Jisoo has eighty-four books in her shop, and Jennie vows to read every single one.
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There are eighty-four books in her small shop, and she often thinks, when she's dusting the shelves-most people have more than this on their shelves at home. They're all rare-special editions, collected by her since her teenage years-but her shop looks empty, and it doesn't even have that distinctive smell that most bookshops seem to have. Here, it just smells of rotting wood. It smells of lost hopes and destroyed dreams. It smells of failure.
Jisoo had, once upon a time, wanted to be a writer. A poet, more specifically. She wrote a lot of poems, mostly about girls with long flowing hair and sparkling eyes. She got teased all through secondary school about her paper fantasies. It was so cliché: The notebook teasingly held aloft, mocking voice ringing out through the classroom.
Now, she doesn't get many customers. She chucks glitter everywhere to try to liven the place up, and then she sits alone for six hours, occasionally leafing through one of the books that are 'For Sale'.
She used to be proud of them, that's the thing. She swore she'd never give them away, or sell them, because they were special. They were signed or old, and they were her private collection of antiques, of things that were worth something. As it turns out, they aren't worth a penny in Seoul.
She falls asleep with her head on the desk around lunchtime, forgetting to eat, as always, her head creasing the pages of a limited edition of Anne of Green Gables. It was the first of her collection, because her mom had noticed her love for reading and had got it for her as a birthday present when she was seven. It had been a hard book for a child so young, but she'd persisted. Her mom had always said that was her most admirable trait: that Jisoo never gave up. That's half the reason she's still sat behind the till in this crummy old bookshop, alone.
The tinkling of the bell breaks her out of her doze, and she leaps up, watching the new arrival, hawk-like.
Brown hair, long and wavy, like one of the princesses in Jisoo's earlier poems, and caramel skin with wide, striking eyes. She's wearing a blue, off the shoulder top. She's wearing jeans and checkered slip on vans. Jisoo loves it. She sits up straighter at the desk, calls out: "Can I help you?"
"Oh, hi! I'm just looking for a good book," she replies, smiling.
"I think all of my books are good," Jisoo grins back. "What sort are you looking for?"
"Um, something old. One of the classics, I guess. And...something sad."
"You'd love Gatsby," Jisoo suggests, skipping out from behind her desk. She knows exactly where to find it, all the shelves sorted into alphabetical order as they are.
"That one with Leonardo DiCaprio?" the other girl inquires.
"This isn't a DVD store," Jisoo bristles. "This is the book. Written in 1925 by F. Scott Fitzgerald, about a fictional man called Jay Gatsby."
"Alright, alright. I'm sorry."
"It's okay. I just loved this book since I was thirteen, and it was never a film to me. It was words written on pages, telling a story. Now Baz Luhrmann's interpretation is all anyone cares to talk about."
"It was good, though. I watched it four times."
"Did you ever think of reading it?" Jisoo asks, selecting the book from the shelf and passing it to her companion. It's faded, and the pages are yellowing, but it's from the 1940s and Jennie always loved it. She wonders if this colourful girl will love it half as much. She doubts it.
"I did," the other girl nods. "How much is it?"
The thing is, Jisoo doesn't know. She's never priced these things; it's too depressing for her. She doesn't know how much they're supposed to go for.
"I don't know," she admits. "I wasn't really planning on selling them, originally."
"What were you planning on doing with them, then?" the customer asks. "Just reading them over, and over, and over again?"
"Yes," Jisoo replies simply.
"Tell you what, then. I'll read it. But I won't buy it. Well, if you want, I'll pay you to sit here and read it. But I won't take it away from you."
"Why not?"
"I'm a bit of a movie junkie," the other girl responds enigmatically. "I used to have my dad's copy of Jurassic Park, and I had all the original Star Trek movies. They weren't as valuable as half these books, I'm sure, but they were special to me. I watched them so many times it was ridiculous. If I'd been forced to sell them, I never could've accepted any money, only someone who'd love them as much as I did. And there was no one like that. No one would understand how I used to sit on my dad's knee and watch Jurassic. How I was scared of the dinosaurs but knew he'd protect me. I could never have given them away."
"You can read it here," Jisoo says, eyes wide. She had never known anyone who felt how she felt before.
"Not just that. I'll read all of them. All..."
"Eighty-four."
"Eighty-four. Starting with Gatsby."
"Alright, then. What's your name?" Jisoo queries.
"Jennie Kim. And what's yours. Well, I know it's Jisoo, that's on the sign, but...?"
"Kim Jisoo."
So Jennie comes to Jisoo's Books every day after that.
•••
"That's not the end, is it!?" Jennie cries out, from where she's perched on a rickety wooden chair that Jisoo pulled down from her apartment above. "That can't be the end? Where's the sequel?"
"There's not another one. That's the third and final in the series," Jisoo grins evilly. "I know, I was the same. Did you notice it's signed?"
"Did you meet him? Patrick Ness?"
"A few years ago. He came into our school. I take it you enjoyed it, then? Which was the best in the series?"
"They've all sort of blurred together," Jennie admits.
"That's what you get for reading them all in two days," Jisoo tuts, as if she hadn't done the exact same thing the first time she read the Monsters of Men series. "I'll give you a hint: the second one's the best."
"I don't know. Todd and Viola finally kiss in the last one," Jennie counters.
"Is that really all you cared about?"
"A large part of it, yes."
"Hopeless romantic."
"Heartless cynic."
They've been doing this for a few months now, and Jennie's been mostly complimentary of all the books in Jisoo's collection (except that she doesn't like Sherlock Holmes. This revelation is utterly horrific to Jisoo, especially when Jennie then proceeds to gush about the BBC series.)
They've fallen into an easy sort of camaraderie over this time, teasing and lightly insulting each other's tastes in music, in books and in movies.
"Do you want a cup of tea?" Jisoo asks. "If you're finished with that, we can head upstairs and you can show me how to make "The Perfect Cup of Tea". Which, I presume, involves pouring at least four packets of sugar into it."
"You buy sugar in packets?"
•••
Jennie gets a girlfriend a few months after that, a lovely girl called Lisa, who Jisoo would like a lot more if she hadn't just invited herself into the shop when she came to collect Jennie one day. Because, the thing was, Jennie hadn't told her about this. So a girl with dirty blonde hair turns up and goes up to Jennie, all: "Are you ready to go?" and Jisoo's just...confused.
"Where are you going?"
"Oh. Um. Date."
She wonders why Jennie didn't just tell her to begin with, but she doesn't read into it that much. She just holds on to the days they sit upstairs with a cup of tea, and the days (less often now) that Jennie turns up and reads another book. She's read fifty-five of them, now. Soon enough, it will be over, and Jennie will have no reason to keep coming back. It's not even like they're such good friends.
The worst part of it: Jisoo thought they were on the edge of something great. She thought they were on the precipice of becoming more than they were, and that little space in between, that little spot on the top of the cliff, it was wonderful.
Now, Jennie turns up breathless and only stays until she's finished reading, then she smiles and leaves in flash, before they've even had time to talk.
•••
When Jennie and Lisa break up, it's midnight. Jisoo knows this, because she's the one who's woken up by an incessant knocking on the door, the one who drags herself downstairs and sees Jennie, dishevelled, rain in her hair, sparkling droplets against the moonlit background. She's beautiful, even with mascara running down her cheeks.
Jisoo opens the door, of course she does. The bookshop is, at least, warmer than outside, in this wintry night.
"It's lucky I sleep down here," she comments lightly, letting Jennie drip water onto the wooden floor. She does, it's true. Her flat's technically upstairs, but she likes it better down here, even if the smell of rotting wood has never gone away, no matter how many air fresheners she sets in the corners.
"Thank you," Jennie replies sincerely.
There's only one bed upstairs, and Jisoo gives it up because she was sleeping curled up in a chair anyway, so it isn't going to make much difference. They exchange goodnights but they don't say anything, not really.
•••
When Jisoo wakes up, it's because of a smell of pancakes and one of strong coffee. Jennie is perched cross-legged on one of the rickety wooden tables, buttering a pancake methodically and watching Jisoo while sipping her tea.
"I made you coffee," she says. "And pancakes. Help yourself."
Jisoo stretches out in her chair, levering herself up and trying to will away the hopelessly clogging morning breath. She blinks a few times, rubs her eyes free of gunk and wonders how terrible she must look.
"I'm gonna go brush my teeth," she replies. "I'll be back in a sec."
She is. They eat pancakes smothered in golden syrup atop wobbly tables with the sun just breaking over the horizon on another cloudy day. And Jisoo thinks she should ask, "What happened? Why did you turn up at my shop at midnight?"
But she doesn't.
Instead, she tentatively reaches out a hand, waiting for Jennie's reaction to the (shaky at best) proposition. And Jennie takes the hand in hers, and they stay like that, until eating one-handed becomes exceptionally difficult and they have to break the contact.
And that's when Jennie says: "It was always you."
•••
Jennie finishes all eighty-four books within a year. And when the final book-Frankenstein-is turned to the final page, Jennie finds a pink sticky note in the shape of a heart, purple glitter pen scrawled over it.
'Move in with me? I love you.'