Top Shelf: A Seacroft Novel Read online

  “That must have been fun.”

  Martin’s jaw tightened—a small reaction, but an important one. Seb knew how to spot the little signs when he’d stepped on a nerve and had learned how to take advantage of them a long time ago. It was a matter of survival with his family. The twitch in Martin’s jaw was the same kind of gesture as the tip of his chin while he’d defended his position about Seb’s work the last time. Whatever he was keeping to himself, Martin was willing to stand up for this.

  “It was important work,” he said, his voice dropping. “Bergmann was a poet and a political activist. They didn’t even know he existed until the late nineties when someone found a box of his drafts in a secondhand store.”

  Seb grinned as Martin appeared to come to life. “How is that possible?”

  “He died in a concentration camp, and most of his work was burned.”

  Wow. Seb blew out a breath. What would being so completely erased from the record that you disappeared for more than forty years mean?

  “Is that why you freaked out about my work?” he asked.

  “I didn’t freak out.” Martin’s eyes narrowed, and Seb’s heart beat faster. Finding something Martin would push back on was sending little sparks up and down his veins.

  “You practically accused me of censorship!” He laughed. “Over an agricultural manual.”

  Martin’s cheeks flushed. For all he so obviously tried not to draw attention to himself, every thought and feeling he had were plain to see for anyone who bothered to look. Seb would have to show him how to lock that down.

  “What you do isn’t censorship. We could argue about it being disrespectful, though.”

  “Disrespectful?” Seb had heard that word a lot in his life. Almost every time he spoke to his dad, he was reminded how little respect he had for his father’s achievements. But Philip had never cared for anything Seb had ever accomplished either, so they were basically even.

  “Books are important.” Martin’s determination pushed itself a little further forward.

  “You’re such an academic.” Seb couldn’t help it. He’d heard it all before. The respect the written word required, the sanctity of the knowledge contained between covers. The same old bullshit.

  It was the wrong thing to say now, though. The light in Martin’s eyes faded, and he scraped his chair back to stand.

  “Not anymore,” he said. “Thanks for letting me hang out today. I should get going.”

  Seb went to protest. He hadn’t meant anything by his remark. It was a reflex to old hurts more than anything Martin had said, but Martin slunk to the door and disappeared down the stairs without another word.

  Too late for apologies.

  Again.

  7

  Martin was waving goodbye to the mystery writers group when Penny bustled into the store, a broad smile on her face. Dread filled Martin. He’d managed to forget about his impending death-by-MC over the last few days.

  “Good afternoon.” Penny bubbled as she dropped a stack of papers on the counter. She fished around in a large satchel, digging for something buried deep inside. “I need some help. Mom wants me to take some measurements. She’s worried about seating. Can you give me a hand?” She snapped the end of a tape measure just beneath his nose.

  They moved around the space, holding opposite ends of the tape measure, and pausing while Penny made notes.

  “So how are you doing? Enjoying Seacroft?” she asked.

  “It’s different. I’m used to the small community of the college where I used to work.”

  Penny’s laugh shook dust from the closest shelves. “There’s somewhere smaller than Seacroft?” Her smile dimmed as Martin tried to stammer an explanation. “Sorry. I’ve lived here my whole life. It always seemed so tiny when I was growing up. Nosey neighbors and everyone all up in everyone else’s business. “

  “Everyone I’ve met so far is pretty nice.” A few didn’t even make his heart feel like it might leap out of his chest when they came into the store.

  “Oh, they’re nice. But I thought I’d move away when I grew up, start somewhere new and exciting. Then I met my husband, and the diner was always his dream. So I trusted that this was the right place for us, warts and all.” She sighed happily, staring out the big front window, and Martin envied her.

  Warts and all. Martin had nearly choked on his dinner when Seb made the joke about sleeping with students. Up until then, he’d been having a nice time, and Seb probably hadn’t meant anything by it, but it was several heartbeats too close to the truth.

  What would Seb have said if Martin trusted him enough to tell him the whole story, even the warts?

  “That’s a lot of faith to put in one person.”

  Penny give him a knowing look and tugged at one of her pink seashell earrings. “I’m not a religious person. But I do believe things happen for a reason. When Tim said he wanted to stay in Seacroft, I cried for a week straight. He was miserable too, so I don’t want to make it sound like he forced me into anything. But I took a chance. He asked me to trust him, and I did. Not every day was a good one, but now, five years later, the diner is always busy, we’ve got two little boys, and I think it’s going to be all right.”

  Martin gave her a smile. Letting someone have that much control felt impossible. “What would you have done if you’d realized you had to leave? Or if the diner hadn’t worked out?”

  She shrugged and gave his arm a pat. Penny couldn’t be any older than he was, but the gesture was so maternal. No one had looked after Martin like that in years.

  “Tim says we can’t worry about what might happen, only what’s in front of us, and he’s right. If we’d worried about the future when we were starting out, we wouldn’t have opened for business that first day. And if we make a mistake—and trust me, we’ve made lots—then the next day, we try again.”

  Something in his chest uncoiled. Try again. He felt like he had tried every option available to him in the last few months, but what had he actually done? He’d taken the job at Dog Ears because it was easiest and safest. He still hadn’t talked to Brian about the scene with Jess. Things at the house were tense. Brian spent a lot of nights out, and Martin mostly avoided him when they were both home, instead choosing to eat by himself and go to bed early. He had nowhere else to go, but he wasn’t doing much to make himself at home in Seacroft either. There were too many things he wasn’t talking about.

  The afternoon in the bookshop got quiet again. Martin used Seb’s Wi-Fi to wander the internet and check the Mount Garner website. It was the same as always, with smiling students and promises of academic excellence. Nothing had changed. Martin was gone, and there was no outward sign that it made any difference.

  “Goddammit!”

  Seb’s shout broke the silence, followed by heavy footsteps on the stairs. More crashes sounded as books fell from a shelf somewhere deep in the store.

  Martin hurried to inspect. Just like the first time they’d met, Seb had his back to him, flinging books from the shelves like an angry blond apparition.

  “Can I help you?” Martin asked.

  Seb glared at him over his shoulder. “You could find me something that isn’t going to break my heart.”

  Seb’s heart seemed pretty well defended.

  “Tough day?”

  Seb bent, shuffling through the books at his feet until he found one toward the bottom and flung it at Martin. The pages fluttered. This time, Martin was prepared for the lightness when he caught it. He opened it to find a black-and-white photo of a man in a very small pair of swim trunks, carved out from the pages around him.

  “Not your type?” Martin asked, which begged the obvious question of who Seb’s type might be. Martin flushed. Whatever the answer, Seb’s type was definitely not failed professors who could barely keep themselves on an even keel.

  “Look farther back.” Seb resumed pulling books off the top shelf and flipping through them before tossing them to the floor in disgust.

  Martin
did as he was told. Behind the man was a woman in what looked like a knitted cape and a pointy hat. Then after that a couple on a moped. “This is really cool.”

  Seb snorted. “Keep going.”

  One more flip, and Martin came to a woman wearing a ball gown. Her head was missing, and a slash through the paper made the edges flap as he turned the page.

  “Oh.”

  “Fucking right, oh. I knew the paper was crap, but I thought it would be fun, and now look!” Seb tossed another book over his shoulder.

  “Can’t you just cut her out and keep going?”

  “No. The narrative is ruined now.” Seb kept pulling books out.

  “Can I—Can I help you find what you’re looking for?” Martin asked. After a few weeks, the bookstore’s bizarre shelving system was actually starting to make sense.

  “It’s fine.” Seb moved on from the shelf, leaving a trail of rejected books on the floor. His eyebrows were creased together in a frown, the lines around his mouth deep and tight. Clearly, he didn’t want Martin’s help.

  But Martin had to start making a space for himself somewhere, and he might as well begin by soothing his most idiosyncratic customer. He left Seb and turned the ancient coffee maker on. A few minutes later, he brought two mugs out, stepping carefully around the small mountain of books on the floor.

  “Want some coffee?”

  “Not now.”

  Martin hesitated for a second, then squared his shoulders. He extended a mug. “I made you some coffee.”

  Seb took it distractedly. Then his eyes narrowed as he saw the chaos behind them, and his shoulders sagged. “Shit. I’m being a dick again, aren’t I?”

  Martin shrugged. “You’ll clean up the books later, right?”

  Seb grinned at him. This close, the smile made Martin shiver. His grip tightened on the mug, but he held Seb’s gaze. Trust. He had to trust someone, and Seb kept showing up, so why not him?

  “How big a problem is it?” he asked. “The lady with the missing head?”

  Seb sighed as he glanced at the discarded book on the floor. “It was coming together. There was a whole story there. A day on the Adriatic. A glamorous evening dancing.”

  “Sounds romantic.”

  Seb’s eyes sparked with humor. “That was the idea. But then my hand slipped, and her head was gone and . . . ” He sighed.

  Martin struggled to think of the next thing to say. He needed to share some of his secrets, but it was terrifying, even in the quiet bookstore. So he stuck to small talk. “Were you working on it for something specific?”

  “The Schiller exhibit. It’s a show I have coming up. I need three more pieces. And I don’t have time for mistakes.” He took another sip of coffee, then lifted the mug gently toward Martin. “Thanks for this.”

  They stood in silence. Seb scanned the shelves. Occasionally, he’d pull one down and flip through it quickly, then put it back and move on to another one. Martin twitched, working up the nerve to speak again.

  “I didn’t sleep with my students. That’s not why I lost my position.”

  Seb’s shoulders tensed, and he gave Martin a guilty look.

  “I’m not sure if you know this, but I’m not always a jerk. But I do seem to say the wrong thing around you a lot.”

  Martin wasn’t sure how to respond, so he barreled on.

  “The department chair was, though.” His stomach rolled. He hadn’t spoken about this with anyone. But it was eating him alive, and all the other not-talking at Brian’s house compounded it.

  “And?” Seb’s blue eyes assessed him.

  Martin’s pulse pounded in response to old panic. He could say he didn’t want to talk about it, that he’d only wanted Seb to know he hadn’t behaved inappropriately, and leave it at that.

  But Penny said if he screwed this up, he’d be able to try again tomorrow, so what was the worst possible outcome? He’d find himself alone in the bookstore, still sleeping on his brother’s pull-out couch.

  “I’d known about it for a while. Not for sure, but enough to have suspicions. Lots of ‘office hours’ at weird times. I didn’t want to know, but—”

  “Did he catch on and get you fired?”

  “No. Nothing so Hollywood as that. He was sleeping with this student in his undergraduate lecture. She was nineteen, so there wasn’t anything illegal, but it turned out she was just one in a long line of affairs. He’d been discreet in the past, but this time word got out. The administration tried to keep it quiet, but the student involved wasn’t having it. The campus newspaper printed the story, and the whole school lost its mind.” Cold sweat trickled down his spine as memories started to play like a highlight reel in his head. “The students demanded that the chair be reprimanded, but the school decided to go with the ‘consenting adults’ argument instead.”

  Seb shook his head and snarled. “Fucking old boys’ club.”

  “Everything they did to resolve it made it worse. And then it turned out he wasn’t the only one.” The second week, when the school paper ran a story about a retired professor who had several relationships with students over the course of his career, saw the beginning of demonstrations on campus. First, they were small, but as the university continued to try to protect its reputation and handle the situation quietly, the dissatisfaction grew. The longer it went on, the bigger the crowds got. “The protestors started coming to classes. Any time someone from the history department had a lecture, they would be there.” Martin took a sip of his coffee to calm his shaking hands.

  “They protested at your classes? That doesn’t seem fair. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  He hadn’t, but, “At night, all cats are gray.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a saying. In German, it goes—”

  Seb waved him off. “And the school didn’t fire him? Any of them? That wouldn’t have stopped it?”

  “He was the chair. He brought in a lot of funding.” Months later, more removed from the chaos, that reasoning was clearly backwards. But at the time, surrounded by angry voices, nothing was clear. “He even told the school paper that relationships like his happened at campuses all over the country. They probably do, but—”

  “That’s no excuse.”

  “Of course not.” Getting to class had been like running a gauntlet. The students shouted accusations and insults, while the university kept asking for cooler heads to prevail and talking about decades of sterling academic excellence. “The administration dealt with it badly. They were more interested in protecting the staff and their reputation than they were in admitting anyone had been wrong.” He shook his head. His knees were trembling. They were back where he had started this story.

  “But they fired you and not the others?” Seb’s eyes flashed.

  “The chair was encouraged to take a long sabbatical.” He was probably on a beach somewhere, working on his next book and flirting with the cabana attendants. “I—” Had Martin resigned? It still wasn’t clear. “It got pretty bad. I’m sure you’ve noticed that I can be a bit—”

  “Skittish?” Seb raised an eyebrow and Martin laughed. His laughter warmed over some of the tension that had formed in his neck and shoulders. He could tell this story to its end.

  “I’m not a horse. I was going to say shy. Asserting myself has never been my strong suit.” He’d tried. Mount Garner had been his home. When the university continued to sweep everything under the rug, Martin attempted to reason with his students. “They didn’t like it when I explained the university’s position. Not that I thought what happened was okay, but there was a lot of funding at stake.” He’d been wrong, but at the time, his world was going to pieces, and no one seemed to be able to fix it.

  “What happened?”

  Martin shivered. “One of the students followed me home, and they started organizing protests outside my apartment building.”

  “But that’s harassment!” Seb’s declaration was so welcome. Martin had been waiting months to hear someone say it. />
  “Free speech. At least, according to the police. They were on public property and not posing a safety risk, so—”

  “So what did you do?”

  Shame clawed at the small spark of confidence that had flared to life. “At first, I tried to pretend like it was all normal, but I’d lie awake at night, picturing them outside my house and on campus while I tried to get to class. It felt like they were everywhere. Like their only purpose was to shine a giant spotlight on me and point out all my failings. I wasn’t brave enough to bring forward my concerns about the chair. Wasn’t strong enough to confront him myself. And then the voices in the dark pointed out the other things I wasn’t. I wasn’t prolific. I had a few publications, and that was it. I wasn’t a very good teacher. Too shy to really hold my students’ interest.” The list could go on for hours. He’d never been cut out for academia, not really, but he’d found his niche and stayed there because the idea of packing up and moving on to something new was even more terrifying than a lifetime of lectures to students only there for the credit hours.

  “And then?” Seb’s sad eyes said he got the point.

  “And then one day I didn’t get out of bed. Because why bother? No one wanted me on campus. Not the protesters. Not my students. No one from my department even noticed when I didn’t show up. The administration still had its hands full.” It was like he’d become invisible. Or like he’d never existed at all. He’d worked hard for his PhD and his place on the faculty, but in the end, his presence had signified nothing.

  “How long were you like that?” Seb’s voice was soft.

  “Three weeks, give or take a few days.” It was a bit vague. He hadn’t exactly marked it into his calendar. Stop interacting with the outside world, Monday, 8 a.m.

  Seb whistled. “That’s a long time.”

  It was and it wasn’t. Time hadn’t meant the same thing then.

  “Brian finally came when he hadn’t heard from me.” As they talked, they’d moved away from the pile of books out toward the open front area of the store. Martin sank onto one of the old leather couches by the window. Talking about this was good, but the telling was exhausting.