“What you readin’?”
He glanced up guiltily and shoved the book back on the shelf. “Nothin’. Sorry.” His hands dived into his jeans pockets, and his cheeks flamed red.
“It’s okay to flip through the books. I mean, we’re not a library, but you gotta know you’re interested before you buy, right?”
“Yeah, right.”
“You wandered off. Not a fan of MMA?”
His shoulders came up to his ears. “I guess not.”
So ... cute, but personality-free, apparently.
He seemed harmless enough, so Petra was going to leave him to himself and go back to the bar to start the closing process, but before she could turn around, Jacob said, “I never heard of a bookstore in a bar before. Did Gertrude think it up?”
Petra smiled. “Well, sort of. Do you know who Gertrude is?”
He shook his head. “I don’t hang around over here much.”
“Neither does she. She died about seventy or eighty years ago. In Paris.”
A shadow passed through his eyes, and his expression darkened. He thought she was making fun of him.
That could be dangerous. Regardless, she felt bad for making him feel bad, so she tried to fix the damage. “The bar’s named after Gertrude Stein. I don’t think many people know about her anymore, but she was a writer and a patron of the arts during the first half of the twentieth century. Especially around the Twenties. She was friends with Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Picasso. This part of the bar is designed to look like the place they all hung out together—her living room.”
“Fitzgerald—he wrote that book, right?Gatsby.”
He was definitely not a reader. “Yep. He wroteThe Great Gatsby.”
“Cool. Was Gertrude ... you know.”
Petra was pretty sure she did know. “A lesbian? Yes. She lived most of her life with a woman named Alice B. Toklas.”
“Is that the Alice on the board?”
They had a big chalkboard hanging behind the bar where they wrote their specials in colored chalk. Painted in deco-style letters across the top was the phraseAlice Recommends.
“You mean the specials board? Yep, that’s our Alice.”
“Cool.” He looked around, idly picked up another book from a table near his hip, flipped it over, pretended to read the back, then returned it—upside down—to its stack. “Um ... are you?” He asked with his face pointed at his boots.
Now she was confused. “Am I what?”
“Like Gertrude.”
Petra wasn’t sure how to respond. There was a scenario in which he could be asking so he could determine his targets tonight. Or he was simply curious—clearly uncomfortable, but also curious. Or maybe he was considering hitting on her?
No, not that. That was silly.
But then he looked up again, and she didn’t bother to formulate an answer. “You’re bleeding again.” He must have bit down on his lip or something and got that cut going again. It was bleeding quite a lot.
“Huh?” He put his hand up and swiped the back across his lip. “Oh, shit.”
Then he shook his hand and flung blood droplets over the books he was just fidgeting with, which ...sigh.
“Hold on,” Petra said and hurried back to the bar. She grabbed a few thick paper napkins from the dispenser and went back to Jacob. “Here.”
“Thanks. Sorry about the books. I’ll pay for ‘em.”