Hooking Up With My Dad's Best Friend

And that’s when I woke up.

Damn it.

If I’m never going to actually fuck Bryce, the least my brain could do is allow me to imagine what it would be like. You know?

And maybe it could actually let me have an orgasm when I really need it. I’ll just have to try again later when I get home. Maybe I’ll be able to relax enough—or maybe the dream will be far enough out of my head that I’ll actually be able to get off. It’s been a long damn time since I’ve had actual sex and not just my hand or vibrator. But I just don’t have the time to put into dating anyone.

Not that that isn’t what I want and crave. But it doesn’t seem to be in the cards for me. Go figure.

It’s Monday, and I think that I hate this day before it’s even started.

As if adding insult to injury, my alarm starts to blare, startling me and shattering the morning quiet with its loud, brassy noises, so different from the whispered warmth of the dream.

I’m going to need so much coffee today, and I desperately hope that there aren’t a lot of crazy customers today. Because I can already tell that I won’t have the patience for it.

Today is not going well, to say the least. My normal Monday shipment of books was almost three hours late, putting us way behind, adding stress on me and Elle, and to make matters worse, we’ve been busy all day.

On any other day, I would be over the moon that my little shop has had this many customers. Owning a bookstore is difficult, and sometimes it feels like customers are be few and far between. But I’ve put a lot of hard work into Katti Corner, and I’m proud to say that it’s now a cornerstone of our little community, and that many people in the neighborhood rely on us for their literary needs.

And we’re not just busy either. We’ve had lots of people with special requests. Books that we would normally never stock, and would have no reason to. Anything from obscure textbooks to esoteric religious tomes and the like.

On the one hand, I am glad that our reputation is spreading as a store that is welcoming and that we can always find what you need. But on the other hand, with the way my brain is today, I don’t have a lot of patience for these kinds of requests.

Especially when every time somebody asks for a book, it seems like they can never remember specifically what they want. It’s always something along the lines of ‘Oh, I think the title was something like this,’ or ‘It was a book about penguins with a blue cover. Do you know which one I’m talking about?’

Of course, I rarely do. And of course, I do my best to help them. But I usually do it a bit more gracefully than I’ve managed today.

Boxes of unopened stock are scattered around the small space, and it’s making it very crowded. Elle thankfully notices that I’m not doing well, and graciously takes over one of our more regularly obtuse customers. He comes in every week and asks for the new books on quantum physics. Even though we don’t carry books about quantum physics, and never have. So what inevitably follows is a half-hour of googling that he could easily have done at home, and him likely leaving without buying anything.

If I’d known how little running a book store had to do with actual books, I might never have opened this place. But I still love it. It’s tiny and cozy, and the best part is that it’s entirely mine. Even if I can’t seem to get my head on straight today.

There’s so much that I need to do on Mondays, and it seems like I can’t get my thoughts on the proper track to do them. The dream I had this morning is still haunting me, and I feel my mind drifting away into warmth and murmured words and simple, elegant touches.

In the book world, release date is on Tuesday. Which means I have to get a lot of this stock catalogued and ready to go out on the shelves for when we open tomorrow morning.

There’s a significant portion of our customer base who comes in every Tuesday to get the new releases they are expecting. I can’t afford to just let it slide and do all this in the morning, because it will be bad for business. But I haven’t been able to complete a single task without being interrupted.

Finally, when closing time rolls around, and there still people in the store, I head back to my office to try to get some of the cataloging done, while Elle herds the last few harried customers out of our doors.