Just losing myself in the idea of bookshop owner!reader and tangerine. fem!reader; hella cursing; mentions of terminal illness; tan being an angsty boy; possible I might continue this little ditty 🌻🐝 (p.s. taking requests till dec 31)
Tangerine’s not quite feeling himself.
He’s really going through it and slips out of the rain into the first used bookshop he sees. He’s in New York and has never been in this one before, but he likes the way there’s candles burning, even if the first thought he has is “some fuckin’ insurance adjustor prick’s worst fuckin’ nightmare.”
They’ve got a job that night, he and Lemon, and for the first time ever Tangerine is having doubts about the morality of it all. Fuckin’ Tokyo changed him. Made him soft, he thinks, or maybe made him smart. Made him want to get out of the game, he thinks, but what else is there for a bloke like him? A wife? (She’d have to be a bloody saint to deal with the likes of him). Kids? (Little nippers would drive him crazy, he’s certain). A dog? (…actually, that sounded quite nice so long as he’d never have to go John Wick on any bloke, because he wouldn’t hesitate).
For now, Tangerine reasons, he’ll just have to settle on a book.
And he’s idly moving along the shelves, impressed by the small collection of first edition Dickinson and Emerson titles that have been amassed, his fingers hovering reverently over their spines.
Until he sees you—a sweet-looking thing in a floral get-up that’s garishly at odds with the shite weather outdoors, but for some reason he likes it. Even if his first thought, as he watches you reach to replace something on a shelf over your head, is that your hemline might sneak up just a little further, on accident of course, and he might catch a further glimpse of your thighs.
But you bustle away before he can be a lech and as if you haven’t seen him at all.
And so he’s left there with Emily and Ralph and, he notices now, Langston—whom he pulls from the shelf, dust unsettling to dance in the air around him.
Something catches in his chest, then, because he remembers how he first knicked a copy of Hughes’s collected works for the foster mum he and Lemon had lived with when they were twelve. She’d loved poetry—was the closest thing they’d ever had to family besides each other—with her lilting accent and her deep brown eyes. But shit never lasts. Seven months in and she’d sat them down. Told them about that bullshit diagnosis that gave her three more months, tops, and they knew, faces stoic and unmoving even at that tender age, that they’d be shuffled to somewhere else.
In a moment of forgetting himself—or perhaps in a moment of absolute indulgence to his real and baser self—Tangerine slips the book into the front of his suit jacket. Easy doing. He doesn’t rush out, confident in his theft, taking the time to browse a little while longer before he strolls to the front of the shop to leave.
It’s still piss pouring out there and he scoops up the umbrella he left at the door, about to open it when a soft, tentative voice interrupts.
“Sir?”
He should just keep walking. Just step out into the bloody hurricane and disappear into the crowd. But instead, he turns.
And then he’s face-to-face with you.
And there’s something glinting in your eye—some spark of really seeing—that’s a little unnerving coming from someone wearing such a goddamn sunny dress.
And he knows he’s right and truly fucked.
