A Note from the Publisher: Thanks to all of you who have been reading along—we're halfway through BB & Heather's story. Let us know which parts are your favorite by leaving a comment in the margins!
He was out when it was delivered, but she had kindly kept it for them to do together. It was only a bookcase, so it should have been simple. BB assured her that he’d built more complicated things than that before. A glance at the instructions suggested NASA had never built anything so complex.
“That’s just the instructions though,” BB told her while she smiled knowingly back at him. “It’s just that whoever did the pictures for the instructions didn’t know what the fuck they were drawing, that's all. You’ll see, once we get started this’ll be a doddle.”
He went off looking for a screwdriver that took him twenty minutes to find. He came back cursing under his breath.
“Right, this won’t take half an hour,” he said, glancing at the instructions again and pulling long slabs of wood from the box.
It was Heather who insisted on the bookcase. BB didn't have one, didn’t have any need for one. He owned four books and had read one and a half of them. Heather, on the other hand, had more books that BB thought readable. How could she ever find time to watch TV with all those books?
“You need to start reading,” she had told him. “Seriously, you do. I’ll recommend you a few of the books I have. You’ll enjoy them, I’m telling you.”
BB had nodded, but only because this seemed to be important to her. If it mattered then he would comply in polite silence.
“My father always says that you should never trust a man who doesn’t read books,” she told him. “You need to keep on the good side of my father as well, by the way. He’ll hate you until you give him a reason not to.”
“Jesus, doesn’t seem like I got a choice then,” he said and smiled. He stopped smiling when he looked at the size of some of the books she had piled up on the floor beside the couch. Some of them were French and Russian, two hundred syllables in the writer’s name. Surely she didn’t expect him to read something French or Russian.
It took two hours and fifty seven minutes. BB cut two fingers and scratched the thin backing. On his own it would have been the sort of thing that drove him mad, but Heather turned the whole experience into something hilarious. They shared a joint, which they didn’t do often, to celebrate.
“We are so late for dinner,” she pointed out to him.
“I’m starving,” he said with a wheeze, sliding the bookcase into position against the wall. He had to admit, it was going to make the living room look a little classier. “You start loading up them monstrosities and I’ll go get something on the cooker.”
It had taken one meal for BB to decide that Heather wasn’t allowed to cook ever again. He didn’t tell her that her cooking was vomitus, the expression on his face did that for him. To be fair, she already knew, it had been pointed out. BB, on the other hand, was a terrific cook. Something he’d always had a flair for, the one true skill that he could boast about.
It took forty minutes for him to put something simple but tasty together for them. By the time he carried it into the living room she had all the books lined up the way she wanted them on the bookcase. She’d picked three out for him to choose from.
“The Godfather, L.A. Confidential and A Game of Thrones. I know you liked the movies of the first two and I know you love all the boobs and blood in "Game of Thrones," so you'll love the books too.”
Didn’t matter how much he wanted to argue, she was right. Her plan was cunning and simple. Start with books he was already familiar with. Good books, sure, great even, but made much less intimidating by their screen adaptations. Once she got him wrapped in those, she could push him toward books he hadn’t heard of. Something joyous for them to share.
They sat and ate dinner, spending their time watching the bookcase rather than the TV. There was something captivating about books to Heather anyway, and something captivating to BB about the bookcase he’d wrestled with and won.
YOU ARE READING
BB & Heather
Short Story"They had met a few times before. Parties, dancing in the same circles, that sort of thing. It was obvious they liked each other. Dancing close, a few drunken, slurpy kisses but never anything further than that. They were young and life was fast. So...
