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A PLACE WHERE NOTHING EVER HAPPENS
    The first time Kyle received one of those phone calls, he was getting ready for a date.
    Kyle had been attracted to Lauren since the first time he’d seen her, when she walked into Pen & Paper and asked to see the manager. She was there for a job interview. He remembered struggling not to let his mouth gape open. He remembered actually being able to direct her to Mr. Howard without sounding like a monosyllabic moron.
    And he’d made her giggle. He didn’t know how he’d done it. But he could tell by the glint in her eyes that it was a good giggle.
    He’d always sneered at people — women, mostly — who went on and on about eyes and eye colour. Blue-eyed, brown-eyed, fucking fuchsia-eyed. What did he care? He never believed that it made one iota of difference to how attractive someone was. Besides, he could never remember anyone’s eye colour. Once, a girl he’d been seeing for almost two years — Jessica — dumped him because he couldn’t remember what colour her eyes were. What kind of stupid reason was that for breaking up with someone? He still had no idea what colour her eyes were.
    But Lauren’s eyes were a bright brown that verged on orange. At work, he was almost afraid of catching a glimpse of them. Often, when he did, he lost track of what he was doing and where he was. Her eyes made him dream of a peaceful nowhere, suffused with a bright warm glow. More than once, he’d had to be shaken out of it by Cass, the assistant manager, who, thankfully, was more amused than annoyed. You should just ask her out, Kyle. Get it over with already!, she’d tell him.
    It had taken him a few months to get up the nerve to even contemplate asking her out. First, she was just too gorgeous not to have some type of boyfriend or something in her life. Second, she was a co-worker; if she turned him down, it would make things awkward.
    He’d had to take a few days off work to attend his uncle’s funeral. His mom’s brother Flip — his real name was Philip, but everyone called him Flip — had been the coolest guy in the family, next to Kyle’s long-dead dad. Before Kyle’s dad died, the three of them — Dad, Kyle, and Flip — hung out together all the time: went to movies together, shot some basketball, walked around the city. After, Flip was always there for Kyle, reminding him that life continued. That you had to keep having fun. So they still did all the stuff they had loved to do with Kyle’s dad. But eventually Uncle Flip had to move out of the country because of his work, and it was just Kyle and his mom after that. Kyle hadn’t seen Uncle Flip for almost three years when he died.
    When Kyle came back to the shop, he learned that he’d pulled inventory duty. Together with Lauren. Alone with Lauren. That Sunday, the shop was closed, and they had the place to themselves. No customers, no bosses, no co-workers. If Kyle were ever going to ask Lauren out, this would be the time. Besides, in the three months Lauren had been working at Pen & Paper, Kyle had never heard her mention the dreaded boyfriend word. There might be some hope after all. And as Uncle Flip would have said: life goes on. You have to keep doing the fun things in life, no matter what.
    They were taking a break — they’d just finished doing all the behind-the-counter stock and were next going to attack the showcase islands in the middle of the retail floor — and Kyle decided that he was going to pop the question there and then. Somehow the words just wouldn’t come out, though.
    They were talking about what they really wanted to do instead of working in a stationery shop. At least, Lauren was. She spent every evening writing, either film criticism or film scripts. She told him about the screenplay she was working on, a period piece set in the States during the Second World War, a hardboiled crime story starring a