Book Lovers

by Emily Henry

That’s the thing about women. There’s no good way to be one. Wear your emotions on your sleeve and you’re hysterical. Keep them tucked away where your boyfriend doesn’t have to tend to them and you’re a heartless bitch.

Mom’s theory was that youthful skin would make a woman more money (true in both acting and waitressing), good underwear would make her more confident (so far, so true), and good books would make her happy (universal truth), and we’ve clearly both packed with this theory in mind.

“What, then,” I say, “is a Poppa Squat?” The corner of his mouth ticks downward. “I don’t know—a state of mind?”

Not every decision a woman makes is some grand indictment on other women’s lives.”

That was how my heart had felt for years. Like all the cracks callused over.

“I don’t hate him,” I say. “We’re just, like, opposing magnets, or something.” “Opposing magnets are the ones that draw together.”

Is there anything better than iced coffee and a bookstore on a sunny day? I mean, aside from hot coffee and a bookstore on a rainy day.

This is the problem with small towns: one minor lapse in judgment and you can’t go a mile without running into it.

It’s a feeling not unlike reading a really good book: all-consuming, worry-obliterating.

Without breaking stride, Libby squeezes my arm. “Perfect. A goddess among mortals.”

Mug and Shot.”

That’s why I put my career first. Not because I have no life, but because I can’t bear to let the one Mom wanted for us slip away. Because I need to know Libby and Brendan and the girls and I will all be okay no matter what, because I want to carve out a piece of the city and its magic, just for us. But carving turns you into a knife. Cold, hard, sharp, at least on the outside.

“Because,” he says quietly, “Libby’s smart enough to know what she has.”

“Until you got here,” he rasps, “all this place had ever been was a reminder of the ways I was a disappointment, and now you’re here, and—I don’t know. I feel like I’m okay. So if you’re the ‘wrong kind of woman,’ then I’m the wrong kind of man.”

That’s the thing about being an adult standing beside your childhood race car bed. Time collapses, and instead of the version of you you’ve built from scratch, you’re all the hackneyed drafts that came before, all at once.

And if you want to stay, and then change your mind, I don’t mind driving you back at four a.m.”

“This isn’t a movie, Libby,” I say. “Love isn’t enough to change the details of a person’s life, or—or their needs. It doesn’t make everything fall into place. I don’t want to give up everything.”

Maybe it’s possible to belong in a hundred different ways to a hundred different people and places.

Life with Shepherd would be a lot of slow, romantic sex with intensely loving eye contact, followed by watching the sunrise over the valley. He will, no doubt, be part of someone’s happy ending. Maybe he belongs to someone already, in a way that can’t be explained. For

Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either. Not the kind that forces two people into shapes they don’t fit in, but the kind that loosens their grips, always leaves room to grow. Compromises that say, there will be a you-shaped space in my heart, and if your shape changes, I will adapt. No matter where we go, our love will stretch out to hold us, and that makes me feel like . . . like everything will be okay.

Even if it hurts, when he shimmers across my mind, it’s like remembering a favorite book. One that left you gutted, sure, but also one that changed you forever.