The Bookshop Wager

So here's how I ended up working weekends at a used bookstore at thirty-four years old. Travis, by the way. I'm thirty-four, I coach high school swim, and I thought a little side gig would be easy money.

It wasn't supposed to be a bookstore. My buddy Danny worked the counter at The Gilded Page, this snug old shop in the college part of town, and he got a real job offer out of state in March. He quit with about a day's notice and then cornered me at the gym.

"Travis, man, Wallace needs somebody. Weekends only. You're always saying you want extra cash."

"I say that about a lot of things," I told him.

"You say it constantly. I already gave him your number."

And that was that. Danny had the guilt of a golden retriever, meaning none, and Wallace Naeole called me the next morning before I'd even had coffee. Wallace is the owner, thirty-nine, married to his college sweetheart, and he has this way of talking like you've already agreed to whatever he's saying.

"Saturday and Sunday, nine to five. There's a cat. His name is Dewey and he does not work. You'll fit right in."

"Do I get to say no?" I asked.

"Sure! You can say no. Nobody ever does." He laughed and hung up.

So I started the first weekend of April. The shop smells like old paper and cinnamon, the floors creak everywhere, and there's a break room in the back with a wobbly table and a kettle nobody cleans. I figured I'd shelve books, run the espresso machine for the café side, pet the cat, and go home.

Then I met Oliver Lassiter.

Oliver is the head bookseller. Thirty-one, reads actual literature on his lunch break like it's a personality, and he smirked at me from my first minute in the building. I'm not exaggerating. I walked in, Wallace introduced us, shook his hand, and Oliver looked me up and down and smirked. Not a smile. A smirk.

"So you're the swim coach," he said.

"That's me."

"Heard you're good at holding your breath." And he walked off to shelve something.

Who says that? I stood there holding my first box of stock and thought, okay, this guy is going to be a problem. And I was right, just not in the way I expected.

* * *

The first month was all little digs. Oliver found ways to needle me about everything. I rang up a romance novel for a customer and he appeared out of nowhere to say the author had better prose in her earlier books, then rated my latte art out of ten in front of Jerry Adams, who's a retired librarian and a regular and honestly the funniest person in the building. Jerry's seventy-three, cheerfully single, and comes in every Saturday to buy westerns he's already read.

"Your swan looked like a duck, son," Jerry told me.

"It's a heart!" I said.

"That's worse," Oliver said, and Jerry cackled.

But the thing that got under my skin, the real thing, was the polo. Wallace gave me two staff polos, dark green, and I made the mistake of wearing one the first Saturday without checking the fit. I swam, I lift, the shirt fit. Oliver noticed immediately.

"Do you own anything else?" he asked, leaning on the fiction shelf like he was posing for a catalog.

"It's the uniform, Oliver."

"Mm. Wallace should buy a size up." He turned a page. "For morale."

I flipped him off behind the register and Jerry laughed so hard he had to sit down on the poetry bench.

Here's the part I'll admit to, since this is my story and nobody else is telling it. I liked him. From early on I liked him and I did not want to like him, so I doubled down on being a jerk. There is the entire dynamic, right there. Two grown men, thirty-one and thirty-four years old, acting like the break room was a schoolyard.

Because the break room is where it all went sideways. Small table, two chairs, the kettle, a window that doesn't open. That's where we took our lunches. And I swear Oliver started timing his breaks to match mine on purpose. We'd sit there and bicker about whether Hemingway counted as books (his position: yes; mine: he counts, barely) and who shelved the travel section wrong (his, always his), and somewhere in there I realized I was watching his hands. He has nice hands. He uses them when he talks, waves them around like he's conducting.

"You're staring," he said one Sunday.

"I'm looking at the wall."

"The wall's behind me."

"Then I'm looking through you at the wall."

He grinned and stirred his tea and I hated how much I enjoyed losing that exchange. Every single day I lost something to that man.

* * *

Then came the last Saturday in April. Rain all day, slow shop, Jerry camped in the armchair by the window with a western and Dewey asleep on the atlas. Wallace was upstairs doing whatever owners do. I was restocking the café pastries when Oliver came up behind me.

"Travis. Break room. Now!"

"Are you firing me?"

"I'm offering you the deal of your life." He sounded so pleased with himself I nearly said no on the spot.

We sat down at the wobbly table and he folded his hands like a lawyer. I want to set this up right, because what he said next changed my whole summer.

"Here's the wager. I bet you can't last a month."

"A month doing what?"

"A month without giving in." He tilted his head. "Come on, you know what I mean. You've been staring at me since you started. I've been staring right back. The whole shop sees it. Jerry has a pool going."

"He does not."

"He does. I'm not allowed to tell you the odds." He leaned in, elbows on the table, and that smirk of his was at full power. "So here's the dare. One month. You keep your hands to yourself and I keep mine to myself. No touching. You don't give in, you don't crack, you don't let me get to you. You make it thirty days clean and I buy your drinks for a year. Every coffee, every pint, everything."

"And if I lose?"

"If you lose," he said, "you're my personal assistant for a month. Book running, coffee fetching, whatever I say. Within reason," he added, because he's not actually a monster.

I sat back. I looked at him. And the honest truth is that my first thought was not about drinks. My first thought was that he'd basically told me he wanted me, out loud, at a table with a wobbly leg, and my second thought was that I could not let him win anything, ever, not one single round.

"You're that sure of yourself?" I said.

"Completely."

"You think I'd crack in a month."

"I think you'd crack in two weeks. I gave you a month to be generous."

"This is the dumbest bet in history," I told him. "Two adults, wagering on their own self-control, in a break room that smells like burnt coffee."

"You forgot cinnamon."

"I didn't forget cinnamon. So what happens if we both just, what, behave? Nothing happens for a month? That's it?"

"That's it. Thirty days of perfect professional conduct." He stuck his hand out. "Or I win, and you spend June carrying boxes and admitting you wanted me since day one."

And here's where I should have laughed and gone back to the pastries. But he had that smirk, and I had my pride, and between those two things there was no chance in hell I was walking away.

"One condition," I said.

"Name it."

"Drinks for a year means good stuff. Not the cheap tap beer."

"Travis, I would never insult you that way." He kept his hand out. "Deal?"

We shook on it. His hand was warm and he held on maybe one second longer than a handshake needs, and I pulled back first, which I'm pretty sure counted as a point for me.

"For the record," he said, standing and taking his mug to the sink, "you're going to lose so beautifully."

"I'm going to win so boringly," I shot back, "you'll cry."

He left the break room whistling. I sat there with my heart going and Dewey wandered in and jumped on the table like he wanted to ask what I'd just agreed to. I honestly didn't know. All I knew was that I had thirty days, one smug bookseller, and the growing suspicion that I'd been set up from the very first smirk.

"Jerry," I said, walking out front, "tell me about this pool."

"No refunds," he said from behind his western. "But I'll sell you late money on Oliver at very good rates."

"Which side are people on?"

"Everyone's on Oliver. He's got history on his side."

I stood there and thought about that all afternoon. History on his side. Sure. But he didn't know about my pride, and he didn't know that spite is the strongest fuel I've got. Thirty days. How hard could it be?

Reader, it was hard. It got hard fast. But that's the next part.

Wallace found out about the bet on day three. Of course he did. Wallace finds out about everything in that shop, including the time Dewey got stuck behind the science fiction shelves, which happened on his day off.

I was shelving a stack of paperbacks when Wallace strolled past and said, casual as anything, "So. Thirty days, drinks for a year against a month of servitude. Bold stakes, gentlemen."

I nearly dropped the whole stack. "How do you know that?"

"Travis. I own the store. The break room has thin walls and Oliver talks to himself when he's pleased with himself." He picked up a paperback, checked the spine, put it back. "But the wager as stated lacks ambition. So I'm raising the stakes. If Oliver wins, you also work his Sunday shifts through the summer. If you win, he has to dress as Dewey for the store's anniversary sale."

"He would NOT," I said.

"He agreed before you finished reading my face," Wallace said, and strolled off, delighted with himself.

I found Oliver in the front and asked him if it was true. "Every word," he said. "Start making the cat costume. Get some whiskers."

"And this is work appropriate?"

"Wallace calls it morale building." He shrugged. "It's already shop gossip, you know. Jerry told three regulars on Saturday. It's got legs."

He was right about that. By Friday, Jerry Adams had upgraded from a pool to an actual book of betting slips. Little fake tickets, made on his home printer, with odds handwritten in the margin. He laid them out on the counter for me like a man showing off his grandchildren.

"See here," he said. "Two to one Oliver wins. Three to one it happens in the biography aisle. Five to one nobody cracks and you both fake it."

"Fake what?" I said.