July 31, 2002

I take it all back. I don't care what anyone says. I don't care what I said. Or thought. I'm not abnormal, I'm in love and I'm happy, and maybe those people with their demands for marriage and their parades aren't just an embarrassment to people like me. Maybe they have a point.

I need to stop babbling and start writing. I want to remember this, every moment, although really I don't think it'll be a problem even years from now.

Day before yesterday, closing time, Paige was finishing up some internet orders when I went over and pulled out the bag for the bank deposit.

"Want me to lock up?" she asked, and I said sure, might as well. She locked the back door and then came back to lock the front door, pull the blinds and turn off the "Open" sign. While she was doing this I pulled the cash tray out of the drawer and pretty much finished the counting; the total wasn't great.

She stood by the computer next to the cash register. "The books I just ordered, they were specific requests from people?"

"Mm-hm."

"Where does the inventory for the store itself come from?"

"Different places. You've seen people come in and trade a bunch of their used books for a store credit. Estate sales, sometimes. Donations."

"Donations? People just walk in and give you books?"

"Well, not so much 'walk in.' Usually it's someone who's moving, cleaning out the basement, or somebody's aunt died and the executors have discovered that she had about five hundred romance novels stashed in the spare room. They'll call and say, if you'll come take them away, you can have them."

"That's nice."

"Well, it's books. People don't like to just throw them out. They think it's wasteful, or they think about how much they loved reading when they were little, or they think how happy Aunt Edna would have been if she knew her books were finding good homes. All kinds of reasons why people want to keep books circulating."

"Yeah. I can see that. Wow, five hundred romance novels, though. Makes you wonder how happy Aunt Edna could have made some guy if she hadn't been devoting herself to Lance Studley the bodice-ripper."

I laughed, zipping up the bank bag. "You'd think that. But from what I read, it seems to work the other way around. Apparently romance novels actually stimulate a lot of people's love lives. People need their fantasies, you know."

"Yeah?" she said, as I closed the cash register and turned around. "What do you fantasize about?"

It was a deliberately provocative question asked in a deliberately provocative tone. There was a little sideways smile on her beautiful mouth. And she was blocking my exit from behind the counter.

A rush of feeling went through me, physical and emotional. I couldn't move and couldn't meet her eyes. And I couldn't dodge the question.

"I try not to," I said.

She nodded. "So you never think about – "

Very gently, very delicately, her cheek began to slide along mine.

I don't even know how it happened, just suddenly she was against the wall and I was against her, tasting her, smelling her, my hands full of her, my mouth full of her, not at all gentle or delicate.

I pulled away suddenly in near terror and she laughed and said, "You think that's something?"

She grabbed me and we rocked dangerously against the glass-topped counter, kissing passionately, my hands under her blouse, her thigh pressing mine.

When we broke for breath again she asked, "Your place or mine?"

"Mine's closer," I said.

Is there any way of describing this that doesn't sound like a romance novel cliché? The softness of her lips, the smoothness of her skin? I don't have to describe it, I'll remember every moment of that first time with her. At one point I said – or maybe gasped – "Magical"; and she gave me that wicked laugh and said, "Nah. This is better."

August 7, 2002

So here I am, facing the end of the bookstore as I know it, and even now my memory's too fuzzy to grasp clearly what happened. I'd swear off margaritas, but I really don't know how they could have caused it. They've just made me hazy about figuring out what exactly happened.

Paige came down just as I was ringing out a customer, waited until she'd left, and told me, "Dinner out tonight, and you're buying."

"I am? Why?"

She opened her arms from elbows to fingertips, a gesture of accomplishment, a CD between two fingers. "The upstairs inventory is done."

I applauded. "I thought that would take one person much longer!"

She handed me the CD. "I just need that store stamp now. A few of the books up there don't have it."

I panicked just a bit. "I thought I gave that to you when you first started."

"Not the name-and-address stamp. The one that says 'Ex Libris.'"

"We don't have – Oh, those." I knew exactly what she was talking about: a stamp well centered on the title page,the words 'Ex Libris' in a distinctive font. The end letters were the longest, with the letters getting shorter and shorter toward the middle, so that if you drew a pencil under the words of the stamp you'd be outlining a half-circle. There was no line for the owner's name, and the half circle under the words certainly wouldn't have allowed enough space to write a name, although if you had a little round stamp for an initial it might have worked. "That was something the previous owner put in. The big donor."

"The big donor?"

"She came in about seven or eight months ago and donated about 6,000 books. That's mostly what you've been inventorying."

"Six – thousand." It was funny, it was like she made a mental transition between the two words. When she said "Six," she was just starting to repeat what I said, in surprise; then there was the slightest pause, and when she said "thousand" it was like there was something fascinating about the word.

"It was amazing," I said. "I didn't even have to go get them. She pulled up to the back entrance with a small U-Haul. And you've seen their condition. Except for that stamp and a little wear on the corners, they look like new. If she'd tried to sell them to me for cash I'd have thought they were stolen, but she just gave them to me."

Paige nodded. "All kinds of reasons why folks want books circulated, isn't that what you last week? Did she say why she wanted these out in the general population?"

Normally, of course, I wouldn't have remembered one remark from someone I saw once months ago, but it's not every day that someone walks in and boosts your inventory by more than 50. "She said something about – her gift to the passionate people of the world. Something like that."

"Do you remember her name?"

"Dalayne, Dalayna, I think. I've never seen her since, you know. I started to fill out a receipt, and when I turned around she was gone."

"So let me guess," Paige said. "She's read 6,000 romance novels – she's got blonde curly hair and dressed all in pink frilly stuff, right?"

I laughed. "You should know better than that, from just the time you've been in here. We get all kinds. She was solemn. Straight dark hair, dark suit, very dark makeup. Kind of a goth business executive, if you can imagine that."

"Strangely enough, I can," Paige said. I bet she went through a goth period herself.

I told her that I'd been putting Dalayna's books in with the store's inventory relatively rapidly, but of course I wanted to inventory them first, and it was about that time when my staff started turning over and I could never keep anyone long enough to get through them all. Probably about a fifth of them, however, had been logged and sold, another fifth were in the store, and the rest were still upstairs. When I could get them downstairs, they flew off the shelves. People love getting a new-looking book at a used-book price. Even when my regulars began showing up less and sales dropped off, the books from the big donation moved well.

Paige asked if she could take off an hour early, said she had some research that she needed to do. I said yes. And then just before she left, she asked the oddest thing. "If the store – if you ever decided to close the store, what would happen to the books?"

"You mean when it goes under?" I meant that as gallows humor, but it came out sounding just grim. "I'll sell as much as I can, maybe have a going-out-of-business sale, maybe contact other dealers and see if they're interested in the inventory. Why?"

"So the books would keep circulating, just from someplace different."

"Sure. What's this about, Paige?"

"Just curious. Don't forget, dinner's your treat tonight."

"I guess I can afford La Cocina. So – your research won't take too long?"

"No, Piper and Leo have some kind of romantic date night planned. I'm just going to – read up on stuff. I'll meet you there at 6:00. If I'm not there, just order without me, I'll be on my way."

When she wasn't there at 6:15, I ordered, but just a margarita, which I drank on a nearly empty stomach. Bad idea for anyone, especially someone who drinks as little as I do. My brain was screaming at me, though, and I wanted to shut it up and relax. How long can I keep the store afloat? What do I do when I finally have to shut it down? Why do I care, I'm in love! Sure, I'm in love with someone that I can't introduce to anybody and can't talk about. "It's San Francisco, for God's sake!" Well, that was Kara, and this is me. Still, fear of other people's reactions should not be the first thing you think about when you consider the person you love. Unless you really are ashamed and you're just not admitting it. Does Paige suspect that I feel ashamed? Will we make love tonight? Will she even be here for dinner? What on Earth do her sister's and brother-in-law's plans for the evening have to do with the amount of time Paige will spend researching? Researching what? There's so much she doesn't tell me, I know that, and I shouldn't feel threatened, but I'm still afraid that I just don't deserve this happiness, and it's the only joy in my life right now –

Well anyway, I was on my second margarita when Paige arrived and we ordered dinner. Then I ordered a third, but thank God I had the sense not to take more than a few sips of that. Paige doesn't drink, but I got the giggles and I think gave her a contact high. I'm pretty sure I annoyed the couple at the next table, and I know that outside the front door I turned my ankle and said the f-word with force. Paige started laughing and I did too, leaning on her for support.

I said I was in no condition to drive and Paige said, "You think?", which set us both off again, and then Paige said she'd take us both back to her house and we could come back for my car in the morning.

It's on the drive over to her house that my memory starts getting hazy. No, not hazy, it seems like details come clearly enough, just weird. I'm just going to put everything down as I seem to remember it, and maybe it will all make sense in retrospect.