turned his head into her touch, chasing her hand whenever she tried to pull away.

  “Yeah, you won’t be left alone like that anymore,” she promised him. From the corner of her eye, she saw Dickens watching them from his usual spot atop the nearest bookcase, his back straight and his gaze perfectly reproachful, and she avoided making direct eye contact with him as she set her coffee cup beside Willy in case he saw it as a challenge and decided to attack her. “I’ll be right back,” she told them both, though only Willy seemed to care—Dickens just turned with a dramatic swish of his tail and curled himself into the small space at the end of the top shelf that was always kept empty for him to sleep in.

  Joss wandered deeper into the store, the soles of her running shoes silent against the pale gray tiled floor, and d
ragged a finger along the spines of the books that packed the deep mahogany shelves. The store smelled of parchment and ink and dust and loss, and Joss swallowed around a lump in her throat as she gathered Helen’s laptop from the office and took it back to the front counter.

  This area beside the register had been her domain when she worked at Atramentum all those years ago, and she was much more comfortable by the till than in the office. Eventually, she would have no choice but to make the small room at the back of the shop her own, but for now she was more than content to avoid it.

  She opened the laptop and powered it up, and sighed as it came to life with a beep and a hum. She sipped at her coffee as the computer booted, and then glanced at Willy as she double-clicked on the Excel icon. “Time to see where we’re at.”

  Willy yawned and hopped into the window to nap in the sunshine pouring through the store’s front windows.

  “That’s not very reassuring, you know,” Joss told him as she turned her attention to her computer screen.

  Willy snored contently on the counter beside her as she tried to decrypt Helen’s shorthand notes in her inventory log. Author’s names were easy enough pick out, along with the titles of their books and their publishers, but the letters and symbols that followed in the columns beyond did not make any sense at all.

  “What in the world were you doing with all of this?” she muttered to herself as she leaned back on her stool, hoping that the distance she put between her eyes and the screen would be enough to make sense of what she was looking at. It did not, and she groaned as she ran a hand through her hair. “Fuck. I'm going to have to totally redo this.”

  The bell above the front door rang, and she looked up with relief, grateful for the distraction. She expected to see a brown uniform and a stack of boxes on a dolly, and she could not contain her grin when she instead saw a familiar face smiling at her. Scott Heitz had been her first friend when she moved to Sky fourteen years before, and she shook her head as she slid off her stool and walked around the edge of the counter into his warm embrace. “Hey, you.”

  “Hey, Joss,” he murmured as he held her close.

  Scott’s arms tightened around her waist, and Joss sighed as she squeezed his neck one more time before pulling away. “You look good,” she said, giving him a quick once-over. His warm brown eyes were no longer hidden behind the curtain of dirty-blond hair he had sported the last time she had seen him, but his shy smile and lanky build were exactly the same as she remembered.

  “You do too.” He sighed and shook his head. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here for the funeral. Michelle and I were in France when we heard what happened, and we just couldn’t make it back in time.”

  “It’s okay,” Joss assured him with a small shrug, touched that he seemed so genuinely upset about not being there. “It was unexpected.”

  “Still…”

  “It’s fine, man. But I appreciate the sentiment.” Joss took a deep breath and flashed him a wry smile. “So, I guess I’m technically your boss now…”

  He hooked his thumbs in the front pocket of his jeans and smiled. “Assuming you’re not going to fire me.”

  “I’m not going to fire you,” Joss chuckled. “It’ll be nice to have a friend around.”

  “Yeah, it will. So, what do you need me to do, boss-lady?”

  “I like the sound of that.” Joss glanced around them. The cozy sitting area by the electric fireplace opposite the register at the front of the store was already nice and tidy thanks to the fact that the store had been closed for the last few weeks, so there was nothing immediately pressing to be taken care of. “It’s business as usual, really. UPS should be bringing a shit-ton of inventory they couldn’t deliver over the last couple weeks sometime this morning, and then it’s just stocking shelves and getting ready for the summer season.”

  He nodded. “Okay. You want me to make sure the stacks are in order?”

  “That’ll work. I’ll help, and you can catch me up on everything I’ve missed since I left.”

  Scott laughed. “Yeah. That’s a lot, you know. You’ve been gone for a long time…”

  “I know,” Joss murmured. It was strange, being in Atramentum with Scott like nothing had changed, but she felt an undeniable comfort in the familiarity of his presence as well. “So I guess that means you better get started.”

  Even though Sky was one of the most popular tourist destinations in the Rockies above Denver, it was a small-town at heart, which meant that everybody pretty much knew everybody’s business. Joss listened to the stories Scott was telling her about people they had gone to school with as they worked side by side, down one row and up the next, straightening books and rehoming those that were in the wrong place.

  “And how did you meet your wife?” Joss asked after Scott finished telling her about the mayor’s daughter’s lavish wedding the summer before.

  “She came in here one day looking for a book…” He shook his head as a positively awed smile lit his face. “She’s so far out of my league, it’s ridiculous. But, yeah, she was looking for a specific edition of The Giver, and when I was ringing her up, she handed me a business card with her phone number written on the back of it. It took me a few days to work up the guts to call her, but we met up for coffee one day after work, and the rest is history.”

  “That’s sweet.” Joss bumped him with her shoulder. “Good for you.”

  “Thanks. Anyway, what about you?”

  “Honestly man, I was working so much I didn’t even have time to meet anyone. It’d be nice,” Joss admitted with a wistful sigh, “but I think that’s something I’ve just kinda missed the boat on, ya know?”

  “You’re insane.”

  “No, I’m a realist.”

  Scott rolled his eyes. “Yeah, because thirty-three is definitely too old to find a good woman.”

  Joss laughed. After Helen, Scott had been the first person she had come out to the summer before her sophomore year of college, and they had spent their free time during her trips home playing wingman for the other on the weekends when Helen let them off work to go enjoy the town for the evening. Not that either of them ever did anything more than stare longingly at the pretty girls they desired from across the room, both of them far too chickenshit to make a move, but the intent to be a good friend had been there, and she knew by the way he was grinning at her now that it still was. “First of all, I doubt Sky is suddenly crawling with eligible lesbians, so whatever, and second of all, we just ran into each other again for the first time in years, and you’re giving me shit about this?”

  “Yeah, well…” He winked at her. “What can I say? I guess some friendships can just snap back on track like that like nothing happened.”

  “Yeah. I guess so—” The rest of Joss’ reply was interrupted by the sound of the bell above the front door jingling, and she left Scott to sort through the rest of the science fiction section on his own as she headed toward the front of the shop. She smiled at the UPS guy that was waiting by the register, scratching under Willy Shake’s chin as the cat purred contentedly. “Can I help you?”

  He stopped petting the cat and looked up at her with a questioning smile. “Ms. Perrault?”

  “That would be me.”

  “I’m Ben. Sorry to hear about Helen.”

  “Thanks,” Joss murmured as he picked up the electronic clipboard that was on the top of the boxes on his dolly and held it out to her.

  “Where do you want these?” he asked, motioning at the boxes.

  “You can just leave them up here by the register,” Joss said as she scribbled her name in the screen. “We’ll get them taken care of.”

  “You got it.” He wiggled the boxes off the dolly and left them at the edge of the counter. “Have a good day.”

  “You too.” She used a pair of scissors to cut through the tape on the top box and scanned its contents. She picked it up with a soft grunt and carried it back to Scott. “More sci-fi,” she announced as she dropped the box beside him
.

  “Yay,” he cheered sarcastically as he reached out and pulled it closer. He looked up at her and frowned. “What happened to your hand?”

  Joss looked down at her hands that were rubbed raw across the palms from when she had hit the dirt the day before. “Nothing. I was unloading my stuff yesterday and my neighbor’s dog took me out.” She rolled her eyes at Scott’s amused smirk. “Don’t ask. But, anyway, speaking of my new neighbor, what do you know about her?”

  Scott sat back on his heels and shook his head. “Not a lot.”

  “Yeah right. If there’s one thing people around here are good at, it’s gossip. How long did it take everybody to find out I was gay after I came out? Like a week?”

  “If that,” he chuckled. “But I’m serious. Nobody really knows a lot about her. She moved in during shoulder season just after Thanksgiving, and pretty much keeps to herself. Helen always spoke kindly of her, which you know as well as I do says a lot because Helen wasn’t a fool, and she seemed polite enough the few times she came into the shop when I was working. But, really, that’s it. Why?”

  Joss shrugged. “Just curious.” She had thought about Maeve Dylan more than she cared to admit in the time that had passed since they said goodbye. She knew Maeve was beautiful and kind and funny and that her dog was a complete character, but she had hoped that he would have something deeper to share.