Accidentally Yours: A Friends-to-Lovers Gay Romance (Superbia Springs Book 3) Read online

She considered the question as though it were one of the great philosophical conundrums of the age. Glacially she asked, “Good witches…or bad witches?”

  He felt a sense of relief as her attention turned away from Inspector Kestrel.

  “Good, definitely. Witches who use their powers to solve crimes. And fall in love, occasionally.”

  “I don’t know…”

  His phone pinged, and even though he normally would not check his messages in front of a customer, Mrs. Fortune’s attention was now fully on the shelves in front of her, and so he glanced down.

  It was a message from Vidalia at the post office: You’ve got a big box here…is it all your naughty books?

  Winking emojis followed the words.

  His heart leapt. The package he’d been waiting for was finally here. It was like Christmas, and he was the little boy rushing downstairs to marvel over his new presents. Except of course in this case the presents were all books, which as a little boy he would’ve been horrified by; his love of literature didn’t blossom until later, in high school.

  But it was here! He would spend the afternoon working on the display in the window. He would line the books up just so, stacking them in a tall, narrow pyramid. Next to the formation would be the sign he’d been hand-painting all week, the sign that had taken ten tries to get right, his table back home currently a mess of puddles of poster paint, sponge-brushes drying on saucers, rough draft sketches, and a ruler and a protractor to try to get the letters perfectly-shaped, because this was important.

  All he had to do to get started, was to finish selling a book to the reluctant reader before him, so he could get down the street to Vidalia’s office.

  There’s a postcard too, pinged his phone.

  That got his heart racing. It set a time-limit. He needed to get over there quickly. Vidalia was a valiant woman in her lifetime battle against her own curiosity, but a postcard lying in plain sight was a temptation too heavy to be borne. Even now she would be telling herself not to touch it, promising herself she wouldn’t…even as a finger reached out and caressed the card’s edge.

  Who even sends a postcard? He didn’t have any friends who were traveling right now, and his family were all right here in Superbia.

  “In this series,” he said, “the witch comes from a small town just like this one…but she moves to the big city, where people don’t even believe in witches. So she has all kinds of crimes to solve, and nobody believes her when she says she uses magic to solve them.”

  “But does she have a cat? A black cat, as a familiar?” asked Mrs. Fortune. “Does the cat help her?”

  “You’ll have to read it to see.”

  It was a race against time, or at least against temptation. Vidalia would hold off as long as she could, Alex knew that. She was a marvel of directed willpower when it came to not snooping. But she had her limits. The postcard might be nothing, it might be an advertisement, an invitation to a bookseller conference, anything…but it might be something personal. Even now, he could practically sense her temptation from a block away, her eyes pulled inexorably toward the hidden message meant only for him.

  He put the Back in 5 sign on the door, not bothering to lock up since he was just going down the street. It wasn’t like Mrs. Fortune was going to break in to steal the rest of the cozy mystery series.

  His mental checklist ticked off people the postcard couldn’t be from. His brother Toby, the bartender? He saw Toby every day. There was no call for him to send any mail. And his friends over at the mansion, Liam, Noah and Judah, they wouldn’t send him anything, when they could just drop by, although he hadn’t seen them as much since renovations on the mansion had really gotten underway. Judah, he of the Donkey Kong t-shirts and battered red Converse, hadn’t even come by for the latest in the space opera saga he’d been reading, and Alex had begun to worry he’d found other sources for his books, perhaps one of the online retailers who had made the bookselling business so precarious these days. (Or maybe he just doesn’t like your company anymore. That would’ve been a shame. Alex enjoyed his little platonic crushes on people, and he’d had one for the bookish Cooper boy, brightening up whenever he’d come by to study the shelves and talk for a while. Nothing serious, of course.)

  Yes, he couldn’t do without readers. People like Judah and Mrs. Fortune were the lifeblood of a store like his.

  But not the only lifeblood, he thought with a lilting excitement, as he thought of the big package Vidalia had mentioned.

  He hopped off the curb and crossed the street, keeping a vague eye out for cars, although this time of morning the streets were usually quiet, everyone already being at work. Waving to a couple of ladies he recognized down the road, he stepped onto the opposite curb, and entered the Superbia Post Office.

  “I tried,” said Vidalia, “I really did try, Alex, I’m sorry.” She pushed the big box over the counter, the postcard sitting on top of it. “Do you want me to tell you what it says? I can tell you.”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I’ll read it later.”

  “You’re going to be surprised,” she said.

  He laughed. “Don’t spoil it for me!”

  “Now, whether it’s a good surprise or a bad surprise—”

  “Do I need to read it right here?” He glanced down at the picture on the back of the postcard. A night-time view of a city he didn’t recognize, bright with a million lights next to black and reflective water.

  She considered. “I wouldn’t. Save it for when you get back. Do you need any help with your dirty books?”

  “They’re not dirty, I promise,” he said, getting his arms around the heft of the box. “I’m not running an adult bookstore. And I’m sure I can carry the box, no problem.”

  “You better get on out of here before I tell you about the postcard. Oh, Alex! Run!”

  He left her to her guilty laughter, tilting the box to get it through the narrow doorway. Should’ve brought the hand truck. A few storefronts down, he was regretting his haste. The box really was heavy. An entire window’s display of books…couldn’t they have shipped it in two or three smaller boxes? His hands felt sweaty against the cardboard, and he worried about dropping it, denting covers, bending pages, all the infinite horrors that could befall a fresh, crisp, untouched book.

  In a moment he had to set the thing down to readjust his grip, or it was going to slip right out of his hands. As he put it on the sidewalk, his curiosity got the better of him. That postcard…clearly it wasn’t from a business, there were no words or logos on the picture. He wiped his hands on his shirt and picked up the card, flipping it over.

  An unnameable sort of harm. But then, there was a name for all harms, wasn’t there? Every injury had a word of its own.

  This injury’s name was Ian.

  Dear Alex—

  Shanghai is beautiful. Most exciting city I’ve seen so far. Just found a bookshop that reminded me of you. How’s life in Superbia? Hope you’re well.

  —Ian

  PS, Bastian says hello.

  If it wouldn’t have become the focus of the entire town’s gossip, he would have torn up the postcard right there on the sidewalk. Would’ve let the bits of paper flutter through his fingers down to the ground. Might’ve stopped someone and asked for a lighter, just to set the remains of the card on fire. But nothing got the people of Superbia talking like something different happening. He’d be lucky if Vidalia weren’t already on the phone with her friends, talking about the arrival of this cryptic message.

  He felt an obscure hurt in his chest. Not a stab, although for ages he had felt stabbed in the back. Nor a burn, although at the time he had burned with anger. No, this hurt was a clutching, as though a hand had emerged from the depths and was reaching up, trying to grab his heart and return it to the dark deep.

  The card was against the rules. He had been clear. He had been more than clear.

  “Hope you’re well?” he muttered. “Bastian says hello?”

  He shoved
the card into his shirt pocket for later consideration. Because no matter how much Ian wanted to interrupt his life, no matter what his motivation for this message, Alex had work to do. Important work.

  Heavy work, too. He knelt and lifted the box, careful to distribute the weight in his legs. Getting my exercise for the day, he thought, not moving until he felt he had a good grip on the thing.

  Ian.

  Shanghai. But that was just like Ian, wasn’t it? He’d never crop up in, say, Chicago. You wouldn’t get a postcard from him from Des Moines. No, it had to be somewhere special. Somewhere superlative. The most exciting city he’d seen thus far—out of a long, long string of exciting cities, an entire atlas of excitement and fulfillment, a spinning globe of rewards and admiration, leaping from continent to continent into the open arms of adoration.

  Alex never saw the car.

  Well, that wasn’t quite true. When he heard the tires screeching, it brought him to a sudden realization that he had been standing in the middle of the road, clutching his box the way a beleaguered ex might clutch the memories of a last argument, the tattered proof of being the one who was in the right. There was hardly time to look up, hardly time to see the car slewing sideways as though it had been thrown at him, the terrified face of Judah Cooper staring, not at him, but at the windshield, even though the problem was no longer the front of the car, which was pointed at Pepper’s Antiques; no, the flank of the car had become the weapon, a broad flat wall of steel racing towards Alex, and by some useless ancient instinct he raised his hands, as though he could ward off the car by means of gestures. The box, responding to the gravity of the earth rather than the gravity of the situation, plummeted, finding its rest on top of Alex’s foot, causing him to cry out in pain, the rest of his body frozen as the car seemed to leap into the air, a predator pouncing on its prey.

  He closed his eyes.

  3

  Alex

  When he opened his eyes, Alex was surprised to find himself still alive. His body, finally catching up with the idea that he'd survived, forced a gasp from his lungs, and his heart began hammering against his ribs. "Oh my god," he said.

  “Alex! Oh my god!” echoed Judah’s voice from the car.

  Invoking some lower-case god another five or six times, Alex shook off the sense of paralyzing shock that had pinned him, and looked into the car to make sure Judah was okay.

  It was difficult to tell. Judah was struggling against his seatbelt the way a drowning man struggles against helping arms, in his determination to sink forever. Yanking and yanking at the belt, he could not get it unclasped.

  Alex tapped on the window. "Stop pulling it," he said.

  "What?" Judah said through the glass. His eyes were still wide with panic.

  "The seatbelt. Just let it go slack, then it'll loosen up."

  Judah nodded, and exhaled a deep breath, bringing his hands up flat onto the wheel. For a moment he looked like a practiced meditator, an image of peace.

  I wish I could be at peace like that. The thought of the postcard in his pocket had rushed back into his head, and he wondered how many near-miss car accidents it would take to fully distract him from the message. Maybe he could have someone run him over again and again, for the entire walk from here to the store.

  Judah, unclasped from the python grip of his seatbelt, finally got out. His body was long, longer than you expected from the t-shirt and the beat-up shoes. You always wanted to think of him as small, curled around a book, but in fact he was just as tall as his brother Liam.

  Concern welled in his eyes, a concern that Alex couldn’t understand, since it was aimed at him.

  “Alex, what’s wrong?”

  It took a moment. Pain has that funny delay, it doesn’t let itself be felt until you’re out of the most immediate danger. Maybe all pain takes a moment of reflection. Maybe pain is reflection, and to avoid pain, we should simply avert our eyes from the past, both recent and distant. These considerations fled the moment Alex took note of his own posture.

  He was upright, yes, the car having landed a safe distance from his bones and sinews.

  Yet when he looked down, he saw the stance of an angry flamingo. Only one foot touched the ground, the other held up, throbbing. As the excitement and fear fled, pain rushed in to take its proper place.

  “Did I run over your foot?” Judah asked in horror.

  “No!” Alex barked, then bit his lip. “Sorry, I didn't mean to yell. I dropped the damned box on my toe!"

  He pointed at the offending box.

  He didn’t ask for help. Not him. Alex knew the value of self-reliance, the kind of do-it-yourself attitude you had to have to survive as a businessman in a small town. He could have just hobbled back over to the box, struggled to get it up in his arms again—

  But there was no chance for that. Judah had an arm under him even now, holding him up.

  "I'm fine, really," said Alex.

  It was a strong arm, an oddly strong one, and Alex caught the scent of cedar, an unexpected clean sharpness that focused his attention. His face was suddenly inches from Judah’s.

  What do faces look like? Different writers go in different directions. Henry James could throw out a couple of details that said everything: She had large eyes which were not bright, and a great deal of hair which was not ‘dressed.’ Others wanted you to know the length and angle of nose, the color of eye, the strength of brow, but Alex had always found those descriptions useless; his mind would make up an image instead. What did Judah look like? Alex had studied his face over his numerous visits to the store, thinking of it at his leisure. He had two eyes, a nose, a mouth, the same parts other people had, but his mouth always looked like he was on the verge of telling you a secret, his eyes giving you a look like he had second-thoughts, and would be keeping that secret to himself.

  "You don't seem fine. Are you sure I didn't hit you? Brushed you a little? Tire going over your foot?"

  Self-reliant businessmen don't whimper, no matter how bad their toe hurts. Maybe it wasn't just the toe. Maybe some important bone in his foot had snapped.

  "I think I'd know if your car had actually run into me," he said with an embarrassed laugh, but his mind ran to alternate scenarios, a question of what might happen if the car had come just a few feet closer. Would the box have protected him? Or would it have been just one more burden smashing him down, like a dried flower pressed between the pages of a heavy book? "Although why you were driving like a madman down the middle of the road—"

  "I was going the speed limit!" protested Judah. "You weren't watching where you were going."

  Damn it, Ian, you've nearly killed me again. "Pedestrians have the right of way," he said, smiling weakly.

  "I'd feel very bad if I murdered the only source of books in this town," said Judah. "But look, do you hurt anywhere else? Neck pain?"

  “I really think it’s just my toe. I might have a bruise.” Better not mention the foot, the way the entire thing pulsed and seemed to swell in his shoe.

  “That really is a big box.”

  “Hundreds of dollars of books. Ruined.”

  “Ruined?”

  “Well, possibly ruined. Marred. Bent. If you hadn’t—”

  “But you were in the middle—”

  Alex held up his hands in surrender. “Okay. All right. We were both wrong. Mostly you, but a little bit me. No harm done…except to my inventory.”

  “Do you want help getting it to your store? I could drive you. I have the car right here. You might have seen it. It was the chunk of metal flying towards you.”

  Alex considered whether he could trust Judah to drive the one block to the store without killing him again. “All right. But be careful with it. Please. It's important."

  Judah hefted the box with a grunt, and his back did interesting things with the burden, the muscles pressing against his t-shirt in a way that captured Alex’s attention. Why should a geek have any muscles at all? All that renovation work at the house, one assumed. T
he shirt was untucked, so Alex couldn’t sneak a peek at Judah’s bottom. Not that I would’ve done that anyway!

  "Are you sure it's not an order of bricks?" Judah set it carefully in the trunk. By now, people were on the sidewalk, looking at the way his car was parked perpendicular to the road itself, and Judah waved to them. “Just loading up, I’ll be out of here in a second!”

  “Just like those Coopers,” said someone.

  “Always up to something,” replied someone else.

  Alex couldn't help but notice the blush that colored Judah's cheeks as he heard these comments. For many of the fine citizens of Superbia, the Coopers were interlopers, disrupting their quiet town with construction and renovation—not to mention their strange penchant for finding boyfriends that caused so much talk. Everyone was still chattering about the way Judah's friend Noah had landed a rich developer who, even now, was putting some sort of crazy robot factory just outside of town. People would enjoy the jobs, the money rushing into the community, but they all looked fondly back to a quieter time, BC: Before Coopers.

  He didn't get it. Superbia had been dying for some new blood, and the arrival of the Coopers had been just what they needed. Or maybe he was biased, because they actually bought books from him. Especially Judah. Who might have nearly killed him, but was certainly helping now.

  His gait was a sort of step-hop beside the car, one hand on its roof. First a flamingo, now maybe a finch, or one of those angry wrens who had a nest next to the bookstore. Always hopping and glaring down, judging you.

  He was nearly to the car door when Judah spoke.

  “Wait,” he said. “You dropped something.”

  “I dropped—”

  “A card or something. Over there—wait, the wind got it, let me try—”

  Again that clutching sense that something was reaching up from the depths to pluck his heart out. He looked around wildly, trying to spot it.

  “No!" he said to Judah. "No, I’ve got it—”

  A strange sort of race, Judah rushing around the car to help, Alex hobbling for the postcard which danced across the road.