The Bookworm's Guide to Dating

by Hart, Emma

  I couldn’t believe I’d gotten lies past Holley and Saylor already. Either I was a better liar than I thought, or they were really, really dumb.

  Ivy gasped, dislodging the empty chip packet from her bump. “It was Josh!”

  “Sssshhh!” Frantically waving my arms, I looked around the store. Which was stupid, because I knew the store was empty except for us. Saylor and Holley were on their lunch break while I kept Ivy company.

  “Oh, my God!”

  I drew a chair up next to her and pleaded with her. “Don’t say anything.”

  “Who am I going to tell?” she asked, holding her hands out. “Well, Kai, but you figured that.”

  “You can’t tell Kai! He’ll tell Colton!”

  Her lips drew into a little ‘o’. “Ooh, he doesn’t know.”

  “Of course he doesn’t know, Ivy! It only happened last night!”

  That ‘o’ became an ‘ooh.’ “How did that happen? Holley told me you kissed, but I thought that was the end of it. Because, you know. Your brother.”

  I winced. “Can we stop bringing him up? This is a sensitive subject.”

  “Tell me, tell me!”

  I ran through everything that had happened. It wasn’t until I got to the part about everyone being at Bronco’s that I realized she was really out of the loop, so I delved into a little bit more detail until I’d finished the entire story.

  “What are you doing to do?” Ivy asked after a moment.

  I shrugged. “We don’t know. As far as everyone—and I mean everyone—is concerned, he’s still setting me up on dates.”

  “How the hell are you going to date other men and then go home and bang him?”

  “Ivy. That’s not helpful.”

  “I know, but I’m hardly a relationship expert myself.” She pointed to her bump. “Hello. One-night stand baby.”

  “Yes, but you’re now engaged to him, so that’s irrelevant.”

  “Ssh, Kins, don’t be picky.” She flapped a hand at me. “Have you spoken since?”

  I shook my head. “I had to open the store this morning. We’ve texted, but we haven’t had a chance yet. I don’t know how much time we can spend together before someone gets suspicious.”

  “Hmm.” Ivy tapped her finger against her lips. “Well, tonight is easy. If he owes you a date, you can have him go to your place under the pretense of you both working together to find a date and reevaluate your wants and needs like you did before.”

  Slowly, I nodded. That could work.

  “Then at the very least you can talk and decide where you want to go from here. I don’t think anyone will be suspicious about that.” More finger tapping. “After is where it gets questionable. You obviously don’t want to date other guys right now, right?”

  I shook my head a little. “At least not until we’ve figured everything out.”

  “You’re probably gonna have to go out of town to spend time together until you come clean. If he’s dating too, you can lie and say you both have dates, but use towns in the same direction. You won’t be able to hide it forever, but for now… You can probably buy yourselves a couple of weeks to get a handle on everything.”

  “It might not even come to anything,” I said, getting up and straightening the new releases table at the front. “So it’ll all be moot.”

  “Do you want it to?”

  “To what?”

  “Come to anything.”

  I shrugged one shoulder, doing my very best to look unbothered. “I don’t know,” I replied, spending way too long fiddling with this book stack. “Maybe.”

  “That’s a yes.”

  I peered back at her over my shoulder. “That obvious?”

  “Yes.” She grinned.

  With a sigh, I turned back to her. “It’s just... weird. Like this is Josh, you know? He accepts all my little weird quirks and doesn’t care that I’m awkward and love books and go on bookish tirades about Harry Potter and all the other things that matter to me.” I paused. “I know it’s not like I’m old, but I feel like I’ve waited forever to meet someone who just… gets me. It’s strange to think he could have been there all along.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He’s been there all along, Kinsley,” Ivy said, meeting my gaze in earnest. “Maybe that’s why he gets you. Nobody but him ever took the time to figure you out. Even if neither of you realized it was happening.”

  ***

  I was dying.

  It was the only explanation for the cramps that had me doubled over and hissing into my throw pillows on the sofa.

  Seriously. Nothing was touching these cramps, and I was about to get a coat hanger and rip out my own uterus and flush it down the toilet.

  Ooh, no.

  It’d probably clog the pipes.

  The point remained, regardless of the method of disposal.

  I was so over it, and it was day one.

  My dinner had consisted of an entire bag of salt and vinegar chips—a family sized one, thank you very much.

  And I wondered why I bloated on my period.

  Really.

  The familiar sound of Josh’s truck pulling up outside my house made me groan. I’d told him not to come over because I wasn’t feeling well, and I wasn’t in the mood to figure out our clusterfuck of a situation tonight.

  If he wasn’t going to listen to me, this relationship—or whatever it was—wasn’t getting off to a good start.

  The truck engine went off, and a minute later, there were three knocks at my door.

  “Go away!” I yelled.

  I never said I had manners.

  “Kinsley!” Josh knocked on the door. “Let me in.”

  “I said go away!”

  The handle jiggled. “Damn it, Kinsley!”

  I hissed out a curse. Damn my terrible habit of forgetting to lock my doors during the day.

  Not that it was the day.

  All right, fine, I was awful at locking my doors all the time.

  “I’ve told you about—what are you doing?”

  I turned my head to the side and stared at him. “I have no idea what you mean.”

  I did. I knew what he meant. I was in the universal period pain position. You know the one. Head flat on a pillow, ass up in the air, thighs drawn as close to my stomach as I could get them, and my arms wrapped around my clenching lower stomach. The occasional rock back and forth to try and coax the muscles into relaxing.

  Totally normal.

  “Why are you—you said you didn’t feel well.” Confusion marred his handsome features, clouding his gaze.

  “I don’t feel well. I’m dying,” I confirmed. “My uterus is staging a coup and trying to murder me.”

  His gaze darted across my body before he shrugged. “Good thing I came then.”

  “What on Earth makes you say this is a good idea?”

  He held up two brown paper bags in triumph. “I brought supplies.”

  “Supplies.”

  “Uh-huh. And don’t worry, I went to Dartree Mountain so nobody saw me.” He grinned. “Are you ready for this?”

  “No. No woman will ever be ready for a male savior when she’s on her period. She doesn’t want to be looked after. She wants to curse the world and damn all reproductive systems forever. Cry. Scream. Shout a little. It’s worked for centuries. I see no reason to change the system now.”

  He paused. “So, I’ll start, then.”

  I rolled my eyes, and he took that as his cue because one by one, he unloaded things from his grocery bags.

  “Chocolate. Chips. Muffins. Ice cream. Lemonade. Wine. Cookies. Cheese. Ibuprofen. Tylenol. Aspirin. And—”

  “Are those sanitary pads?”

  He looked down at the green cube and frowned. “That’s what the woman in Walgreens said.”

  “You asked a woman in Walgreens about sanitary pads?”

  “I wasn’t going to ask a man.” He met my eyes. “Are they the wrong ones?�
�

  Weirdly, no. But then everyone I knew used them, so…

  I pushed myself up to sitting and crossed my legs. My lips pulled to one side as I stared at the little packet in his hand. “No, they’re the right ones.”

  He visibly relaxed. “Thank fuck for that, because there was a lot of colored packages in that aisle, and I was starting to feel like I was on the boat in Willy Wonka's damn factory.”

  It took all my self-control to bite back the laughter that threatened to bubble up. “I can’t believe you did this.”

  “You said you didn’t feel good. You said you were on your period. I put two and two together.” He shrugged. “I know you told me not to come, but I’ve bullshitted your brother enough today that I figured I may as well come over and make the lies worth it.”

  “And here I was, thinking you were coming to make me feel better.”

  “Kinsley, I bought you sanitary pads. If that isn’t making you feel better, I don’t know what to tell you.”

  I grinned. I couldn’t help it. The smile burst from me with a giggle that overtook my entire body. The thought of him standing in a women’s health aisle buying sanitary products was just too much.

  His own smile broke out across his face, and I grabbed a throw cushion to bury my face into because if I didn’t, I was going to explode into peals of uncontrollable laughter.

  Not that it stopped me, actually. All it really did was muffle the inevitable as I curled up like a turtle retreating into its shell and let the cushion take the brunt of my amusement.

  “Well, it beats being yelled at.”

  I looked up in time to see him pick up a grocery bag and head for my kitchen with it safely in hand.

  Thank God. Otherwise I’d eat that before I tucked into everything else.

  Honestly. I was like a rabid bear. You’d think I hadn’t eaten all day.

  And I had.

  Boy, I had eaten.

  Between my incessant hunger and the zit that was rapidly turning into Mount Vesuvius on the underside of my chin, the junk food was a welcome addition to my day.

  Josh wasn’t exactly a terrible one, either. In fact, he was an annoyingly delightful one, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

  He walked back into the living room, drawing on a beer.

  “I don’t have beer,” I said, frowning.

  “I know. I brought my own.”

  “You’re efficient,” I said appreciatively, taking the empty wine glass he held out.

  He set his bottle on a coaster on the coffee table—be still my heart—and poured me a glass of the chilled wine.

  Now I knew he’d been to more than one place. The grocery stores around here didn’t stock cold wine—or really wine at all, to be honest—but the liquor store did.

  That, my friends, was almost enough to make me fall irrevocably in love with him right here, right now.

  What?

  I liked romance.

  It wasn’t all lavish displays of flowers and fancy dates and grand gestures.

  Sometimes, romance was cold wine and sanitary pads.

  There was a sentence I never thought I’d say.

  I sipped the wine—it was my favorite, after all, and nestled into place when he sat on the sofa. Josh grabbed my legs by the ankles and lifted them so he could get as close to me as possible. My legs hooked over his thighs, and he let them settle on his lap as if they were meant to be there.

  He displaced me slightly as he leaned forward to grab his beer and drop the chips in my lap, but it was by no means uncomfortable. I already had Netflix pulled up on the screen when he sat back against the cushions and had the remote pointed in anticipation.

  “What are we watching?” Josh asked, balancing the beer between my legs so he could open the chip packet.

  “I don’t know. I was waiting for you to decide.”

  “Are you going to watch anything I say?”

  “Depends what you suggest, but there’s a high chance I’ll argue everything.”

  “Why don’t you just pick then?”

  “Because I was trying to be polite,” I replied. “I won’t bother next time.”

  His lips twitched, and his amusement was in his eyes. “Just don’t turn on something that was a book once,” he said after a moment of stifling his laughter. “You’re feisty enough tonight without the rage of a book-to-screen adaptation to rile you up.”

  “Carry on with that attitude, and I’ll put Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on.”

  “If you do that, I’m leaving.”

  “Excellent. Harry Potter it is!”

  Laughing, he whipped the remote control from my hand and held it at arm’s length. “You’d miss me if I left.”

  I snorted. “I told you not to come. I was going to wallow in my own self-pity all night.”

  “Yeah, but I brought food.”

  “If you really wanted to cheer me up, you should have brought books.”

  He paused. “You own a bookstore. You can get any book you want. I can’t top that, Kins.”

  “Fine. A notebook. Pens. Post-It notes. Pencils. Ooh, or bookmarks. I love bookmarks.” I sighed. “I’m a simple girl.”

  Josh looked at me as if I were anything but simple. “Seriously? That’s the way to your heart? Stationery and bookmarks?”

  “No, it’s books, but you just told me why that won’t work.”

  “And you think you’re a simple girl,” he muttered. “Here. Schitt’s Creek. Have you watched the latest season?”

  “Damn, no! I didn’t know it was on!” I sat up a little straighter, almost knocking his beer over myself.

  He grabbed it before I could cover myself in Eau de Coors Light. “I haven’t had a chance to start it yet. I’m behind. Shall we?”

  “Okay, but before we do this, you have to remember we’re officially entering into a binding agreement.”

  “It’s a TV series, not a marriage, Kinsley.”

  “No, Joshua, you don’t understand. If we start watching this series together, we’re obligated to only watch it together. We can’t watch it with anyone else or while we’re alone unless we’re buddy watching.”

  He blinked at me. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. If I find out you’ve watched it without me, I’m going to be furious.”

  “What are you going to do? Make me sit through Harry Potter?”

  “No. I’ll make you sit through Twilight. I know you hate those movies.”

  He visibly shuddered. He really did—his sister had been obsessed when they came out, and since he was older than us, he’d been forced into chaperoning us to the theater along with my brother.

  I don’t know why they’d complained. They’d both been paid for the chore of it, and they’d been able to take their girlfriends at the time.

  It really wasn’t the end of the world.

  “All right, all right,” he finally acquiesced. “Besides, if I had the time to watch it, I’d have started already.”

  “You live alone with no dependents. How do you not have time to watch TV?”

  “Sports,” he deadpanned. “And finding you dates.”

  “Yeah, that went well.” I rolled my eyes and plucked the remote back into my possession. “I mean it. You can’t watch it without me.”

  “I solemnly swear not to watch any of the final season of Schitt’s Creek unless it’s with you,” he said in a serious tone. “Is that good?”

  I dropped the remote and held out my pinky finger. “Nope. Pinky swear.”

  “Pinky swear? How old are we?”

  “Old enough that I watched the new Trolls movie for fun by myself last week and felt no shame,” I said, wiggling my finger. “Now, pinky swear.”

  “I remember why I’m single now,” he muttered, looping his finger around mine.

  “You’re not single.” I unhooked my finger from his and slapped his chest with the back of my fingers. “Technically.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Ooh. Are you claimin
g me?”

  “Do I look like I’m the type of girl who claims anyone? I was merely pointing out that, technically, we’re…” I trailed off.

  What were we doing?

  “We’re…” Josh waited, amusement curving his mouth into a smirk. “What are we, Kinsley?”

  “You’re about to be dead,” I replied. “I don’t know. What are we?”

  “You can make that decision.”

  “Wrong answer. I’m going to give you a romance book. Read it.”

  “I’m sorry. Was I supposed to put down our drinks, pull you on top of me, and kiss you until you got your answer? Demand that we’re dating and that you’re mine and you will be forever?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll kill you before forever comes.”

  “Or am I supposed to drag you into bed and fuck your brains out to answer the questions?” He quirked one eyebrow. “For what it’s worth, I’d be okay with that, but you’ve made your feelings on period sex abundantly clear.”

  “Yeah, well, if you passed tiny, bloody squish balls every time you wiped, you wouldn’t be so excited about period sex,” I said flatly.

  He stared at me. Just stared. For what felt like ever, and I knew he was processing my words.

  “And there goes any desire to ever have sex with anyone on their period,” he deadpanned.

  “Seriously. Have you ever popped a blood clot? They’re like those zits that squirt all over the mirror. One minute you’re living your life, then the next, it’s all, whoosh. Like stepping on a grape. Complete with the pop and everything.”

  “Kinsley.”

  “It’s gross. So gross. Not to mention the mess.”

  “Kinsley, shut up.”

  “I buy nice sheets, Josh. Normal sex is messy enough without—”

  He interrupted me by taking my wine and setting it down on the coffee table with his beer. Just as I opened my mouth again to say something, he cupped the back of my neck, leaned forward, and kissed the shit out of me.

  It was so. Damn. Good.

  Hey, maybe he didn’t need the romance novel after all.

  He pulled back just enough that the tip of his nose brushed mine. “We’re dating, Kinsley. Secretly, but still dating. And exclusively. I’m not going to see anyone else, and neither are you. Does that narrow it down for you?”

  A little shiver cascaded down my spine. Josh brushed his thumb over my jaw, bringing it close to my lower lip where he gently pulled it down before he released it.