Castle in the Air
By Steampunk . Chuckster
Summary: Sarah has opened her dream bookstore just before the holiday season, but when a corporate monopoly announces their reduced-price brick-and-mortar is going in a block away, she must band together with her fellow small businesses to fight for their lives, even if it means getting past a slew of bad first impressions to work with Chuck, the owner of the comic book shop next door. AU Charah.
A/N: Thanks so much for the reviews and for reading, y'all! Enjoy this chapter!
Disclaimer: I don't own Chuck or its characters, and any similarities in this fic to any corporate entities are just coincidence... shh.
He sprang backwards, nearly falling on his ass. "Oh. Nope! Nope! Morgan? Morgan. Dude."
Morgan rushed out from the back. "What happened?! You get shot?!"
Chuck turned a look on his best friend. "Shot? Why would you automatically jump to that? You probably would've heard it if a gun went off, don't you think?"
"Not if they used a silencer."
"What? Jesus Christ, Morgan." He gestured towards the door where he'd been dusting a display, the usual Sunday morning task since Sunday mornings were typically very slow. "Spider. Ugly, super gnarly one."
"Oh boy. Is it juicy?"
Chuck shivered. "Oh God. That's so disgusting. Never use that word about spiders again. I'm gonna barf."
"I'll get him outside, don't you worry, Chuck. Morgan to the rescue. Knight in Shining Armor, relocater of the dastardly eight-legged beasts." He rushed into action, grabbing two backing boards and scooping the disgusting thing out of its web, pushing through the door and rushing off to the nearest plant.
Chuck knew it was immoral, and yet, he wondered why in the hell these things even had to be saved. Now it was still out there in the world, terrifyingly alive, to wreak havoc on him again in the future if it so chose.
He shivered again as Morgan came back. "Thanks, buddy."
"Anytime."
And as Chuck watched him move to put the backing boards in the spot where they pulled to bag up customers' purchases, he exclaimed, "Ah! Don't put it back!"
"I didn't use them to squish him. He was just sitting on 'em. That's a waste of good—Oh my God, your spider thing is kind of ridiculous, Chuck." Morgan rolled his eyes, dropping the backing boards in the recycle bin behind the counter.
"It's called arachnophobia, it's a legitimate condition, and I don't have to explain myself to you. Every other bug is perfectly fine. If I'd found a cockroach right here, I'd be like, '¡Sal, pequeña cucaracha!' And scoot it on out the door. Same with literally everything else." He shrugged.
"My mom would be so proud with that bit of Spanish, but you need to work on the pronunciation. It was a little bit gringo still."
"Well, I'm gringo, so…" He turned to go back to cleaning, but caught sight of something moving through the window.
Morgan had gone to the back again, the sound of his feet shuffling on their floors fading.
That meant nobody was out here manning the store. Otherwise, he'd rush out there to greet her. Like the sap that he was. Her arms were full of totes that seemed to be packed with something, but he couldn't see what.
She was making her way through what they'd built—a new festival grounds full of booths, selling stations, tents…ready for Small Business Saturday in six days. Well, not ready. But they'd made massive headway; advertising had already been going out, flyers and news ads, promotions on websites, in neighborhood blogs. Everything was just about set up, and covered in tarps because of the morning dew, the moist nights they had out here in Del Rey, so near the Pacific Ocean.
She'd been instrumental. There'd been moments of little disagreements, but most of it felt… Damn it, he couldn't be the only one who felt like the teasing arguments, the jabs, the way she kept labeling him a nerd, his labeling her a bookworm, was verging on flirtation.
Chuck had been careful not to touch her, or even come close to touching her, ever since that intense moment in the back of the delivery semi-trailer. In the dark, surrounded by all of those displays, the way he felt every inch of her tall, muscled figure pressed tightly to his front. Her grip on him, an arm around his shoulders, cool fingers on his neck. Blue eyes wide and blazing, lips parted, so close to his he could feel her breath against his face.
He shook himself now, letting out a slow breath through pursed lips. And then he glanced back up at her. Damn it, she was struggling with the totes a little, and now she'd have to get her door open.
Sure, there were a million things she could do to get the door open, one of them being setting her burden down, unlocking and opening the door, and then bringing them in.
But Chuck glanced back towards the break room behind the DC area. "Morgs, I'm stepping outside for a sec. Just listen for the door, huh?"
"Okaaay!"
And Chuck bolted out of the place, leaving the dusting rag on his shoulder without even thinking about it, hurrying to Sarah's side as she finally approached the door. "Hey! Hey, lemme—" Sarah turned, blue eyes wide, and a small smile grew on her lips as she watched him hurry nearer. His voice died in his throat and he cleared it. "Lemme get the door. Or-Or I can hold those if…"
"If you can grab the keys, that'd be awesome, thank you. My coat pocket, right side."
Oh. Shit. She wanted him to take them out of her coat pocket? Which was cinched all tight against her body? She didn't have the keys already clutched in her fingers or something? Why? Oh, why?
"Sure. Yeah. Right side. Okay."
With very (very!) careful fingers, he slid his hand into the pocket, felt the cool metal of the keys, and eased them out. His knuckled maybe brushed against her hip for a moment, and he nearly pulled back like she'd burned him, but he controlled himself instead, holding the keys up and jingling them . "Taa daaaa. These the ones?" he asked, playing off his sudden nerves.
"Yeah," she said with a giggle. "Thanks. It's the gold key with a windmill looking thing on it."
"Gotcha. Okay." He unlocked the door and pulled it open for her to stroll in. "You don't have an alarm system or anything?"
"No. Not yet," she said, leading the way into the store and hefting her totes onto the front counter. He noticed piles of books all over the counter again. He imagined she was constantly in a state of trying to catch up on work with no employees besides herself. "Can't afford it. I just have to hope the security in this shopping center is good enough that it deters people who'd try to break in here and steal my books."
Without thinking much about it, Chuck said, "Well, if you need some tips on the best and cheapest alarm systems, I'm your guy. Not that I'm trying to…be the big cool man swinging in to rescue you or anything. I just know stuff about a lot of tech. It used to be my job back in the day. Before I got my store off the ground…"
She gave him a long, searching look. There was something in her eyes then, but he didn't recognize it as realization, which was exactly what it was.
"And before you came into a huge inheritance?" she asked. He shrugged that off of his shoulders as she sent him an apologetic look. "I didn't mean for that to sound so nasty."
"It didn't sound nasty."
"It did sort of. Like I'm labeling you as super privileged or something. I didn't mean to."
"I am super privileged," he said, knowing she hadn't meant to offend. And he wasn't offended because it was the truth. "But I wasn't always. Being the Nerd Herd supervisor at the Burbank Buy More set me up with a lot of contacts I wouldn't have had otherwise. And I know tech products backwards and forwards. Including stuff like alarm systems and companies. Computers, tablets, phones…"
She stared at him. "I see." Then she cleared her throat and glanced down. "When I'm ready to take that step, maybe I'll consult Mister Tech Professional over here."
Chuck smiled at the teasing look she gave him. Then something occurred to him and he furrowed his brow. "Hey, it's Sunday. What're you doin' here on a Sunday?"
"Well, the store is closed but that doesn't always mean I get the day off. I have catch-up work to do." She pulled a bunch of plastic bookends and stands out of the totes and began piling them on any horizontal surface she could find.
"Are those for Saturday?"
"Yep. Realized I won't have all of my shelves out there with me, so I'm gonna need to have way more of this stuff for the makeshift store I'll be setting up out there."
"Great idea."
"Thank you." She sent him a smile over her shoulder, still unloading.
"Well, I'll let you do what you need to do. It's just me an' Morgs at the shop today so if you need anything, just, um… Well, you have my cell. Or you can call the store. Or pop over. We'll be there."
"That's nice of you, thanks. But it's okay. I'm just gonna be doing a bunch of business paperwork crap." She looked around the place. "Maybe I'll revamp a promo, switch things up."
"Cool. Cool cool." He backed towards the door then. "See ya."
"Yeah. See ya." She smiled and gestured at the totes. "And thanks for helping me get in without dropping all this and breaking it."
"Oh, anytime."
When he stepped back into his own shop, Morgan sent him a sparkling look from where he was running a customer's pull-list that they were picking up. Chuck responded with a snarky look, knowing exactly what his friend was intimating with his face doing that stupid thing.
Morgan had probably come out from the back when he walked out and had seen him helping Sarah.
And now he was making assumptions. Because of course he like Ellie had made assumptions.
And sure, yes, it was true, he was currently enmeshed in this sometimes awkward push and pull with the woman who owned the bookstore next door, and he didn't think he was imagining the flirtation, but then he'd be assailed with nerves and he'd get stupidly shy, or feel shyness from her.
But there was something. He felt it.
He didn't know if she felt it, too. And he wasn't about to ask or pry or anything at all that meant distracting them from the most important thing: taking down Cadabra, stopping them from moving into that space, into this community, and putting all of them out of business.
None of them had knocked themselves out to open their dream businesses, only to have them get stolen away by some mother fucker who had enough money to build shit that cost billions of dollars and yeet it off into space to see if extraterrestrials found it in a thousand years or whatever the hell Geoff Frezos had done recently, the selfish narcissistic asshole.
Chuck hadn't known much about his Uncle Alexei's business decisions, only that his employees had seemed very happy in their jobs when Chuck stepped in as the company's interim CEO for a year. He'd tried to foster that good atmosphere while he was in charge, doing his best to learn the ropes, needing a lot of help from Alexei's right-hand woman while he was alive, a woman named Vivian who was maybe only a few years older than Chuck himself. And then he'd passed CEO duties over to her, content with his role as the corporation owner, knowing she'd do better running the company than he could, with his very limited business knowledge. Vivian knew how to keep the Volkoff Industries name in the conversation, and she was a good leader to their employees.
So he still didn't know everything Alexei had done with the fortune he'd built and fostered while he was alive.
What he did know was that Alexei Volkoff hadn't sent stupid, unsafe, unsanctioned rockets into space looking for aliens from the future. And he hadn't flattened small businesses by shoehorning his way into communities to sell cheap-ass versions of products those small businesses sold.
That definitely wasn't happening now that Chuck Bartowski was the owner and main shareholder of Volkoff Industries. He was still on the board, but Vivian was doing an inspired job.
That inspired job hadn't been knocking small business owners out of business.
And now Chuck was doing his best to spearhead a fight against someone with even more power than Alexei Volkoff had before his untimely death. Cadabra, Geoff Frezos, had an infinite amount of power. But wasn't that what he read about in his comics all the time? The normies, the non-supers, facing off against supervillains and their evil machinations when the superheroes were captured or hurt, and winning in spite of not having superpowers.
He had to put his focus into this.
When he and Lou started dating, they'd talked about centering their new businesses and not their relationship. That hadn't gone so well for the relationship, and in hindsight… Well, that had made sense. It wasn't destined for more than what it ended up being.
Before he got too enmeshed—because there really wasn't a better word for it, damn it anyway, Ellie—before he allowed things with this girl to move into a place where he could get hurt, he needed to make sure they didn't leave anything on the table in this fight against Cadabra.
And he knew he was getting way too far ahead of himself in this. Who knew where she stood? Whether she liked him, or…more than liked him? Or…? Maybe he could not think of it in such juvenile terms? All he knew was that their first, second, third, fourth impressions were…warped. To put it nicely.
Things were different now, and then at the same time, there was this strange current flowing through their interactions, the business they had with each other, the partnership in getting this festival up and running.
That current was there every single time.
And it was practically screaming through him in that dark nook between the display cases in the back of the delivery truck.
Focus.
He was gathering the single issues they'd be selling at a discount on Saturday, trying to figure out how to organize them—by title character, publisher, or price point?—when the bell jingled on the door.
Chuck turned to greet the customer, a smile automatically slapping itself onto his gob, when he stopped, eyebrows shooting into his hairline. "Sarah. Hi!" He immediately put the comics back down.
She smiled back at him. "We were in my store talking and something occurred to me. I-I have an idea. And you're going to think I'm nuts. Or…maybe not nuts but an opportunist." She winced. "Do you have a minute?"
"I have more than a minute. Wanna take a walk to the Marina?"
He'd really taken a shot without thinking about it. At all. And now Sarah was sort of gaping, opening her mouth to respond, but instead shutting it and staying quiet.
"Sorry. I know. You've got that work to do. Catch-up, like you said. We don't have to. You can just tell me your idea—"
"Yes."
Chuck blinked, shifting his weight. "Yes, you've got…work to do? Or…?"
"Yes, let's go for a walk. That always gets my brain juices going."
"Really? Exercise? For me, it's hopping in the shower." He realized what he'd just said and squinted at her, lips pressed tight together. "Alone. I mean, showering by myself. Not… Uhhh…" He spun on his heel. "Morgan, you good for an hour or so? Sarah and I are gonna talk about Project Crush Cadabra."
But he realized Morgan had been watching the whole thing, that annoying sparkle in his eyes somehow even more sparkly. Chuck sent him a look where Sarah wouldn't see it: a combination of shut the hell up and you think you know shit but you don't know shit. If Morgan understood the look, it didn't show in his wide smirk.
"Ooohhh mannnn. I don't think I can haaandlllle thiiiiiiis." He gestured at the completely empty shop sarcastically, then snorted and smirked even harder.
Sarah let out a quiet giggle as Chuck sent his best friend the best John Casey impression he could muster, a curl of his lip and a growl.
"Hi, Sarah. Take him away. Just one request: don't keep him for too long. Lunch is approaching and you really can't let him get to a point where his tumbly gets grumbly. He gets hangry." The Bearded One even rubbed a circle over his stomach for effect.
The bookstore owner let out a melodic laugh. "Thanks for the tip. We won't be long. Just business."
They ducked out of the comic shop together, Chuck holding the door for Sarah as she smiled at him in thanks, and he trudged after her. He gave himself a moment, following in her wake, her words echoing annoyingly in his skull.
Just business.
We won't be long. Just business.
Just. Business.
Business.
"I'm new to this area, maybe you'd better lead?" Her actual voice cut through the echo in his head.
"Oh. Oh! Yeah, of course. Sorry." He trotted up beside her and pointed to the left. "This way to the Marina."
She pulled out her phone, glancing at it for a moment, and then she snuck it back into her pocket. "Although I might've been able to tackle it, considering it's probably just…in the direction of the ocean?"
"True. Though I'm starting to suspect you can tackle just about anything." He felt her eyes on the side of his head and they didn't leave for a while so he stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets and cleared his throat, staring straight ahead. "But, um, I know a route that cuts the half hour walk to the Marina from our center down to fifteen, twenty minutes."
"A short cut? Oooo, I love a good shortcut."
"Right?"
Silence settled for about a minute, and it felt strangely serene, comfortable, the two of them just strolling side by side, hands in their respective jacket pockets, enjoying the weather, temperature in the upper sixties, sun out, none of the usual beach breeze reaching them here. It'd be different when they got to the Marina, he knew.
"So, um, my idea…"
Oh, right. That.
Focus.
"Yes! Lay it on me."
Her tongue darted out to wet her lips and she turned to look at him, waving one of her hands through the air as she spoke. "I told you that I was maybe going to use today to do paperwork or maybe revamp a promo, change up the theme?" He nodded. "Well, that's way more fun than paperwork so I decided to start with that."
It made him chuckle. "Relatable."
She snorted. "But then before I started taking books out of the window to put them away, I realized that's it. Promos. Promotions. Displays. Themes. At stores like mine, at a comic book shop like yours…even with the toy store, MegaJamz, the spy shop, the promotional displays are set up by us—the workers, the people who know their shit. I saw on one store's social media page, they did a display with books that had blue covers and captioned it: "I'm looking for this book; I can't remember the title or the author, but it has a blue cover."
Chuck laughed, rocking forward. "Oh my Goddddd, that's classic! It's so true! This guy came in asking for a specific issue of Wolverine and he said the cover is yellow and Wolverine is on it. I was like … Well, yes."
She giggled. "But customers love stuff like that, right? Fun displays, stuff that they can relate to, or if it even makes them think, makes them laugh, whatever it is. And that isn't something that Cadabra is capable of doing."
"You're right. Everything they do is an algorithm cooked up by AI. You bought a Doom Patrol comic? Here's something else you'll like. And then it's, like, a Captain America comic and a compendium of Marvel's Silver Age comics. Like, do you even read comics, Cadabra algorithm? How are either of those anything like Doom Patrol? You friggin' yahoos." He scoffed, shaking his head.
Sarah merely watched him with a small amused smile on her face, one eyebrow raised. "Uh, sure."
Chuck cleared his throat. Suddenly, he thought he knew what she was getting at.
"Oh. That's what we have to offer our community that can't be replicated. And we need a way to let said community know what they lose if we all get put out of business by this Cadabra BnM."
"BnM?"
"Brick-and-mortar, sorry. I shortened it because I was being lazy." She smirked. "Cadabra offers whatever big best sellers that are all over everywhere all the time anyway, total snooze fest household names that are always best sellers for that reason. But we provide…" His brain stopped working.
"What?"
"Uh. Damn it. The word, it's there, on the tip of my tongue. Like picking the books specially. What art history majors usually want to do in art museums."
"…Curate?"
"Yes! You're brilliant! Curate! I was gonna say, we provide curation. Jesus H. Christ, I do need to read more books, maybe."
She threw her head back, cracking up. "Well, they do say it helps with vocabulary, but you're allowed to have little brain farts here and there, Chuck. It's okay."
"Even with you, the Bookworm?" he asked, gasping and clasping a hand to his chest.
"Especially with me, the Bookworm." She snorted. "I'm not some Harvard graduate, double major, PhD in English Literature or Comparative Whatever-the-Hell. I just love books and read a lot of them. I'm sure that helps my brain, and maybe I seem super smart or whatever, but I'm really not." She poked herself in the chest. "Community college."
He frowned at that, the way she looked away, her jaw clenching. Like she was embarrassed she'd just admitted out loud that she went to community college. "What's wrong with that? There are brilliant people who end up going to community college, or who end up teaching at community college. Society is fuggin' stupid and snobby, acting like Harvard is automatically going to give someone a better education than a community college just because it's private, expensive, and full of legacy admissions assholes who think they're smarter than everyone else. I think…and therefore I am!" he announced, lifting his finger in a scholarly fashion.
Sarah laughed, hugging herself, peering up at him. "I'm not sure that was what Descartes meant by that phrase, but I like the way you used it better."
"See? I didn't even know that was Descartes, so apparently your education didn't do you any harm."
She laughed again and shook her head. "You're great at talking someone down from the self-pity ledge, aren't you?"
"Ask me how good I am at talking myself down from that ledge. I'll just answer, you don't have to ask, I'm terrible at it," he rushed out, making her laugh again. "I love self-pity when it's my own. I wallow in it. I swim around in it the way Scrooge McDuck swims around in his room of gold coins."
"I got that reference," she said, giggling.
"DuckTales. Classic. Might solve a mystery…" He turned to her and sang, "Or rewrite hiiiiistoryyyyyy! DuckTales! Wooo-ooo!"
Chuck felt a bright light shine inside his chest as he got her to laugh yet again, a little proud of himself for being on a roll the last few minutes. If he could just listen to her laugh for the next half hour or however long this nice late-morning stroll lasted, he'd be happy.
"We're getting so far away from the subject at hand, we're singing intro themes to cartoons from our childhood now," she chuckled.
"Right. Sorry. Focus. We should focus on Project Crush Cadabra."
"You come up with that all by yourself?"
Was that flirtation?
He turned to look solidly at her, take in her profile, the way her eyes were so blue out in the crisp November sunlight. "Morgan helped," he said quietly.
She shifted her smile to him, her eyes meeting his. "I like it." And then she cleared her throat, looking away again. "Thing is, I got the idea of the curation, and maybe how all of us shop owners in the center could… Shoot, I don't know. Maybe every shop has different needs and a display that's curated would look different. But… I was hoping maybe we could brainstorm. The two of us."
Chuck nodded. "It's a really good start of an idea. You're right. Cadabra's curation isn't done by people and it's disjointed and makes no sense."
"Exactly. There has to be a way for us to use that as a weapon."
He liked the way she used the word weapon. And maybe he pretended he was thinking about how to use that small business real person curation to their benefit, while what he was actually thinking about was Sarah Walker the bookseller in a Xena Warrior Princess outfit swinging a mace into the ugly mean face of Geoff Frezos.
Hot.
"...Chuck?"
He spun to face her, knowing his cheeks were red, hoping she assumed it was the cool air or…something. "Hm?"
"Any ideas?"
"Oh. I was…thinking. I was thinking about that." Lies.
"People like gimmicks, little fun things you do to sell stuff to them. Like…oh gosh, when you go into a Starbucks and they have those gift baskets with the bag of coffee, the mug, the coffee chocolates, whatever else they stick in there, Starbucks gift cards. People love that kind of stuff." She was getting excited, both of her hands out of her pockets, circling through the air, and then she clasped them together, her eyes wide, her breath coming in cute little puffs.
And he realized what he was witnessing was Sarah Walker in her element. He really, really liked Sarah Walker in her element.
But then she whipped around to look at him, grabbing his bicep. "Right?"
Chuck shook himself a little. "Yes. Right. You are absolutely correct. People do love that. Crap, I love it. You've got my brain gears turning for how I could start to do that in my comic shop. We're…kind of one note. We have comic books, a few collectible cards and games like that, I've got some POPS figurines but—" Oh. Oh, wait. His eyes got big as he turned to grab her arm back.
They'd reached the Marina just about at this point. They had to cross one more street and they'd be at the sidewalk, the grass flanking it, and beyond that, boats of all kinds were docked, bobbing about, others out in the water beyond.
But he didn't care about that because it was starting to come together in his head. "You said you were opportunist before in my shop when you told me you had an idea. And now I'm kind of starting to work off of that. Not-Not that you're an opportunist—or maybe you are and that's not a bad thing." He shook himself, trying to get back on track. "We combine forces. All of us work together to create gift baskets. Combine our products in gift baskets for Small Business Saturday."
She bit her bottom lip. "You're going down the path I think I was going down but I couldn't quite get a solid…thing to come together in my head."
They crossed the street and he pulled her to the edge of the sidewalk gently, out of the way of joggers…and bicyclists who weren't actually supposed to be using the sidewalk, the jerks.
"Imagine a gift basket that has…" He put his hands on his hips and looked up at the sky. "A Red Sonja comic book from my shop, maybe Martha might put in a vinyl from the band Heart…"
Excitement spilling out of her, she grabbed his forearms tightly in both hands. "Wait. I know Heart, but what's Red Sonja?"
His jaw nearly fell to his feet. "Oh. You don't know who—You know what? Of course you don't. Comics."
"You didn't answer my question."
"Sorry! Red Sonja is this sword and sorcery type of comic about this barbarian warrior woman whose family is massacred and she's enslaved, but she breaks free of her enslavers and one by one picks them off. It's a lovely little story about vengeance. You'd like it. Maybe you'll read it somet—"
"No. But here's what I will do," she teased, winking at him. That absolutely made her refusing to read comics worth it. Just that one teasing wink. "I'll add in a Robin Hobb book. She's high fantasy. I haven't read any of it, but I think that'd go well with a sword and sorcery type comic book and the stuff I've heard by Heart. That 'Barricuda' song, right?"
"Exactlyyyyyy. Yes! YES! See?! How cool would a gift basket like that be? And maybe Toys Central would stick some D&D dice in there, a Dungeon Master guide?"
"Ooooh wow, that's pretty nerdy."
"Someone would want that gift basket, nerdy or not. Admit it."
"I just said it was nerdy, but I know that doesn't mean that someone wouldn't want it. Apparently there are a lot of nerds out there."
"Mmmmhm, lotta nerds like meee," he drawled, liking that her hands hadn't left his forearms yet, her fingers still squeezing him over his jacket.
Her eyes sparkled as she delivered a genuine coup de grâce. "Not sure there are any nerds quite like you, Chuck."
He couldn't help wrinkling his nose, warmth pooling in his midsection. "Because I'm exceptionally nerdy ooorrrrr…?"
Sarah giggled and pushed at him gently, letting go of his arms, and then she turned to look out at the water. "Wow. I guess I didn't come down here when I was first scoping Del Rey out for my bookstore. This is beautiful."
He turned to look at the view as well. "Yeah. It really is."
"And your idea is epic. But what do we do with these gift baskets? Like, I can come up with some Ian Fleming or John le Carré books, stick 'em in a basket. I'm sure you have spy comics, and that Eye Spy place can toss one of their doohickies in there, too. But how do we market it to people during the festival?"
Chuck pursed his lips and gestured for her to follow him, continuing their walk down to the docks, meandering amongst the boats, because they could. Sometimes he liked to do it just to look at them.
"We can put 'em out there for people to buy, I guess."
Sarah gasped, this time grabbing his wrist. "A silent auction!"
He chuckled immediately and she gave him a befuddled look that was actually incredibly endearing. "Sorry. I'm sorry. You said auction and I immediately pictured our landlord John Casey standing at a podium with the little gavel like, 'Spy gift basket going for fifty, going for fifty, do we have seventy-five? Seventy-five! There, the gentleman in the striped coat, seventy-five! Ninety? No ninety? Going once, going twice, SOLD!'" She laughed and rolled her eyes. "But a silent auction? Casey's going to absolutely hate that idea."
"Oh, yeah?" She looked a little bummed.
"I absolutely love the idea, however."
She sent him an amused look. "Do you? Is it because you know he'd hate it?"
"No, I just love it." He paused dramatically. "It's definitely a bonus that he'd hate it."
Sarah giggled. "Okay, silent auction it is. And then we just split the profits evenly between the shops that contributed to the basket." There was a comfortable silence that set in then. And finally, she broke it, her voice quiet. "What is it it with you two, anyway?"
"Us two? Who?" He received a flat look. "Oh. Casey."
"Yes. You and Casey."
"He's mean to me," he said with a shrug. "And I guess when that goes on for a few years, it's hard to keep up the nice squishy feelings attitude towards someone. Try as I might." He pointed at a sailboat, the name gleaming on its side: HOLO NALU. "You think these people came here from Hawaii or are they posers just using a Hawaiian name to be Tropical Cool?"
"Oooh tough question." She snorted. "Probably the latter, just because I tend not to trust people."
He stored that one away for later.
"Why's Casey so mean to you? I don't get it."
"Well, thanks. I appreciate that. That's nice." He chuckled as she smirked. "Especially after the slew of bad impressions I gave you when you first moved into the spot next to my comics shop." He winced. "I think maybe I might've done a similar thing with him. I fumbled a few times when I was trying to open up and he gave me the benefit of the doubt but I know I rubbed him the wrong way." He sighed, embarrassed as he reached up and pushed his hand through his windswept curls. "I'm not great at first impressions and, erm, I'm probably not a great business owner, either. I mean, I'm not very good at business. Running a business."
"Ashcan Comics seems to be doing pretty damn well."
"Yeeeeahhh, well, I hit it at the right time. There's a resurgence in folks wanting to buy physical comics right now so I got lucky. I think the business is doing well in spite of me. Heh." He shrugged.
"Well, you've got plenty of repeat customers who go back to your shop all the time, and I'm sure you have a lot to do with that, so don't beat yourself up too much, huh?" She nudged him with her elbow. "And Casey's being unfair. Starting a business is really fucking hard."
"Thank you! Holy crap, I feel like I was walking around with my arms full of weirdly shaped, awkwardly sized things and I was constantly trying to keep 'em from falling out of my arms where they'd shatter on the ground. Unfortunately, I feel like I dropped enough that Casey kind of thinks I…" He cleared his throat. "Well, like I'm only still around with my shop still open because of my inherited fortune and the massive corporation I technically own."
She was quiet for a good twenty seconds.
"…I see. He thinks you're exceptionally privileged."
"Most likely."
Sarah pursed her lips. "Having privilege doesn't automatically make you a bad guy, Chuck. It's what you do with that privilege that matters. I don't know you or your life story. I don't know what you do outside of selling comic books. So I can't make any judgments there. Only, it's…kind of fucked up he's so consistently snarky and shitty towards you. I don't like it."
Chuck sent Sarah a crooked smile for that. "Well. Wow. Thank you." He said it with as much sincerity as he could muster.
"You're welcome. He's kind of a dick, isn't he?"
"Mmm. Yes. But he's our dick."
She cracked up, knuckling him on the bicep gently with her fist.
}o{
Sarah could only stare as her best friend skillfully cinched the ribbon, took a pair of scissors, and brought it along the bumpy surface of the ribbon with a ssshhhhwippp, creating beautiful colorful curls that fell down over the gift basket wrap.
"You are eerily good at this, Red."
"What do you mean, 'eerily'? I'm good at everything, so it follows that I'd be good at this."
Sarah laughed as the redheaded literary agent twirled the scissors by the handle on her pointer finger. "I can't argue with that." She reached over to poke the other woman's shoulder. "Hey, thank you. I really appreciate you helping with this. Chuck and I have so much other stuff on our plates, gathering all the products and getting the baskets together has been yet another task on top of all the other tasks… though it's admittedly been a little fun, too. Finding things within the various shops that go together. It's helped a lot that you've wrapped up so many of these. I gotta repay you somehow, someday."
"We're best friends, the rules don't apply. You don't have to repay me shit. You've saved my vida so many times over the years. This is nothing." Carina Miller smiled, then leaned in to give her friend a side-hug. "Anyway, you'd make it look awful."
"Shut up."
"You wrap birthday presents so horribly. You're typically good at everything just like me, but oh God, not gift wrapping."
"You're such a brat."
"Yep. Heh!" Then she got a wily look on her face, lifting her eyebrows innocently. Only, Sarah knew there wasn't an innocent bone in this woman's whole body. "So you and Chuck have been having fun together, huh?"
"Oh God. That isn't what I said and you know it."
"Am I wrong? Planning all of this, being like little sidekicks for each other? Little co-captains planning the whole festival together. Brainstorming gift baskets."
"It has been fun but it's not…" She searched for the right words, and with Carina Miller, she knew she needed the exact right words. "…fun I'm having with anybody in particular. It's just a general sort of fun." She waved her hand through the air.
"Uh huh." So maybe she hadn't found the exact right words. "By the way, I tried to find this guy's last name to do a deep dive and make sure there isn't, like, some sort of serial killer in lanky dork's clothing who's fawning over my best friend…"
"Carina! He's not fawning over m—"
"I love that that's what you catch onto, and not that I just told you I'm basically playing P.I. searching through the guy's background."
"Because it's stupid and I know you aren't gonna find anything," Sarah said easily with a shrug, playing with one of Carina's ribbons she'd tied around a cute kids gift basket with ice cream gift cards, kids books, a comic book called DC Superhero Girls, and of course a few toys. "And how hard is it to get his last name? It's Bartowski. That's what Casey calls him all the time."
Before she could stop Carina, the woman had her phone out, darting away from her, clicking around on her phone with her fingers. "Chuck Bartowski. Or, wait… his actual name is probably Charles, isn't it? Heh. Charles Bartow—Oh." Her eyes went wide and she looked up at Sarah. "Not that one… Oh, there's no way!"
Sarah felt nerves go through her. "What one? What are you talking about? What'd you find? Is it about the money he has? He inherited his uncle's money, but it's not that big of a a deal."
"That name is striking my memory hardcore but it can't be the same kid…"
"Kid? What kid?"
Carina's blue eyes were wide as saucers as she looked down at her phone, typing furiously with her fingers. "Oh my God. The curls. The eyes. The face. That's him. Only he's all grown now. Sarah, you're having fun with Charles Bartowski. As in Eleanor and Charles Bartowski. The Bartowski siblings. You didn't watch that whole true crime special on them?! It was a whole docuseries!"
"What?!" Sarah snapped, snatching Carina's phone and looking down at it. "Oh…my God."
Carina was right. The curls. The eyes. The face. He was little, just a kid. Maybe ten or eleven? Eyes downcast. And the pre-teen girl with her arm around his shoulders, a determined, almost mean look on her face, like she was daring anyone to even try anything with her or her brother. It was Ellie. The same Ellie who'd bought five hundred plus dollars' worth of books at her store a few weeks ago, who'd become a real friend while helping her with her website. They got lunch together a handful of times now, and coffee…
Sarah was immediately plunged back into her own childhood, her mom obsessively watching the docuseries about the Bartowski siblings on Sunday night primetime. Their parents disappeared into thin air, no trace of them, no sign of anything wrong, their belongings still in the house…just gone. Leaving two kids struggling to make sense of the world, totally alone—and yet not alone, because all of Southern California and really the whole country would not let them be. The cameras, the hounding, the police interviews.
Her heart suddenly ached. Awfully. Even as she was filled with adrenaline. "My mom watched this all the time. She-She recorded it on a VHS even so that she could watch more than once," she breathed.
"Right? This was huge when we were kids, Sar. I can't believe it's him! He seems so…"
"Adjusted?" Sarah filled in. Carina winced. "Yeah, if I'd gone through everything these kids went through when I was a kid, I'd be way more fucking broken than I already am." She scoffed, arching her eyebrows.
Poor Chuck.
And poor Ellie.
"I had no idea," she muttered. "This is…"
"Kind of nuts!"
"I was gonna say heartbreaking. They never found out what happened to their parents, did they?" It wasn't a question, really. She knew the missing Bartowskis case was still unsolved.
"Nope. Never. Holy shit, I can't believe they're just…out living their lives like this never happened."
"Well, yeah! Of course! It's probably the only way they were able to survive all of it. Working to get themselves out of this media hole, and away from the obsessive true crime podcast jerks. Working to build normal lives." She frowned. "This is crazy. I really didn't know."
There were so many disparate thoughts slamming back and forth within her skull now. She hadn't had the time to really get to know Chuck Bartowski past this gambit to keep Cadabra from moving into town, and she was realizing now that she really didn't know anything about him at all, at least nothing about his past. And even after spending time with his sister, Ellie, a lot of time, becoming good friends and talking books, she didn't know anything about her past, either.
"Well, I'm sure Chuck is a nice guy in spite of all this. You're still allowed to tap that, Blondie. This is way better than him being a serial killer."
Sarah knew she was blushing hard. "Will you stop? Have some decency for a second. They lost their parents suddenly, both at the same time, when they were just little kids, and they still to this day have no idea how or why, or if they're out there alive. Can you imagine the shit that's gone through their heads over the years?"
Carina wrinkled up her face, guilt in her eyes. "Good point, sorry."
"They don't…act like people whose parents disappeared in a wild whirlwind of speculation and media buzz. They'd don't act like people who had spotlights on them for a horrible reason when they were just kids."
"You mean they aren't crazy. That is kind of a miracle. With the way they were harassed and followed around, detectives up their asses, both real ones and trashy armchair ones, it's a wonder they grew up sane." Carina shook her head and whistled. "Unless it's all boiling under the surface and someday they're just gonna snap and blow up a government building or something."
"Carina! Cut it out! You're talking the way I remember my mom used to talk about them when that awful series was running. Like they aren't real people, just actors playing roles for some entertainment and drama."
She felt heavy, and she felt like she wasn't sure how to act the next time she saw either of the Bartowskis.
She wondered if they got this all the time; new people in their lives figuring out that they're those Bartowskis, having to go through talking about it all over again, every single time. They probably couldn't escape it.
"I know they're real people," Carina was saying. "I'm not dehumanizing them at all." Sarah sent her a flat look. "I'm not! That shit is the sort of thing that lies dormant inside of you and nobody knows it's there, least of all you, and then bam, it comes out. Fine, fine. I'll stop saying stuff like that. Especially 'cause you are clearly interested in more than just planning festivals with this guy, hmmm…?" The redhead batted her eyelashes.
"You're a mess."
"That may be true."
They laughed together, but Sarah still felt like weight was pushing down on her, and she didn't know how to deal with the revelation her best friend had just dropped into her lap.
A/N: That awful cat's out of the bag. Thanks for reading! Please review if you can.
Next chapter is coming soon.
-SC