Book Lovers

Fame comes with money,” I point out. “Money’s helpful.”

“Fame also comes with people telling you whatever they think you want to hear.”

“I know,” he says. “I can read you like a book.”

You let me love you as much as I know I can, for as long as I know I can, and you have it fucking all.

“That’s a face.”

“I’ve always had one, Stephens,” he says. “Fairly disappointing you just noticed.”

“You’re in books. Of course you don’t have a life. None of us do. There’s always something too good to read.”

Another “universal truth” Austen could’ve started Pride and Prejudice with: When you tell yourself not to think about something, it will be all that you can think about.

“We should go in separately. So he doesn’t know we’re together.”

“Right,” I say. “That will make it easier to knock him out and empty his pockets. What should our signal be?”

Is there anything better than iced coffee and a bookstore on a sunny day? I mean, aside from hot coffee and a bookstore on a rainy day.

Maybe I have been fishing in the wrong pond. Or, like, the wrong stream of nuclear waste runoff.”

I, Charles Lastra, of sound mind, do swear I will keep Nora Stephens’s dark, dirty, twisted secret under penalty of law or five million dollars, whichever comes first.