Brianna turned the box set over in her hands and then started reading off the back. "The first three volumes in the iconic fantasy epic. There are more? Since you've been good enough to gift this to us, I could always go onto Amazon and grab the rest."
"Oh, yeah," said Zach, "that's kind of it for Sparks. Well, not exactly, but it's complicated and it didn't ever quite get finished. Let's just say the first three will be perfectly fine for the cafe."
"Do you mind if break this open?" Brianna asked. Zach smiled. Brianna grabbed a pair of scissors and dug them into the plastic fold at one corner. A moment later and she'd ripped off the wrapping. She slid the first volume of the series out of the lushly illustrated box and inspected the cover. At first glance, it was a portrait of a woman. It was a standard fantasy depiction although more tastefully done than most. The artist had skillfully indicated nakedness and the inevitable enormous breasts without actually showing anything too tacky. Your eye was first drawn to how attractive she was, and only secondly to the fact that she had scales where her hair should be and a forked tongue.
"She's got it going on," said Brianna approvingly. "Tell me the story."
"Don't you want to read it yourself?" asked Zach, his eyes full of a rather adorable betrayal.
"Of course," she said quickly. "I absolutely will when I've got time. But just give me the general outline for now. The elevator pitch if you will."
"Well, it starts with the King who has been recently widowed being driven mad by these sexy dreams. He's convinced that he's being targeted by some kind of enchantment, so he sends his heroes out to kill every female monster in the land."
"The female of the species is more deadlier than the male," commented Brianna. "So, it's a pretty horny book then?"
"Not at all," said Zach quickly. "It's all done in the best possible taste. Nymphs dragging heroes underwater to their deaths, sirens crashing their ships against the rocks, medusa turning people to stone. It's a modern take on classic Greek myth with the odd bits of Jewish folklore thrown in. It was written at the start of the nineteen-sixties so there were limits to what he could put on paper."
"I hadn't realized it was that old."
"Yeah, they modernized the covers for this edition. They are well done, but it doesn't quite fit with the overall vibe."
"So, you said the series wasn't finished. If it was published in the nineteen sixties I'm guessing this guy, Houston Rambold, is dead?"
"Not at all, he's in his nineties now, but he's still keeps on trucking."
"We'll have to invite him to one of our book signings," said Heather.
"Yeah, right!" said Zach with a laugh.
"So how come the series never got finished? Is it one of those George R. R. Martin-type deals?"
"No, actually the complete opposite. What happened was..." Just as Zach was about to launch into a full explanation, a woman who had been staring at the advert board quite intently for a few minutes came over to the counter.
"Can I help you?" said both Zach and Brianna at the same time.
"Yes, just let me take a look at what you've got in the dessert section. Oh, and, just out of interest, these guys in the photographs on the board over there...they're actually members of the dating service, are they?"
"They are. That is to say, I have their forms just come in right here and am about to go through and process them all. What's it to be?"
"A slice of the blueberry cheesecake and mocha, please," said the woman. "And, um..."
"Would you like a form for the dating service?" asked Brianna.
"I suppose it couldn't hurt to sign up," said the woman casually. "You know, just on the off-chance."
She was practically salivating, although in fairness the cheesecake did look pretty good.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Heather and Cassian sat in a late-night ice-cream parlour in the East Village and examined their plunder.
"That is one heck of a lot of books," said Heather.
They'd spent the afternoon raiding the second-hand bookstores. Heather hadn't had much time to explore the city and had been Amazoning all her most recent purchases just through laziness. Cassian, of course, seemed to know every bookstore owner in Manhattan personally and had been directing her hither for classics literature, thither for historical romance and yon for contemporary fiction. Then they'd passed a little art cinema that was showing a season of Fellini's work, and they decided, then and there, to watch
Eight and a Half.
It was three weeks after they met, and this scavenger hunt was just another watershed in a relationship that was progressing at a very healthy gallop. They had slept together, in the intercourse sense, then, a few days later, they had slept together, in the slumber sense, and then later they had gone on a series of increasingly cultured dates. Today and tomorrow would be the first time that they had devoted a whole weekend to each other. The impromptu movie had been a great demonstration that they had moved from formal dating to just hanging out together.
They both loved books, but they were very different shoppers. Heather just wanted something interesting to read, preferably cheap. As far as the condition went, she liked her used books with all the pages and hopefully not too covered in unidentified stains, but after that, she wasn't fussy. Cassian, on the other hand, was a
collector
. A book, he said, should be well-loved, but it should be well-looked after as well. He would scan shelves quickly, but when he found something he was interested in, he would pull it down and then forensically examine it to see if it met his standards. The standout moment, as far as grasping his character went, was when he found a copy of Vikram Seth's
A Suitable Boy
and announced, with a very refined glee, that as it was in noticeably better condition than the copy he had he would be making the purchase. Heather then made the mistake of commenting that he must really like the book, to which he replied that he'd never gotten round to reading it, but this pristine, almost new copy was just what he needed to motivate himself to finally get round to it.
They were still at that stage of the relationship where she found this adorable, although she couldn't say that her indulgence would continue if the relationship continued on longer term. As it was, she smiled as he put down his spoon and carefully wiped his hands on a napkin before picking up another purchased volume to flick through.
"Indeed," he finally replied. "I shall have to get another bookshelf at this rate."
"I'll have to get a bookshelf," said Heather, without thinking.
"Oh?" said Cassian, suddenly interested.
"Actually, I haven't really gotten my apartment anywhere near straight yet, and a bookshelf is near the top of the list of things I kind of need to get sorted, but can survive without. Just about," she explained hurriedly. "You know how it is."
Cassian raised an eyebrow, and Heather cursed herself. Cassian lived for 'getting things straight'. That things could be allowed to be other than they should be was an anathema to him. She hadn't thought of it until now, but it was probably fortunate that he still hadn't really seen the apartment properly. That first night, they'd been so wrapped up in each other, and then he'd had to leave so quickly that he probably hadn't worked out exactly how much of a dump it really was. And afterward Heather had always angled to stay over at his. Cassian's place was so much nicer than hers, and, by and large, so much closer to anywhere which was fashionable in the city, that it just made sense that it had become their base.
"I thought you'd been in there a good while already. We've been dating for nearly a month, and I thought you'd been in New York for a month or more before that. And you do most of your work at home, don't you?" He wasn't really chiding her; he was just confused.
"I don't know," said Heather, trying to cast her mind round for an excuse better than pure bone-idleness. "It's just that I'm still getting used to life post-divorce. I'm not sure that I've really accepted that that place is my home, and I've been putting off choices about how to decorate. I want to make it mine, but that's kind of hard because I'm not sure who I am anymore and having a home that is all your personality and no one else's is kind of depressing."
"So, where are your books at the moment?"
