Page 34 of Safe With You
“I had a feeling.”
Naomi looked at me, then at Ellis, and a knowing smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.
“I’ll let y’all finish talking. Maya and I are about done back there anyway.”
“We’re not—”
She was already walking away before I could finish defending...whatever it was I thought I was defending.
Ellis watched her disappear toward the café before looking back at me.
“She always like that?”
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Worse.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“She’s known me since our college days. At this point, she thinks it’s her full-time job to keep me humble.”
“I’m guessing she enjoys it.”
“Entirely too much.”
Our laughter settled between us before fading into a comfortable silence.
Ellis rested the folded chairs against the wall before glancing around the room again. “You really built all of this?”
His question caught me off guard.
I followed his gaze, seeing the bookstore the way I imagined he must have been seeing it all evening. The bookshelves I’d spent months searching for at estate sales. The mismatched reading chairs people always seemed to fight over. The local artwork hanging on the exposed brick walls. The café tucked into the corner that had started as nothing more than a crazy idea scribbled in the margin of a notebook.
“It didn’t look like this at first,” I admitted. “When I signed the lease, there wasn’t a single bookshelf in here. Just concrete floors, white walls, and a whole lot of dust.”
“What made you do it?”
There it was.
The question almost everyone eventually asked.
I leaned against the end of one of the shelves, running my fingers along the spine of a novel that had somehow ended up in the wrong section.
“I’ve loved books for as long as I can remember,” I said. “Libraries were always my favorite place growing up. They were quiet, but they never felt lonely.”
He listened without interrupting, and somehow that made it easier to keep talking.
“When I started thinking about opening a bookstore, I realized I didn’t just want people to come in, buy a book, and leave. I wanted them to stay. Read for a while. Meet somebody. Find a new favorite author because the person sitting next to them wouldn’t stop talking about a book they loved.”
I smiled to myself, remembering how impossible that dream had sounded when I first said it out loud.
“So,” I said, folding my arms loosely, “how’d you end up behind a camera?”
His smile softened, and something unreadable flickered across his face before he answered.
“It started as a hobby.”
I didn’t press. Not yet.
