He hooks his pointer fingers together and pulls to make the point. Josie chokes on her coffee.

“It can last up to an hour,” I add. “Until the swelling goes down.”

“Sounds…” She trails off, clearly at a loss for words.

“Kinky?” Eddie suggests. “I’d definitely bang a werewolf, wouldn’t you?”

“Chairs!” Josie exclaims, a non sequitur if I ever heard one. “You needed chairs.”

She’s right; that’s why I came over here. And the event is starting any minute.

“Take whatever you need,” Eddie says. “And if there are any werewolves in the crowd…”

“I’ll send them your way,” I promise. Then, to Josie: “You want to come listen in?”

“Absolutely not.” She turns on her heel and walks off.

Smiling, I have a sudden urge to howl like a werewolf before heading back to the store with chairs for what promises to be an…interesting evening.

7

Josie

Knitting and Knotting? Gross. Ridiculous. Idiotic.

Intriguing?

Nope. I shut the thought down as I head out the door of Beans. This is exactly why I don’t read romance. It’s not—as one ex-boyfriend suggested—that I’m boring and closed off when it comes to sex (he was just bad at it). And it’s not—as my mother suggested—that I hate love and don’t believe in relationships (she was just bad at them).

Nor is it because I look down on the genre, as Ryan seems to think. I firmly believe there’s a book for every reader and a reader for every book—it’s just that romance doesn’t speak to me. I love literary fiction because it’s gritty, raw, and complicated, like real human experiences. No guarantees, no tidy conclusions.

No false hopes, either.

I’m shaking my head as I walk back into my store, where Georgia has arrived to help me set up for tomorrow’s event. She’s dressed like a seventies flower child thrust into the modern world—wavy hair parted down the middle, round pink glasses, flowy sundress with no bra, Birkenstocks, and of course, her bedazzled pink cane.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, pushing her glasses up onto her head. “Your face is all red and blotchy.”

I pick up the sign I made to advertise tomorrow’s event. “What do you think?”

She knows I’m changing the subject, but she allows it. “The Literary Collective,” she reads. “A.k.a., the book club for people who believe the best novels are the ones that only make sense after being read three times.”

“Ha ha. At least it isn’t Knitting and Knotting, like at Happy Endings.”

She coughs out a laugh. “Like, that kind of knotting?”

I eye her. “You know what it is?”

Her cheeks turn deep crimson. “I may have wandered through the Omegaverse on occasion.”

“George!”