Page 33 of Summer's Edge

This wipes the stupid grin off his face and it doesn’t return. And after a few moments of silence, he does what I asked him to do.

It sounds like we’re heading for a nice and dangerous job. Just what I needed. Perfect for forgetting.

SEVENTEEN

Summer

I’d be lying if I didn’t get a little choked up a few times on the six-hour ride to Sanctuary. But my mother taught me never to cry over a guy. Because if he was worth my tears, he wouldn’t be making me cry. That’s my mom’s logic. It never made a whole lotta sense until just now.

I wish I could tell her about Edge. She’d probably know exactly what I should do. But I can’t, because I’m sure she’s as much behind keeping all members of Devil’s Nightmare MC away from Eden and me as my dad is.

So instead of going straight to see her once we get home, I have my dad drop me off at my apartment. It’s not far from Eden’s bookstore.

“Mom’ll be expecting you for dinner, though. Eight o’clock,” he says like I’m a little girl and not twenty-five years old.

“I’ll be there,” I say and then wait while he and the guys carry my stuff into the apartment.

As soon as I’m alone, the ache of missing Edge and the cabin becomes a physical presence. It’s in the walls that seem to be closing in on me, in the sound from the cafes and shops on Main Street that my living room windows overlook and in the tears I will. Not. Shed. For him.

Because it’s not over.

I don’t shower, even though I probably should. I don’t want to wash his scent off my skin yet. Even though I probably should.

Instead, I head over to Eden’s bookshop. It’s called One More Chapter, and she drew the sign of a long-haired girl with no face reading a book amid tall redwoods herself. It’s probably an auto portrait, actually.

The bookshop closes at seven PM and it’s already five past, so I expected to find her sitting in one of the many plush armchairs, lost in a book. I was definitely not prepared for how I did find her.

She’s wearing leggings and a crop top, her hair is in a messy bun, her cheeks are red and her face glowing as she moves boxes around, muttering to herself. Nearly all of the many bookshelves around her are empty.

“What’s happening?” I ask. “Are you closing down?”

She shakes her head. “No, never. But I made a mistake. I wanted to try online sales, so I created some TikTok videos to advertise, and they went viral. Now I have so many orders that I can’t fulfil them all. Help.”

She looks like she really needs it, so I don’t hesitate to help her stuff boxes and envelopes.

“The worst thing is, I love all these books so much,” she says. “I don’t want to let go of them.”

Looking at Eden, my younger sister by about five minutes, is like looking in the mirror. We have the same dark hair and the same green eyes, nearly identical bodies and sometimes we even sound exactly the same. But on the inside, we probably couldn’t be more different. She loves staying in, lives in her books and always does everything right. I crave the excitement of being bad once in a while and I don’t have the patience to read more than a page or two of a book in one sitting. I love working with my hands and she loves working with her mind. But we complement each other perfectly. Probably because we’re single egg twins so we were actually supposed to be one person. Everyone calls me weird when I say that, but I don’t see it as a bad thing. It means she’s my other half, my soul mate and my best friend and I hers. She’s the only one who truly understands me.

About five minutes into the task, I realize that dinner with the folks will have to be cancelled. She has a printed list of orders that we’re trying to fulfil and before we even get done with a third of it, I know she doesn’t have enough stock.

“There’s six more boxes of books in the basement and I have a few overnight shipments coming,” she says as I point this out.

“Why are you even going to all this trouble?” I ask. “You don’t need the money.”

This whole building, which houses the bookstore, and her apartment upstairs, is owned by the MC, so it’s all rent-free. She sells enough to pay the bills and order all the new books as soon as they come out.

“Someone told me I should try standing on my own two feet,” she says.

“Who said that?”

She blushes, brushes a strand of her hair off her forehead, says, “Never mind,” and goes back to packing.

“Come on, tell me, who was it?” I insist.

It sounds like maybe it was a guy and Eden doesn’t really date. And she certainly doesn’t let guys tell her what she should be doing.

“No one, drop it,” she says. “It’s not the time.”

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