Love in Real Life Read online

  Love in

  books

  Real Life

  Seth King

  Bookworm and book blogger Theodore Martin knows he could never love anything like he loves books – until George Charles walks into his family-owned bookstore one day and starts rewriting Theodore’s story, page by page.

  George is smart and bookish and handsome, but after a past full of plot twists and disappointments, Theodore decided all his future love stories would be experienced solely within the pages of novels. That’s why he dedicated himself to his blog, Books in Real Life, and swore off romance forever. Until George appeared…

  Will Teddy sabotage his new narrative and retreat into the safety of literature once again? Or will he step into reality long enough to finally let love unfurl in real life, and not just in a book?

  “He loved me like a romance novel. The secrets in his eyes kept me up like mysteries. Each adventure with him was a thriller. Our nights together rivaled erotica. Every moment away from him was a weepie. But our love story? That was all real. For good, and for bad…”

  Copyright © 2017 by Seth King

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  For Jacksonville Beach, my sunny little drunken island under the sun

  Teddy Martin

  “And she lived happily ever after. Most of the time, at least. And definitely when scones were involved. The end.”

  I turned the last page of my book, looked up, and sharpened my eyes at a world that suddenly seemed duller and more disappointing. Ugh. Why did everything good and true and amazing (and sexy) only ever seem to happen in books?

  Take boys, for example. Why could you only find a cute, tall, sarcastic, blue-eyed boy in literature? A boy who was just troubled enough to be mysterious without being clinically insane, a boy who was just cocky enough to be appealing without being a total douche nozzle? A boy who would sit with you in the dark and tell you he’d die for you, a boy who licked his lips and bit his tongue and did all those other patented sexy things the boys in books did? And it wasn’t just romance – why did real life in general always have to fall at the feet of literature? Why did names have to be less trendy and parents have to be less willing to stick around and even sunsets have to be plainer and somehow less sunset-y? Had all the authors taken some secret oath to make their books so mesmerizing, I would end up hating my life and all the boys in it? (“Welcome to the annual author meeting. Now let’s make Theodore Martin’s life a disappointing hell.”)

  When would reality measure up to book-reality? And when would bookworms get to fall in love in real life instead of falling in fantasies over and over again, and then being slammed back into stark reality again on the last page?

  I swallowed and made a bet to myself: if real life actually got as good as my books were, and if the real world offered me a guy that could hold a candle to any of these fantasy book boyfriends, I’d put down my Kindle, have a stroke, and die. (And then I’d be too dead to enjoy my new guy, but whatever, trains of thought don’t have to make sense.) I didn’t even see anyone represented like myself, either: everyone was either a hard-bodied hunk or an adorkably gorgeous, like, art gallery worker or something. Sometimes I just wanted to open a book and see awkward people in normal towns who didn’t really know themselves and didn’t know how to successfully be adults and avoided their problems by sinking into books every chance they got…

  I scratched my elbow in a bored way, and that’s when I noticed something strange: a boy. In real life. He wasn’t quite as Book Perfect as the one I’d just read about, but he had eyebrows for days (in a good way), and he was a good six inches taller than me – which was rare, to say the least. And he was standing right across the bookstore, in reality.

  I bit my lip and reappraised him. The strange thing wasn’t that he was hot. Hot boys could be found in my hometown by throwing a rock in any general direction – seriously, I could hit ten Zac Efrons with a single pebble. The strange thing was that he was a hot boy in my bookstore. I mean, yeah, I went to my bookstore, sure, but only because I owned it and because I was somewhat unremarkable and because I was a hopeless bookworm who didn’t really have many other offers on the table. But what kind of hot boy went to bookstores? Shouldn’t they all have been off, like, making out with hotties beside sand dunes, or whatever it was that hot guys spent their time doing? Why would a gorgeous guy like this be here, a guy with strong shoulders and sexy eyebrows and…well, the balls to approach me, apparently?

  “Hi. You work here, right?” this boy asked, suddenly in front of me. And just like that, reality flew out the window. Because this wasn’t a hot “book boyfriend” – this was boyfriend material, in real life.

  It seemed to good, too brilliant a plot twist, to be real. But then again here he was, happening in front of me. So I took a quick breath. “Um, oh, yeah, I do. What’s up?”

  “Cool. I’m looking for the new Benjamin Alire Saenz novel. Do you guys have it?”

  I leaned back, shocked that he even knew the name of one of my favorite authors. “Um, no, actually, but it’s on a delivery truck. It should be here within a few days, actually.”

  “Nice.” He appraised me, then stood a little taller. “Um. Can I sit down? Didn’t wanna interrupt your Kindle session, but my legs are a bit tired, and…”

  I stared up at him, thrown. I noticed that even his eyes smirked. Who smirked with their eyes? And the fact that he recognized my Kindle, and didn’t call it “an iPad” or something – he might as well have gotten me pregnant right then and there. (And I know males can’t get pregnant, but just roll with me here. Mentally pregnant – that’s what he got me. Pregnant with emotion.)

  Finally my mouth did what mouths were designed to do, and formed words. “You…want to sit? With me?”

  “Um. Why wouldn’t I be able to sit?”

  “Oh, well, not to sound rude, it’s just like – I don’t know you, and you could be a weirdo or an Alt Righter or something?”

  He rocked back and looked around. “Well, my question is rooted in more practicality than anything else, but if you say so…”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m afraid to tell you that all the tables are taken, and you look like the nicest person at any of the tables. Would you want to sit down at the table next to us?”

  I looked over – he had a point. The guy next to us was probably seven feet tall, and was decked out in his usual leather biker gear. Even the servers were afraid to approach him, but he wasn’t totally as he seemed – he was just Big Joe, one of our most valued “regulars.” It was also a Wednesday at the tail end of the school year, and everyone in town was looking for somewhere to study and consume caffeine in silence.

  Ugh. What was wrong with me? This poor dude was just looking for a chair, and I was ready to have him arrested for assault…

  “Good point,” I said, “but that’s just Big Joe, he’s a regular here. And sure, yeah, sit down.”

  He sat down and assaulted me with his clean, expensive scent. Of course he smelled good. Why he wouldn’t he? He was hot, and hot people got everything right. They just stumbled out of bed and achieved perfection like some people achieved a stubbing of a toe. Like people like me achieved mediocrity, and/or a general sense of disappointment.

  I leaned back again. “Whoa.”

  “What?”

  “You’re just, like, odd. Can I say that?”

  “For a second time? Yes, yo
u may. But am I odd in a good way or a bad way?”

  I laughed a little. “Weird is never a bad thing with me. I’m a certified weirdo, myself.”

  “Cool, then. Whatcha reading, weirdo?”

  “Oh,” I kind of inhaled. No hot guy had ever asked me about books. “Um, just this thing. This book.”

  “You’re reading a book? I didn’t know that’s what books were for. I thought they were for stopping doors and things.”

  Damnit. Why gave him permission to disorient me like this? “No, I mean – yeah. I’m on my break. That’s what we do here – sell books. Real ones, not Kindle ones. And other crap, too, but mostly books.”

  He laughed, and it sounded like warm honey somehow. Up close, he wasn’t exactly the textbook hottie I’d assumed from afar – his nose was somewhat hooked, and his top lip was kind of thin. But he was still hotter than anyone else in the room, and twice as charismatic. Three times, maybe. “I did assume, yes, that you were reading a book, as I can see it in front of me. What is that book about, though?”

  His sass knocked me back into myself. Couldn’t he tell I was trying to be an introvert here?

  “Tory’s Revenant,” I said, which was the latest book blowing up on the charts about white people and their white issues in their white towns.

  “And your verdict?”

  “Um…average. The characters were way too witty, which is a trait I never come across in real life. Why are you asking? And what are you reading right now?” I asked, the light from the window dancing and drowning in his spitfire eyes as he rolled them across the room.

  “Don’t even ask. Ugh, let me tell you, it was awful, and such a waste of fifteen dollars. This girl fell in love with this dude, and then she just…died. Steer clear of The Summer Remains, by the way – it will hit you like someone threw it at you.”

  “Too late,” I smiled. “Already spent a night in bed crying over it last summer. And I regret nothing.”

  “You don’t?”

  I shook my head. “If a book doesn’t change you and make you want to be a better person and basically rearrange your whole life, it’s not worth reading. I’m a bit of a weepie junkie in that way.” As long as I sought to experience feelings exclusively within the pages of my books, I could continue to be a human zombie in the real world – and that was exactly how I liked it. I had a lot of feelings to avoid, after all…

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “I mean, I get both arguments. In one sense, the world sucks and I don’t wanna spend my time reading about children suffering from malaria or women getting abused, or whatever. But at the same time, bad things happen out there, and for literature to not reflect that would be stupid. You can’t run from misery. But buying a book is like signing a contract with an author – ‘I’m trusting you not to destroy me.’”

  “Well, sometimes that contract is breached. I don’t mind the heartbreak, just as long as I get to turn the last page and put myself back together again.”

  “Wait – I just read your nametag,” he said. “Teddy – that’s a cool name.”

  “Thanks. It’s short for Theodore. That was too long, but with Teddy everyone thinks I’m a girl, so…”

  “Well how do you think I felt when Kate Middleton’s baby stole my name forever?” he asked. “That’s right – George will forever be associated with a cute little blonde prince instead of me now, and my name has lost its unique factor. He stole my thunder for good. I got upstaged by a zygote.”

  “I’ll still think of you,” I said. “I’ll try to banish any Cambridge-related thoughts whenever I hear the name George from now on, promise.”

  “Thank you. And by the way, I’m jealous. This is literally my dream job, to be around books and coffee and fellow ‘book people’ all day.”

  “Um…I’m not an ‘employee,’ exactly.”

  “So what, you’re the owner? Did I really just hit on the owner? Score!”

  “Um…”

  I trailed off. He was really hitting on me? That would certainly be rare, not to say I was grotesque or anything. I wasn’t one of those guys from the books who was a total hottie and somehow had no idea about it, even though everyone fawned over him all day. I mean, I wasn’t exactly thrilled with my looks or anything, and I wasn’t ugly by any means. I had a great chin and my eyes were a strong, clear hazel. But I only ever got called “cute” or “sweet,” and that was fine. Realistically speaking I would be, like, the third-cutest dude in a Starbucks late on a Saturday morning. I was nobody’s guy they went to first. I was what they called a “twink,” a somewhat androgynous-looking male. Small and pale and vaguely blonde, I’d be the Hermione of the show, not the Harry.

  But then again, there was this winter…when I’d been struck by a suddenly-voracious appetite and gained ten pounds in my shoulders and legs…maybe I’m not that dainty-looking anymore…

  “I’m kind of the owner,” I finally said. “Well, my dad owns the store, and I’m in line for the throne, I guess. The book throne. I’ve never seen you here before, though.”

  He swallowed. “Because I’ve never been here, but I have a feeling I’ll be seeing quite a lot of it this summer.” He smiled. “So care to tell me about this place, Mr. Owner? Jeez, that’s so cool. Just think, if I married into your family tree somehow – I’d inherit a book empire!”

  “Marriage?” I asked, probably looking as weirded out as I was. I never had been able to conceal my thoughts from splashing themselves out on my face, after all. But why was he talking marriage? We didn’t even just meet, we were like, currently meeting – right now.

  “I didn’t say I’d marry you,” he said, looking vaguely hurt. “Maybe just your cousin, or something. Or your long-lost stepbrother. Enough semantics. Tell me about this Bookworm place, please!”

  I gulped and told this stranger the basics of our store. So back in the mid-2000s, the book business was crumbling, and everyone and their mothers said Kindles were taking over and that physical books would become as irrelevant as the CD. So when my grandparents died and my dad announced he was using the money to open a little bookstore, everyone told us we were insane and predicted we’d be out of business by Christmas. The opposite happened. Hardcover books somehow became all the rage again, and my father’s sales increased every year. When our lease ended, my father found a dilapidated Victorian mansion across the street from the beach in an otherwise undesirable part of town filled with aging tenements and old shacks. So we bought it and moved in within a week. Then we started renovating it ourselves. The sagging, intricately detailed porches were propped up. The Victorian banisters and fireplaces were restored. And just like in the TV shows, we ripped up the hideous carpeting to find gorgeous (if scratched) hardwood floors underneath.

  Today the Bookworm was the largest and most famous bookstore within two hours in any direction. The first floor held the café and coffee shop, the Meow, where the eight cats that had previously populated the vacant mansion now roamed freely, purring at customers’ feet and posing for photos and jumping across the floor at random intervals. (Keeping the floor clean was a bitch, but the cats had grown so popular we knew attendance would crash if we put them outside.) The other first-floor rooms were either filled with bookshelves or had been turned into reading rooms with reading nooks, old overstuffed couches, and beanbags strewn everywhere. Upstairs was our two-bedroom converted apartment, just for my dad and me. The pool in our side courtyard had been surrounded with bamboo for privacy, dotted with chaises and reading pods for the customers, and turned into a little reading alley we called the Bookcave. The tiny guesthouse at the back of the courtyard was converted into Booktalk, a sort of community club that held book club meetings and signings for various authors.

  And the cool features didn’t end there. Some of our bookshelves were actually sculptures from local artists, our walls were covered in donated paintings from local painters, and no two corners or rooms were remotely the same. It was my heaven, my solitude, my saving grace. I never wanted to leav
e – and really, I didn’t have to. The Bookworm had everything I needed, including my job. I was a barista-bookseller-whatever else they needed me to be, and I loved it. What could be better than talking about books all day, with people who loved reading as much as I did?

  “Can I have a tour?” he asked when I finished.

  “What?”

  “This might be the only time I ever get face time with the owner’s son, and I would like to take advantage. Who knows? I might get scared. I might get run over by a car. I might never step foot in this establishment again.”

  Finally I stood up. Why the hell not? For once, my books could wait.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’d hate to begrudge you the chance, if you die and all. Let’s go take a tour.”

  George Charles

  I took a deep breath and tried to play it cool.

  So, say you were me.

  Say your life was a garbage dump on Staten Island.

  Say you had such bad social anxiety you sometimes didn’t venture further than the grocery store in weeks. Say your mother was an inch away from losing her shit because she just didn’t get it and said your condition was “a case of the blues.” (As if an established neurological disorder could be wished away or something.) But say she’d also made you go on a new medicine, and you were suddenly feeling more social than you had in ages – but you had no idea how long it was going to last.

  Say you saw a boy after all that. A boy who maybe made you want to Feel Things. Not “fireworks in the sky” types of Things or “symphony strings in the air” kinds of Things or anything like that, because I didn’t even know him and that would be crazy, but still – Things were definitely being Felt. Things with a capital T. He was cute and funny and seemed to love books just as much as I did, against all odds. Would you sit with him, if you were me? Or would you walk away? Would you take the chance?