Page 37 of It’s Me They Follow

R ight before midnight, on the night before the bookshop opened, The Shopkeeper sat alone again as she’d done on New Year’s Eve a month prior. She was a shopkeeper, just as she’d declared, and if no one came to the bookshop or if everyone came to the bookshop, it wouldn’t change a thing.

Again she loved on her books, more now since she knew where they came from.

She was nose-deep in her grandmother’s copy of Love Poems when the sweetest-smelling man with a balding head bopped in.

He smelled like herbs and spices, dessert and cologne, incense and deer hide, wet soil and Egyptian musk.

She didn’t turn around; she breathed him in.

“I came to pick up my notebook,” he said, admiring the new furniture and the stacked shelves.

“Let me get that for you.” She tried to treat him like any other customer.

“Take your time,” he said, spreading his sweet smell everywhere he walked.

She kept his leather-bound notebook in her bag and had never once opened it, but she’d touched it every day. She pulled it out, ran her finger over its cover and spine, breathed it in, and handed it to him.

For the first time, their hands touched. Electricity pulsed through her, but not enough to make her stop.

She looked up at him. And they held eye contact there, with his notebook between them.

She looked through his eyes and into her own soul.

In him, she saw herself reflected—her curiosity and sensitivity, her quirks and her strength.

And finally, after forty years of never kissing someone, she kissed ME, and ME kissed her back.

She felt the electricity in her tongue, down her throat, and throughout her bloodstream; it was in her skin cells and hair follicles and toenails, but now she could handle it.

“Can I share something with you?” he said, opening his notebook. Her eyebrows wrinkled; she wanted to say, Not right now, just kiss me. But he stepped back and began to read out loud once again. “‘Once upon a time but not long ago, there was a shopkeeper who did not like to be touched.’”

The Shopkeeper looked at ME as a mirror.

Held him tight in her eyes. She believed he breathed new life into her and she into him.

He whispered in her left ear, “The path with no beginning is worth beginning,” and as his lips danced over her neck, she surrendered and let him begin.

She hid in his smell like a safe space, his scent her sanctuary.

It was her own fingers following the path up her own thighs that welcomed him in.

He shoved sweetness into her sweet spots.

She guided his soft hands around her soft body, and he followed.

And he followed. And he followed again and again.

He longed to smell the parts of her that he could not see and prayed she’d let him taste them.

She sat back on her desk as his smell pressed into her.

His aroma erotic. She unbuttoned his buttons fast, but breathed him in slowly.

He allowed. And allowed. And allowed. She wondered if he tasted how he smelled.

Her mouth wide open with an ahhh that summoned him in.

He followed her to glory. He followed her to freedom.

He followed her to the mountaintop. And all night they moved mountains with their mouths and their minds and their moans.

Again and again and again they took turns adding chapters to their love story throughout the night.

When she woke up the next morning, his journal was still there, but ME was gone.

Endings don’t have to be sad , she thought to herself.