The Walkers (Twilight Fan Fiction)

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen

“Here you go,” I said cheerily and handed two bags to the woman in front of me. She had just bought an eight-book series for her daughter, one that I was particularly fond of. “I hope she enjoys them.”

“Thank you so much for your help,” the woman commented, nodding her head. “I couldn’t have done this without you, Bella.”

“My pleasure,” I answered and smiled as I watched her leave. With a sigh, I turned back to Nora, who was busy checking in new inventory. “I remember my first book series. It was a three-book mystery series. Now that I think of it, it wasn’t very well written, but I loved it anyway.”

“How old were you?” Nora asked over her shoulder.

I shrugged and sidled next to her. “About eight or nine.”

She hummed in acknowledgement before returning to the task at hand. I didn’t mind her brush-off; Nora had a lot of work to do. Seeing as how the following week was Thanksgiving, she was tasked with getting the new books into the inventory and getting them into position for Black Friday—the biggest shopping day of the year. Although many people were concerned more with clothes, televisions, and other electronic devices, there were several, popular authors who were releasing books on that day. Pages was certain to be full.

“This is hardly a two-person job, Bella,” Nora said with a laugh, and she regarded me with a wide, slightly sneaky smile. “Why don’t you go upstairs and start with your reading?”

I tried to curb my disappointment. If I was being honest, I wanted to stay and help Nora. The history of the Walkers was, for lack of a better term, boring, although necessary to my possible induction into their lifestyle. I had finished their full history and had thus moved on to their financial records. It wasn’t necessarily a list of money, but more like a list of jobs that they had taken to earn money. Reading it was easily the equivalent of pulling teeth.

“Are you sure?” I fumbled with my words, trying and failing to come up with a viable excuse for my presence. “This could go by faster with two people.”

“You know as well as I that it wouldn’t.” She stopped what she was doing and turned to me. I could never hide anything from Nora; she was sharp as a nail. “What’s wrong? Why don’t you want to go upstairs?”

I cringed, feeling ashamed of my own boredom. “I just…um…well, the records are a little—“

“Dull, uninteresting, arid, cloying, drab, humdrum, monotonous, or my personal favorite, bromidic.” I turned in the direction of the familiar, humored voice and found Collin leaning against the wall, reading from an open copy of the thesaurus. When I called out to him, he snapped the book shut, returned it to the shelf and smiled at me. “Hello, Bella. Nora.”

“Collin,” Nora said with a smile. “How good of you to grace us with your presence. What brings you by my humble shop? Certainly not a recitation of the synonyms of the word ‘boring,’ I hope.”

He crossed the store to us, and I couldn’t help but admire the way he moved.

“I was given some leisure time,” he answered casually, shoving his hands in his pockets and shrugging. “So I figured I would come by and see how our little receptor is fairing.”

He reached out with his right hand and ruffled my hair, much to my annoyance, and he snickered when I ran my hands through it, trying to fix what he had mussed up. Collin and I had discussed the issue of my hair while he had still been my trainer. He had insisted that a shorter style would be easier for me in the long run, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. My long hair had been one of the constants in my life. It was the longest relationship I had ever had, and I wasn’t willing to end it.