The Summer Girlfriend (Heart Beach, #1)(12)
He’d figure out a plan for his nonexistent girlfriend after.
Chapter Three
“If I wasn’t with André, this is the kind of man I’d want in my life,” Tati said to Noelle.
Noelle glanced up at the mass-market paperback novel that Tati held in her hands. The Pirate Captain’s Lover by Clara Crawford. A brown-skinned, shirtless man donned the cover, displaying his perfectly sculpted abs. Tati ran her fingers over the cover and blew the book a kiss.
“You’d want to date a pirate?” Noelle asked, smirking.
She and Tati were sitting pretzel-style on the floor of the romance aisle at Hidden Gems Books. Between them was a box of vintage romance novels that Noelle had acquired for the store from an estate sale. Almost thirty books for a whopping ten dollars. It had first-edition copies of Clara Crawford’s Pirates of the Deep series, and a second box was filled with mass-market cozy mysteries and spy novels from the early ’90s. The woman who’d owned the house had obviously been an avid reader.
“Why not?” Tati said. “Being with a pirate is probably so much fun. And you know the pirate in this book is probably rich as hell from all that looting or whatever it is that pirates do.”
Noelle laughed. “You should read that one,” she said, nodding at the book in Tati’s hands. “It’s about a woman who’s running away from her evil husband, and she thinks she’s boarding a ship to England, but she accidentally ends up on a pirate ship and falls in love with the pirate captain. It’s so good. Wait, actually…” She sifted through the box until she found what she was looking for. My One True Pirate. “This is the second book in the series. After a shipwreck, one of the pirates gets marooned on an island with a woman who’s pretending to be a maid, but she’s actually an heiress.”
“Oh?” Tati gathered her long twists at the nape of her neck and reached for the book. Her makeup was flawless today, as per usual, and her black scrubs hugged her curves. Even Noelle’s coworker Kevin, who usually ignored everyone, especially customers, glanced up from his phone as Tati had walked into the store earlier. Tati flipped the book over in her hands and skimmed the description on the back. “Sounds juicy. I’ll buy both.”
Noelle flashed a satisfied grin. That was at least two sales for the day. Her boss, Harold, entrusted her with sourcing books from estate and library sales, and she was in charge of sifting through the books that people sold and donated to the store. But her favorite part about her job was hand-selling to customers. It never got old. Even if she were only selling to Tati, who worked at the beauty salon across the street. One of Tati’s clients had canceled at the last minute, so she was spending her unexpected break on the floor of the bookstore with Noelle as she shelved books.
Noelle was glad she got to see her best friend when their work schedules overlapped. And Harold never seemed to mind when Tati visited. Maybe it was because without Noelle and Tati’s chatter, the bookstore was too quiet. This year had been their slowest in foot traffic in a while.
“I wish I could read as fast as you,” Tati said. “You read like your life depends on it.”
“It kind of does.”
Noelle wasn’t joking. A kind librarian and a handful of books had saved her life.
Noelle’s mom had been the first in her family to go to college, and Noelle was determined to be the second. Because college was so expensive, Noelle applied for as many scholarships as she could. Each year, EmpoWOMENt, a nonprofit in New Jersey, hosted an essay contest for girls entering their senior year of high school. The essay winner received a full-ride scholarship to the college of their choice. In Noelle’s essay, she wrote about how her mom was her biggest hero and she was inspired by how hard her mom worked. What she’d written must have resonated with the judges because she won the contest, and the organization paid for her to attend UMD.
At the start of college, she was directionless in terms of choosing her major before she finally settled on sociology sophomore year because she’d already taken a few sociology courses. Then she met CJ at the beginning of her junior year and things went downhill. CJ was at UMD on an athletic scholarship, and talented as he might have been at basketball, he couldn’t have cared less about his grades. When he admitted to Noelle that he’d always struggled in school because he’d grown up in a chaotic household with parents who argued constantly, she threw herself into helping him study. She focused more on helping CJ than she focused on her own classes. But she thought that helping him was the right thing to do, noble even. Because she loved him.
Then came the night that he asked her to hide his bottle of tequila in her dorm room. His RA conducted rounds often, whereas Noelle’s RA was more relaxed. Noelle and CJ got into an argument because she didn’t want to keep his liquor for him. One, she would get into a lot of trouble if she were caught with it. And two, she had a Social Movements final in the morning, and she’d realized a little too late that the time she’d spent helping CJ meant she hadn’t spent enough time studying for her own classes. Their argument was starting to get loud, and CJ finally stormed away, leaving her with his bottle. At a loss, Noelle stored the bottle under her bed and planned to toss it in the morning. But that had been the wrong move. Down the hall, her RA had heard bits and pieces of her argument with CJ, namely the words tequila and party. Her RA came knocking on her door, and Noelle, who wasn’t twenty-one yet, was caught with alcohol in a dry dorm.