Seconds

She left him in the second hand bookstore. He was too lost in the dust-soup of the shop to notice. The leather-bound classics and the cheap paperbacks were his flimsy alibi, she knew the real reason he came here so often - to see if his ex-girlfriend’s books remained unsold (chemistry books written entirely in French: little dazzle for the local bookworms who only coughed up for old Penguin editions and well-thumbed bestsellers). The proprietor must have had a soft spot for the ex-girlfriend, or been swayed by her must-get-rid-of-everything desperation to even bother adding her unsellable texts to the shelves. They’d remain clogging up the science section until some art student bought them to make a papier-mache blob covered in French descriptions of Bose-Einstein condensates and the molecular orbital theory.

She had always felt slightly queasy in second hand bookstores - all the oldness and dust seemed to squeeze out her lungs; she found it hard to breathe, like she had ventured into some foreign altitude. Funnily enough, that’s how she felt when she’d first met him; but the feeling wasn’t a wheezy horror, it was a sharp, short-of-breath intensity. But over time, when she realised she was being pitted in an unwinnable contest (against an invisble ex-girlfriend who ironically was everywhere), her breath returned to its dull, easy rhythm. Like someone finally regaining themself after a long race they had lost.

She hated bookstores, because she hated the romance accorded to the fading volumes. Only the suckers and sentimentalists would fall for the fantasy that these shelves were packed with “pre-loved” items. “Pre-loved”, as she knew too well, was merely a euphemistic word for “unwanted”.