Bookshipped

A windchime sort of noise filled the room. I keep my eyes glued to the page before me and call out the route greeting. “Welcome to Book Blanks, let us find your book for you. Feel free to look around.”

The vague sense of a customer’s presence approaching me was the only thing to break me from my focus. I sigh. It always happens when the book just starts to get good. I paste on a smile and my customer service voice and flip my hair over my shoulder to assess the customer.

Broad shoulders, dark eyes, and lips turned down into a frown. He was in here a few days ago. I force myself to focus on his eyes. “How can I help you?”

He slid a book on the counter. “My book is broken.”

I glance at the book with the blank green cover and back at the man. “What’s the problem with it?”

“It’s the story. It’s not what I wanted.”

I'm ready with an eyeroll, but I reserve judgement until I get the details. This occasionally happened. Someone thought they wanted a happy ending but what they needed was a soulful one. They didn't expect a tragedy, or they didn't want the insta-love romance they thought scandalous.

I take the book and thumb through the pages. The ink reveals a swashbuckling adventure, with knights and pirates and quests. I tilt my head. Maybe not exactly the type to his liking, but nothing drastically offensive.

“It is odd,” I admit, shutting the book again. I’ve never known the algorithm to get a suggestion wrong. “The Blank books are… Well, that's... not how these books work.”

"You picked the book off the shelf. You rung it up for me."

I scoff at him. "I just work here. I don’t have any control over it. I just grab a book from the glowing yellow shelf, check that it's a clean slate, and hand it over.”

"I just,” he cuts himself off with a sigh and sags against the counter, looking bereft with his brown curls flopping into his eyes. “I don’t know what I expected, but this just didn’t do it for me. I’m not the fantasy type."

He looks defeated, and I know what my boss would say if she saw me arguing back with a customer, regardless of whether he’d read the book in its entirety or not. “I’m sorry, sir. How can I help resolve this issue?”

He taps the counter twice. “Is there any chance I can get a refund?”

Big brown puppy dog eyes pull on my heart. “Sure. But can I offer you an alternative?”

He shrugs. “Sure.”

I pull a different book from the glowing shelf behind me, a navy cover, and I flip through the pages to ensure they’re blank. “Would you mind doing an exchange instead? I’ve never had a book go wrong. Maybe we could trouble shoot what’s going on with your book this way?”

He looks skeptical, staring at the new book I’ve placed on the counter before him.

“If we really can’t sort it out, I’ll have to get my manager involved, and I don’t know how long it will take her to fix the shelf. I’d just rather not have the shop close down for repairs right now.” I squirm, wondering if that’s too personal. “And of course, if we still can’t help you, I’ll definitely give you a refund.”

He sizes me up quickly, in a look I can feel all the way down to my bones.

“Deal.”

He picks up the book and we do the shuffle around the register, returning one book to repurchase the next. I look up the name on his account. “Drake, is it?”

His smile is quiet, reserved, but he seems to stand taller at the sound of his name. “That’s right.”

I can’t bite back my grin as I offer him his receipt. “Lyla. Come see me if you have any other questions or problems, all right?”

His cheeks dimple when he grins, and my stomach twists into knots. “I’ll be sure to do that.”

The chime echoes as he leaves the shop, and I heave a sigh of relief. Drake. Heat rushes to my cheeks. I’m not sure what’s come over me. He’s just a customer, and a problematic one at that.

I don’t know who this handsome stranger is, but I secretly hope that his next book is also a problem.

I spend the next few days pestering my regular customers about their reads, trying to ensure that they’re all satisfied with the service. Absolutely no complaints. Romance, adventure, the self-help to heal the wound they didn’t know they had to work on. It’s part of the schtick, and it keeps people coming back. One less decision to make in the day to day, but still entertaining. The addition of the café and the subscription service plan has really upped our business in the past year or two.

The added mystique of how the service works doesn’t hurt, either.

And Book Blanks is a service. I don’t know exactly how it works; that was Melissa’s department. I’ve always assumed it’s some sort of odd technology, tied to an algorithm and sitting on a rechargeable bookshelf, but she’s never told me the secret.

It’s never gotten me wrong.

One of the best things about working here is the opportunity to grab a book at any dull moment, cozy up in the café with a hot coffee, and dive into something that instantly transports you. Reading slump be gone. I glide my index finger across the spines of the blanks, and I’m inherently drawn to the book Drake had returned two days ago. The green cover reveals nothing still, and the pages are blank again.

I delicately slide the spine off the shelf and check it out, and then my favorite part happens. I watch, enthralled, as the first page fills with ink, the story literally unfolding before me. I grin and take the book over to the comfiest chair in the corner by the café, the red velvet slightly worn on the arms. I settle in and open to the first page.

A romance.

I’m pleasantly surprised, but I shouldn’t be. I will admit, I’ve had butterflies in my stomach since meeting Drake. It doesn’t help that I’ve been watching about three hundred too many Hallmark movies, feeling incredibly sentimental and, let’s face it, incredibly single. I grin as I follow the main character through the beginning of her journey, marveling once again at how the books can get it so right every time.

I hear the shop chime faintly in the recesses of my brain, but it doesn’t pull me from my reading. She’s just about to dump her jerk of a boyfriend because he’s going to get a promotion in another city, and they didn’t even discuss the issue before he applied, and now he wanted to uproot their lives? I scoff. I know how this ends for cardboard-boyfriend.

A throat clearing beside me startles me out of my trance, and I look up panicked for a moment before I realize I’m looking at Drake.

He waves shyly, a rosy color to his cheeks. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

I tuck a strand of hair behind my ear and unfold from the awkward position I’ve been reposed in on the chair. “No, I’m sorry. Drake, right?” I ask, like the name wasn’t already burned into the back of my eyelids.

He smiles wide, and my heart flutters again. What a smile. “Yeah. And it’s Lyla, yes?”

My heart is screaming that he remembered, but I keep it cool and collected on the surface. I think. “Yep.”

We fall into a sort of awkward silence, and he points at the green book I’ve been perusing for the better part of the past half hour. “Do you like my book?”

“Oh.” I feel slightly embarrassed that he noticed it was the same cover. “It’s been wiped. I just picked it up for a new one.” I stand up and fold the corner of the page to mark where I’m at before closing the cover.

He nods, somewhat blindly. “Is it a good one?”

I grin. “So far, which means it’s not the book itself. How can I help you today, Drake?”

He looks slightly bashful at that, and reluctantly lifts up the navy-blue book. "I hate to say this again, but..."

I groan and grab the book from his hands. “Again? How?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. This one was like a gothic romance. It’s just not my speed.”

Flipping through the pages, I recognize it as a book I’d read before, a classic, and I’m surprised. “This is a great book.”

“Oh, I don’t mean to insult it. It’s fine, it’s just not what I’m looking for right now.”

“I just meant I know this book. I’ve read it before.” I tilt my head. “It seems odd that of all the stories in the world it would repeat one for you.”

Drake shifts his weight. “That is odd.”

I think for a minute, before snapping the book shut. “We’re going to resolve this, Drake.”

“We are?”

“Yes.” I storm over to the shelf again, and I pull off another blank. “Because either the magic doesn’t work for you, for whatever reason, or there’s something else going on here.”

“Nothing sinister, I hope.”

I grab a red book and check it out to his account. “I hope not. But I’d be more concerned if the magic was the reason.”

Drake leans against the counter, eyes dancing, hands splayed wide. “Why is that?”

I slide the new title over to him. “Because. All the good things in life are a little like magic. If you lose this, what will make you believe in anything else again?”

His eyes are dancing when I look into his, and maybe there’s something more there. I am likely projecting what I want to see.

“Okay. So what do you suppose we do to counter it?”

I don’t shrink back. “We are going to have a little book club, you and I. You’re going to check out a bunch of blank books, and we’ll both read them, see if there’s something to it. And if there’s no discernable pattern, we’ll take it to Melissa.”

“Melissa?”

“My boss.” I don’t miss the way his eyes trip towards my lips. I take a deep breath. “But I think we can recapture the magic ourselves, don’t you?”

He breathed his words. “I certainly hope so.”

I can’t breathe. But then he’s taking the book and walking away, and I finally catch my breath when the chimes sound again.

We play this game every three days or so. Drake finishes the book, leaves little annotations in it for me to find on my readthrough, and I respond and get him a new book. He claims that they still aren’t right, and I tell him the magic is never wrong. We argue over the character motivations in the café with a cup of coffee for me and a chai tea latte for him. We laugh at the quippy one liners of the hero or the comic relief side character. We track in a journal any patterns, although nothing truly discernable has come up. Romance, mystery, adventure, fantasy, always with a twist and a happy ending for the main couple…

I sit up straight, looking at the pages of notes we’d gathered. “It’s romance, isn’t it?”

His chuckles still haven’t died down from our last peal of giggles, and he takes a sip of his latte carefully before responding. “What’s romance?”

“The main thread that connects all of these books.”

He stills, his hand hovering over his mug for a few seconds too long.

I hear what I am saying, what I’m basically accusing him of, and realize how insensitive it is. “I’m sorry. I just mean all of these books, they have a classic OTP, a couple that is unlikely that gets together in the end, even if it’s not strictly speaking a romance novel. It must be telling you that’s what you need.”

“A romance?”

My cheeks are flaming at this point, and I’m suddenly uncomfortable. This is embarrassing for him, clearly. You don’t go around accusing people of being secretly lonely, hoping for a romance. I’m halfway to apologizing again when his hand reaches across the table to engulf mine.

The world spins slowly around me as I look up at him, filled with doubt and anxiety.

A wide smile cracks across his face, and I feel at ease instantly.

“I was waiting for you to figure it out.”

I search his eyes and find only humor and genuine affection. He’s not shying away from me anymore. He’s being bold, shooting his shot. He’s… he’s…

“Lyla?”

He’s waiting on me to respond.

I tense for a moment and think of all the heroines we’ve been reading about the past few weeks. I can meet him here.

I twist my hand under his and clasp my fingers between his. He grins, and I want to kiss it off his face. I lean towards him with a conspiratorial whisper. “Does that mean you think the magic is working again?”

He leans forward halfway across the table, his lips barely a breath away from mine. “I’m starting to think it always was.”

His lips press against mine, and I hum with delight.

Our story is going to be wonderful.