Page 44 of The Bookshop of Forbidden Books

* * *

All Mitch could think about was the evening ahead with Anna. He’d never really been into movies; his mother had only ever taken him to see old film noirs, which she’d loved, and by the time he was old enough to go to the theatre alone ticket prices had shot up beyond what he could afford.

He climbed his stepladder, retrieved a thick film encyclopaedia on the top shelf, and read without pause until exactly 8:45 p.m. Then he threw on his jacket, caught a brief glimpse of himself in the small storeroom mirror, fed the cat and headed for his date.

* * *

Anna had let her hair down. She wore an apron over her dress, neatly tied around her waist. Two places were set at a table in the middle of the dining room. Mitch wondered how she’d managed to get so much work done since the morning. The floors gleamed, a twelve-arm chandelier now hung from the ceiling, casting soft light over the walls. The room still smelled of fresh paint. To top it all, there were two steaming bowls of lobster fettucine in a zesty lemon sauce on the table.

“Something wrong?” she asked, as Mitch gaped at her in silence.

He sat down, remembering their agreement not to talk about anything that concerned either of them directly. So he asked nothing about the meal. He gobbled down the pasta, complimenting it several times, but nothing that resembled a conversation. During dessert – a divine chocolate mousse – he decided to break the ice.

“Why did politics and religion make you cut ties with your family?”

“What about our rule?” Anna asked, tapping the table with a finger.

“Fine, you win. I give up.”

“My father was a brute who believed fiercely in a God he’d never met and refused to trust the people right there in front of him. He had no faith in reality. He preached about love on Sundays but he spent the rest of the week full of hate.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.”

“Was he abusive?”

“If constantly being put down is abuse, then yes,” Anna replied grimly, “but I have to give him credit for giving me the drive to get the hell out, to prove that he was nothing but a simple-minded bastard.”

“And your mother?”

“She was either his maid or his accomplice, depending on the day. She died when I was ten, and it turned my father into even more of an arrogant ass. Do you like éclairs?”

Mitch was still processing what Anna had said when she returned from the kitchen with two chocolate éclairs. They smelled just like Anna – chocolatey, warm.

“Tell me if it’s too rich.”

After two helpings of lobster fettucine and plenty of chocolate mousse, Mitch felt full to bursting, but he obediently took a bite.

“It isn’t.”

Anna took a bite of her own, and sighed.

“You really are a terrible liar. The filling is too thick, and the glaze is not thick enough. I’ll have to start over.”

“If you say so,” Mitch said. He had no desire to contradict her. The éclair had done that for him.

Anna got up, took the éclairs back into the kitchen, and dumped them into the trash. “So, being surrounded by books all day,” she said over her shoulder, “hasn’t it ever made you think about writing one of your own?”

“If I owned a vet’s office instead of a bookshop, would you ask if I’d ever thought about becoming a cat?”

Anna didn’t reply, just stared absently at the last smear of chocolate mousse in the pot. She seemed out of sorts all of a sudden. Mitch hadn’t thought she was the type to be so easily hurt. He knew very little about feelings; it never occurred to him that her reaction might be the result of feelings she already had for him.

“Yes, I used to daydream about it,” he said finally. “Still do, sometimes. But I don’t think I’m capable of it.”

“Why not?”

“Uh…”