Page 1 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

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Fable

The bell over the door chimes its last goodbye at 6:02 p.m. on the first Friday of October, and I flip the sign to CLOSED with hands that are already starting to shake.

This is fine. This is normal. This is just a Friday.

Lock the deadbolt. The mechanism clicks, solid and reassuring, and I wait for the feeling of done to settle in my chest.

It doesn’t come.

Unlock it. Lock it again.

Did it catch the first time? It definitely caught. I heard it catch. But what if the sound was from something else? What if I imagined it? What if…

Lock it again. Three times feels like enough. Three times feels like insurance. Three times feels like the bare minimum number of locks required to keep the universe from punishing me for whatever I’m about to do.

Fable Tales smells the way it always does at closing: old paper and dust motes catching the last of the October light through the front window, the particular mustiness of secondhand books that have been loved by other people first. There’s a comfort in it usually, a sense of home that blankets me.

Tonight it just feels like I’m saying goodbye.

Stop being dramatic. You’re not saying goodbye. You’re going somewhere and then you’re coming back. That’s how going places works.

“Okay.” I press both palms flat on the counter, right next to the register, and make myself breathe. “You’re fine. You’ve done this before. You can do it again.”

The romance section doesn’t answer, which is probably for the best. If the books started talking back, I’d have bigger problems than the one I’m currently avoiding. Although honestly? If anyone was going to develop sentience and start giving me life advice, I’d want it to be the romance section. They’ve seen some things. They know how this works: the fear, the avoidance, the moment where you finally show up anyway.

You haven’t done it in a long time. You know exactly how long. Don’t count.

I count anyway.

Six years. Six years since I’ve driven further than the grocery store, the bank, the doctor’s office two towns over that I only go to because they have a cancellation policy that accommodates my anxiety. Six years of finding excuses, rescheduling, telling myself next year like next year is a place I can actually get to instead of just another version of now that I’ll fail to show up for.

The October light is fading fast, turning the shop windows into mirrors. I catch my own reflection in the glass: brown eyes too wide, chestnut hair escaping from its claw clip like it always does by the end of the day, a smear of something that might be chocolate or might be coffee on my left cheek.

I look scared.

I am scared.

That’s fine. Scared people do things all the time. Scared people are brave constantly. You can be scared and still get in the car. Those two things can exist simultaneously.

“You’re going somewhere brave,” I tell my reflection, and my voice only wobbles a little. “You’re going somewhere that matters. You’ve been meaning to go every single year and somehow never managing, because the car is always too small and the road is always too long and your chest is always too tight to hold everything you’d have to feel when you got there.”

But today is different.

“Today is different,” I repeat out loud, because saying things out loud makes them real. My therapist taught me that. She also taught me that talking to yourself isn’t weird, it’s just thinking externally, and anyone who judges you for it is welcome to live inside your brain for five minutes and see how they like the chaos.

The cinnamon candle.

Shit. The cinnamon candle.

I spin toward the reading corner, where sure enough, the three-wick monstrosity I lit this morning during the breakfast rush is still flickering merrily away. The one I completely forgot about because Mrs. Patterson came in asking for “that book with the duke and the scandal, you know the one, dear,” and I absolutely did not know the one but I spent forty-five minutes helping her figure it out anyway.

Turned out to be The Duke’s Inconvenient Bride. Excellent emotional pacing. I recommended it to her last month, which she also forgot about, because Mrs. Patterson and I are apparently sharing a brain cell and it’s not a particularly reliable one.

I blow out the candle now, watching the smoke curl toward the water-stained ceiling. Then I grab a sticky note from the pad I keep behind the register, yellow, because yellow is for tomorrow, and write BLOW OUT CANDLE in aggressive capital letters.