Page 116 of To Have and to Stalk
Shay got so engrossed, she stopped noticing things likepeopleandfurniture, and I would gently direct her by her elbow.
“Do you think you’d ever open a bakery?” she asked, looking over her shoulder. “Or do you like accounting?”
“My dream was to open a bakery.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Because I’m in the Mafia. And still fucking lying to you.
“My turn,” I said. “Why did you get into cosmology? You started to tell me on our first date.”
She slowly placed a book on the pile, leveling me. “My dad left after I got sick—becauseI got sick,” she said. “My mom doesn’t think I know the truth, but I heard them arguing. Heard him say it wasn’t worth it.Iwasn’t worth it. That I was ruining their life. We never really talked about him when he left. It was like he died.”
“Shay—”
“Anyway,” she continued, cutting me off, and continuing in what I’d gathered was her go-to move to deflect. “That’s how I got into it. I was filled with unknowns, and my dad leaving just…compounded them. When I looked to the stars, I was reminded that everything, even the things we don’t yet understand, serve a critical purpose—” She shot me a look over her shoulder. “I’m rambling again.”
“I like it when you ramble,” I all but growled.
I wanted more of this.
Ineededto know more of her,allof her. All those secret places she used smoke and mirrors to hide.
“Why do you like romance?” I asked as she placed another book on the pile.
Her fingers lingered on the soft cover of the hardback. She had to crane her neck to find my eyes over the stack.
Fuck, she was so cute.
“I’ve always lovedlove…” She fingered the teal spine before spinning and heading in another direction. “I don’t know when it started,” she continued, glancing over her shoulder. “I think I just arrived on Earth obsessed with romance. Even when I was little?—”
Shay broke off, eyeing a new book. She pulled it out of the shelf and placed it on the stack.
“When you were little?” I probed.
“Oh, right. When I was little, I would ask boys to be my valentine. I was six. And it’s not like my mom was into it.”
“No?”
She shook her head and continued on her way down the aisle.
“My sister loves romance—now,” she continued. “But she was very much the ‘I hate pink’ girl growing up, so naturally she had to love horror not romance. I was the only one in the family into it for a while.”
She kept walking, telling me how romance had always been part of her life. How it had evolved from young adult to spice when she found her first smutty book.
“It was like fucking cosmic,” she said. “It was just sitting there, abandoned on a park bench,waitingfor me.”
I loved it when she was engrossed like this. It meant I could watch her brazenly, without her getting self-conscious.
My eyes traced her pale legs in her small skirt as she stood on her toes to get a book.
The way her sweater exposed her shoulder as she reached for it.
I wanted to bite the exposed flesh.
“When I got sick, it was an escape. Rather than be at the doctor’s, I could be a girl at boarding school, about to meet a secret prince.”
She turned and placed the book at the top of the pile. She lingered, and our eyes locked.
