Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 71075 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 355(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71075 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 355(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
“I don’t know.” I shake my head.
“What don’t you like about it?”
“It’s not that I don’t like anything about it. It’s that I know how much it cost me to run my shop, and I also know how much money I was making. Even with the stuff I was selling out of the back room, I wasn’t making a killing each month. Really, I was just getting by, and my rent was half the cost of this place.”
“But that was there and this is here, and we won’t just be selling books; we’ll have lots of other stuff to sell.”
“I get that, but I don’t know that I’m comfortable jumping into this situation without having a solid plan. Right now we don’t know what else we would sell here besides your bags and my books. We need to talk to the vendors you were telling me about and see what kind of stuff they would want us to have in the store so that we can get an idea of what kind of money they will be bringing in each month. If after we talk to them, we think that we can cover the rent each month with a little bit of a profit, we can move forward, but until then I think we need to wait.” I let out a deep breath, then say quietly, “As much as I want this, I do not want to have it and then lose it because we can’t afford the space and the overhead. Plus I still have to be able to survive, and eventually I’m going to need to find a place of my own, so I need to think about the cost of that as well.”
My hands ball into fists at my sides as anxiousness makes my stomach churn. I’ve had such horrible luck these last few months, and I don’t know what I would do if this failed and ended up costing my friend and others money. When I opened my bookstore, I was so sure that it would be a success that I didn’t think about all the what-ifs. Now with that experience under my belt I understand how quickly you can go from profitable to in the red. I could easily blame the woman who found out about the back room in my shop and turned others against me, but there were lots of factors that went into me not being able to keep the shop open any longer, including me giving my nest egg to my ex only to have him refuse to give it back when I needed it to cover my rent for the shop. Not that I even know that I would have been able to keep the doors open much longer even with that money, since toward the end I was barely skating by each month.
“I told you that you could stay with us for as long as you want,” Cybil says, dragging me from my thoughts, and I focus on her.
“I know you did, and I appreciate that, but I don’t want to be Claire’s weird aunt that lives in the shed behind her parents’ house forever.”
“It’s not a shed.”
“I know; I’m just joking. Kind of.” I shrug. “The truth is if I continue to live my life like I have been the last five years, just hoping everything works out with no real plans for the future, there is a real possibility that I could end up the crazy aunt in the shed, and I really, really don’t want that. I want to be able to afford a nice place to live and a vacation at least once a year, so it’s time for me to grow up and to stop living for today when tomorrow is a possibility,” I finish as she stares at me like I’ve grown another head. “So are you okay with us talking to the vendors you know and going from there?”
“Of course.”
“Awesome.” My muscles relax. “After that, if this place is still available, we’ll figure out how to move forward.”
“You know I love you, right?” She stops me as I head for the door, and I turn back around to face her. “I’ve always been envious of the fact that you’ve never been afraid to take chances, to jump without looking.”
“Cybil.”
“Don’t stop doing that just because one thing didn’t work out the way you thought it would.”
“I’m not. I’m just being cautious and making sure that there is nothing that might impale me when I do jump,” I tell her, and she nods before walking toward me.
“Since Tanner has Claire, what do you say we go have lunch? There’s a great bar with awesome food just down the street from here.”
“Perfect, and while we’re there, I’ll see if they’re hiring.” I open the door for us to leave.