Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop Read online

  Already Nina didn’t like him and she had famously low standards when it came to men. Her scowl was interrupted by another customer; Lucy, a pretty woman who worked at the council offices round the corner, came through the door. She read a romance novel a day, three on the weekend. Nina worried that there might come a day when Lucy had read every romance novel ever published.

  Not today though. ‘Are those the new releases?’ Lucy asked, her eyes gleaming at the sight of the pile of books on the counter.

  ‘They are,’ Nina agreed. ‘Have at ’em!’

  Verity was giggling again – she hadn’t been right since she fell in love a few months back – and Noah was murmuring again, but the bell was tinkling, more customers piling in, and Nina’s hangover had abated enough that she felt well enough to leave her stool and actually venture onto the shop floor to help them.

  ‘She burned too brightly for this world.’

  Noah and his infernal iPad left the shop before lunch, not to return. Nina hoped that he was done with his creepy, silent observing but when she got back from the accountants, Posy said that Noah would return the next day.

  ‘He seems nice though, doesn’t he?’ she insisted. ‘He’s a friend of Sebastian’s.’

  ‘Really? Sebastian has friends?’ Nina shook her head. Sebastian Thorndyke was many things: a digital entrepreneur, Posy’s childhood nemesis and now recently wed husband, but he was also the Rudest Man in London and completely lacking any filter. The last time Nina had run into him, when she’d been debuting her new pink hair, Sebastian had taken one look at her neatly set, sherbet waves and sniggered.

  ‘Torrid night of passion with a candyfloss machine, was it?’ he’d asked.

  As a result of that and many other insults, Nina couldn’t imagine that Sebastian had many friends, but here was Posy, insisting that he did and that apparently this Noah was one of them. Maybe that was why Nina still had a nagging thought that she knew Noah from somewhere, even though she’d rather poke her eye out than hang out at boring techy things with Posy’s husband. He certainly hadn’t been at Posy and Sebastian’s wedding, which had been a very small affair thrown together at three weeks’ notice. ‘They met at Oxford,’ Posy said, her face going all melty as it did when she was thinking about Sebastian. ‘Been friends ever since. Noah doesn’t put up with any of Sebastian’s nonsense. Don’t you think he’s a little bit sexy, in a nerdy way?’

  ‘Ugh! No! He was wearing a tie!’ Nina exclaimed with a shudder. ‘And a suit. So not my type. I do bad boys. I don’t do nerds.’

  ‘Have you ever thought of going against type?’ Verity asked out of the corner of her mouth because she was cashing up and if she got too distracted, she lost count.

  ‘Why would I want to do that?’ Nina asked. ‘It would be like asking me to have brown eyes instead of blue. Or to stop being five foot six. I can’t change the way I am.’

  ‘Change is good,’ Posy insisted as she picked up the books that had been discarded on the three sofas that dominated the centre of the main room and began to reshelve them. ‘There’s been lots of changes round here in the last few months and they’ve all been pretty positive.’

  There was truth in this. Last summer, the old and ailing Bookends had become Happy Ever After with a new romance remit and colour scheme, and a reopened tearoom. Nina was much happier selling romance novels to mostly ladies than she had been not really selling anything much to the occasional punter who had infrequently visited the shop.

  But in order for Bookends to become Happy Ever After, lovely Lavinia, their boss and mentor, had died and Nina missed her as much now as she did that awful morning a few months ago when she’d first heard the news. It was why their central display table was a little shrine to their much-loved friend. Each time Nina caught sight of Lavinia’s favourite books stacked on it or caught the heady scent of Lavinia’s favourite pink roses in the glass vase she’d bought from Woolworths in the sixties, she felt the same sweet piercing ache.

  Also, Posy had gone from never dating (unless Nina bullied her into it) to marrying Lavinia’s grandson, Sebastian, in the space of what felt like five minutes. Posy said that it had been building for years, but as far as Nina could tell, one minute Posy and Sebastian were shouting at each other as they usually did, the next they were plighting their troth at Camden Town Hall.

  But in some ways that, too, had been a good change. Evidently Sebastian made Posy very happy. The frown that she’d always worn had been replaced by a slightly dazed smile and even better, she, and her younger brother Sam, had vacated the flat above the shop to live with Sebastian in Lavinia’s house in a pretty garden square on the other side of Bloomsbury. Though Nina missed Sam dreadfully – he could always be persuaded to go on a chocolate run or fix her iPhone when the screen froze – Posy had offered her old flat to Nina and Verity rent-free.

  Nina hadn’t waited to be asked twice. Paying rent had taken up a huge chunk of her not-very-big bookseller’s wages. Not to mention that Nina had been stuck out in Southfields in a houseshare with five other people, no lounge, and an infestation of silverfish in the kitchen that would not quit. It had been a hell of a commute, especially when the District Line was malfunctioning, which it did frequently. There had also been an awful lot of sleeping on friends’ sofas after missing the last tube home.

  So, the good changes and the bad changes just about balanced each other out. And some things never changed, like Nina waiting for Posy to finish reshelving and Verity to complete the cashing up, before she asked hopefully, ‘Pub?’

  Going to the pub after work was a time-honoured tradition, except that was another thing that had changed – and not for the better.

  ‘I would …’ Posy began then shook her head. ‘But I really should get home. Sebastian’s been away on a business trip and I haven’t seen him for three whole days. We are still practically on our honeymoon.’

  Nina didn’t think that it was still a honeymoon if you’d married last June and it was now fricking February, but she decided it was wiser not to mention it. Instead she turned pleading eyes to Verity. ‘Pub, Very?’

  ‘I can’t. I need a half-hour decompression lie-down then Johnny and I are going to a lecture about art deco at the Courtauld Institute,’ Verity said, because one of the other changes was that Verity, Verity, a self-professed introvert, was besotted with her newish boyfriend, a posh architect called Johnny, and Nina hardly saw her. She’d much preferred it when Verity had been seeing an oceanographer called Peter Hardy who’d mostly been away oceanographing so Verity could often be persuaded to go to the pub.

  ‘What’s that? What’s that I hear?’ Nina cupped a hand to her ear. ‘Oh yes. It’s the sound of wedding bells breaking up my old gang.’

  ‘I went to the pub with you yesterday,’ Posy pointed out.

  ‘And, I’m not married and have no plans to,’ Verity added.

  ‘Alcohol?’ said a heavily-accented voice from the archway on the right and Nina turned gratefully towards Paloma, the tearoom’s barista who was standing there with a hopeful expression on her face. ‘Alcohol? Nina? Alcohol?’

  ‘Alcohol!’ Nina gratefully confirmed. ‘Si! Alcohol!’

  Paloma was Spanish, from Barcelona, and hadn’t been in London for long. Her English was rather basic, though she said that coffee was pretty much a universal language, and she had more piercings than Nina (who had seven holes in one ear, eight in the other and a metal bolt through her tongue) or even Nina’s friend Claude, and he pierced people for a living. Paloma also had an on/off Cuban boyfriend called Jesus, who wasn’t as godly as his name suggested. It often sounded to Nina like they were having the most tempestuous rows, as it did ten minutes later, once they were settled round the table in a tapas bar just off the Grays Inn Road.

  As usual, Paloma and Jesus were shouting at each other and gesticulating wildly as Nina sat there nursing a vodka and tonic to chase away the last dregs of her hangover. ‘Guys,’ she said eventually when there was a pause in the argu
ment. ‘Really guys, I’m a big believer in passion, but can we just dial it down a notch?’

  ‘Que?’ Jesus shrugged.

  ‘We just talk about if we need the … the papel de baño …’

  ‘The papel de whato?’ Nina asked.

  ‘How do you say …’ Paloma swiped her hand in the region of her crotch where she apparently had quite a few piercings too. ‘For after when you pee.’

  ‘Oh, you mean loo roll.’

  ‘Si! Loo roll.’

  Just as Nina was starting to despair of her Wednesday night, the door opened, letting in a gust of wind and a group of Paloma and Jesus’s friends. There was much hugging and kissing and shouting and gesticulating. It was a sea of unfamiliar, though smiling, faces.

  The friends commandeered two extra tables, ordered what seemed like hundreds of tiny plates of delicious food and shouted at each other in Spanish. They tried to include Nina, to pull her into the conversation with halting English, but in the end she was left to her own devices and a bowl of patatas bravas. This was how Paloma must feel a lot of the time; everyone chattering away in another language, so Nina took it as her due. She also took the lingering looks from one of Jesus’s friends, Javier, and returned them with interest.

  Javier had tousled black hair, the kind of hair that was designed solely to be rumpled by a lover’s hand. He had dark eyes that a girl could lose herself in. He also had a smile that was pure sex and seated as he was across the table from Nina, she was pretty sure that it was Javier’s leg that was rubbing against hers.

  Nina glanced at Javier from under her lashes, her fingers trailing provocatively along her neckline to highlight her cleavage displayed to best advantage in the tight black vintage dress she’d quickly changed into before they left the shop.

  But when Javier’s tongue did something quite obscene with his bottle of lager, Nina began to wonder how they were going progress things when she only spoke five words of Spanish. And when he did it again, this time with added and very unsexy slurping at the bottle neck, she found herself go suddenly cold.

  Nina knew precisely nothing about Javier, except that he was from Spain (though she wasn’t completely sure about that, he could just be from a Spanish-speaking country), he was Paloma’s friend and, judging from what he was doing to his poor lager bottle, he was angling for a hook-up.

  Oh God, she was so tired of this merry-go-round. It was time for Nina to make her excuses and leave because she had a three-date minimum before hooking up. And how could you have three dates with someone when you only understood a few words they were saying? Also, if she and Javier did get past three dates, got intimate with each other, only for things to fizzle out (after all, intimacy was no guarantee of a happy ever after), then things could get awkward between Nina and Paloma. Paloma did make a stellar cup of coffee and Nina would hate it if Paloma started spitting in hers or worse, withholding coffee altogether. This was why dear, beloved Lavinia had been fond of saying, ‘Don’t get your bread from the same place that you get your eggs,’ or as Nina’s father would say more brusquely, ‘Don’t shit where you sleep.’

  What Javier was doing now with his tongue was actually starting to make her feel a bit nauseous and weary with it all. Since when had hooking up become so … boring? If there was one thing that Nina didn’t do, it was boring. ‘Boring’ wasn’t the reason why she’d upgraded her daytime make-up to an evening look, which involved yet another lorryload of eyeliner, a more strongly defined brow and industrial amounts of red lipstick. ‘Boring’ wasn’t why Nina had poured herself into a black satin wiggle dress and teetered to the tapas bar in five-inch heels.

  Nina had gone to all this effort because she wanted to bewitch and beguile the man of her dreams and she had a very clear idea of just who that man was. Some ten years before, Nina had read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and it had changed her life forever. Heathcliff and Cathy were star-crossed lovers who couldn’t live with each other and couldn’t live without each other. It was all passion and angst and rugged Yorkshire moorland. And though in his worst moments, Heathcliff was one hundred per cent toxic masculinity, in his best moments, Nina had glimpsed the kind of man who would make her happy. A man who was her soulmate. Her one true love. A restless heart to match her own. A man who’d try to beat her at her own game but would only succeed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and alternate Sundays. A man who’d share all the highs and lows of a love that was too great to be contained. A man who loved with everything he was and wouldn’t settle for second best, so why should Nina? And that was why she was holding out for a Heathcliff and would accept no substitutes.

  But it turned out that in real life, Heathcliffs were pretty thin on the ground and Nina knew without a shadow of a doubt that a Heathcliff would not be passionately tonguing a cheap bottle of euro-lager on a Tuesday night.

  Nina smiled regretfully, tucked her legs under her chair before Javier gave her friction burns, and pulled out her phone.

  The night was still young, she thought as she logged into HookUpp – maybe her romantic hero would be lurking in its algorithms tonight. HookUpp was a dating app designed and owned by Sebastian’s company ZingerMedia, so Nina was always slightly terrified that he had access to her login details and might share classified information with Posy over dinner.

  ‘Wouldn’t expect Tattoo Girl to be on time tomorrow,’ he’d say, poring over Nina’s metadata. ‘She’s just up-swiped on a graphic designer who up-swipes a different woman every evening and never gets less than a four-star rating from any of them.’

  Still, Nina wasn’t fearful enough to delete the app. Not when there was every chance of love lurking around the next corner. Or rather Steven, 31, writer, who was apparently 0.3 km away and had already up-swiped Nina and sent her a message: Fancy a drink?

  It was quite dimly lit in the tapas bar and Nina had to peer quite closely at her screen to get a good look at Steven’s picture. Not that she was shallow, but she didn’t want to go for a drink with someone who looked like they’d buried their last four HookUpps in shallow graves.

  Steven looked all right. He was posed with a Labrador, who was absolutely gorgeous. How bad could Steven be if he was friendly with a dog? Dogs were great judges of character.

  Nina up-swiped Steve and sent a message back. Thornton Arms, ten minutes?

  Steven messaged back. I’ll be waiting outside.

  It wasn’t very romantic, but looking for love, even looking for a Heathcliff, was a numbers game. A girl had to manoeuvre around a lot of frogs to find her prince. In Nina’s experience, which was vast, it was best to get the meet and greet out of the way ASAP and then, hopefully, she and Steven, 31, could get on with the falling in love.

  With a renewed sense of optimism, Nina scraped her chair back and stood up. ‘Guys! I have to go now,’ she said. There was a gratifying chorus of ‘No’s and many hand-wringing gestures. Javier, though, just shrugged and stopped making love to his lager bottle, so Nina knew she’d been right to trust her instincts. If Javier had the Heathcliff gene, he’d have thrown himself to the ground to prevent Nina from leaving or at the very least, he’d have offered to buy her a drink if she agreed to stay.

  There was just time for a quick primp and spritz in the bathroom to ensure her hair was still immaculately set and that her lipstick was still where it should be.

  All was well. Watch out, Steven, 31, writer, get ready to fall madly in love.

  Nina left the bar and walked round the corner, took a left, and even now, after years of blind dates and meeting men whose picture was a little avatar on her phone screen, she still got the same feeling in her stomach. A churny, tingly feeling of expectation, excitement and yes, a little bit of dread. It didn’t matter how many times Nina took a walk to meet a man, she never failed to have that colony of butterflies fluttering deep inside her, because she might be about to meet her destiny. This. Could. Be. The. One.

  ‘You Nina, then?’ asked the man in the suit stood outside the Thornton Arms.
‘You looked thinner in your picture.’

  He’d looked at least ten years younger, five inches taller and had definitely had more hair. ‘Steven,’ Nina confirmed with a bright smile, even as the butterflies stopped fluttering and she wondered why she’d bothered to reapply her lipstick for this.

  ‘Shall we?’ Steven opened the door not for Nina but so he could enter the pub first, which was just bad manners. At least he didn’t let the door shut in Nina’s face, but he was already on one strike.

  ‘So, let’s find somewhere to sit,’ Nina suggested, but Steven was too busy giving her the once over to reply.

  His eyes lingered on what Nina lovingly called her three b’s: boobs, belly, booty. Not with admiration or longing or lust, but with obvious distaste.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you really should include a full-body shot on your HookUpp profile. Saves a lot of time. I don’t normally contact women who only have a headshot.’

  Nina refrained from pointing out that he’d uploaded a picture from the dim and distant days when he’d had a full head of hair. ‘I’m sorry that my curves are too much for you to handle,’ she said icily, drawing herself up so those curves were displayed to their best advantage.

  She was a size fourteen. Size sixteen. Size fourteen. OK, she was somewhere between a fourteen and sixteen depending on the time of the month, which shop she was in and how many of the tearoom’s delicious baked goods she’d scoffed that week. And Nina was OK with that. She liked her body. It looked good in her beloved vintage dresses. It looked good with no clothes on at all. It could walk great distances in high heels. It could walk even greater distances on the very rare occasions when she wore flats. If she wanted to feel bad about her body, then she could go and visit her mother. She certainly wasn’t going to let this Steven, with his cheap suit and sweaty upper lip, try to make her feel that she should be something less.

  ‘You know what, let’s call it quits,’ she said, which was very reasonable of her.