The Bookworm's Guide to Dating (The Bookworm's Guide #1) - Emma Hart Page 0,3

happy. As much as I loved Amber, their issues were too big to overcome, and I didn’t get it.

But like I said, I was the worst dater in history, and probably wouldn’t know a successful date if it slapped me in the face.

Not that it bothered me. I was twenty-six tomorrow, not ninety-six. I had plenty of time to dedicate to a relationship. Admittedly, it probably didn’t help that I had a terrible habit of comparing every real man I met to the fictional ones in books to the point that I actually stopped trying to meet real men.

God, they were all so disappointing.

I mean, look at my brother.

It was a miracle he’d ever gotten a girlfriend with his lack of cooking skills.

I sighed and put my book down. Maybe I was too picky. Maybe I’d set my bar too high. That was a thing, and the longer I went without meeting guys I even saw potential in, the more I wondered if I was being a bit of a relationship snob.

Then again, was having standards a bad thing? If I felt I was worthy of a certain type of man, did that really make me a snob? Or did that mean I respected myself enough to hold out for someone who was everything I wanted?

Or did it mean I had way too high of an opinion of myself?

Probably a bit of it all, in all honestly.

It likely didn’t help that the only thing I was ever really comfortable with talking about was books. Any books—romance, non-fiction, sci-fi, mystery, thriller… I could talk books until I turned into one, and the fact that I co-owned a bookstore didn’t even get away from it when I was ultimately asked, “So what do you do?”

I sagged back on the sofa.

That was it.

Twenty-six was going to be the year I put myself out there and got a date at least once a month.

Or maybe once every two months.

Hopefully.

CHAPTER TWO – KINSLEY

rule two: book boyfriends are not real.

sadly.

One good thing about living alone was that nobody woke you up super early on your birthday, and nobody was there to cover your living room in an explosion of balloons that you would be popping for a week.

One bad thing about living alone was that your friends had absolutely no issue sending you a delivery of three large bouquets of flowers, five obnoxious helium-filled balloons, a teddy bear, and a box of chocolates before nine a.m.

Mostly because they didn’t have to wake up to it.

At least they didn’t send a sing-o-gram or whatever they were called. Holley had threatened it at some point, and the last thing I wanted was an acapella band outside my front door.

Honestly, I wouldn’t put it past them. Any of them.

It was the kind of shit they’d pull.

Luckily for them, the only florist in town didn’t deliver before nine in the morning, so they’d been saved from my night-owl wrath for another day.

I busied myself putting the flowers into vases. Apparently, I was the owner of six various vases that I couldn’t ever remember using. Hell, I wasn’t sure I even knew where they came from.

I definitely hadn’t bought more than one.

With the flowers carefully moved to their new homes, I set to finding them places around my little house to live. My house was actually my grandpa’s before he’d moved into his retirement community. He hadn’t wanted to sell it and all my money had gone into the bookstore, so he’d happily agreed to let me pay his miniscule mortgage and do whatever I wanted to the little two-bedroom house that I had so many wonderful memories in.

I was very lucky, very blessed, and very short on windowsill space.

I found places after doing some shifting around in my bedroom and the bathroom. My few windowsills were now much brighter than they had been this morning, and I found myself smiling at the burst of color that now decorated my house.

The balloons were a little jarring, but I’d long accepted that my friends were extra.

Which was ironic since they were all introverts.

Except maybe Saylor. She definitely toed the intro-extro-vert line.

I was most definitely on the introverted side—unless I was really drunk and rapping Kanye West. Despite what my friends would have everyone believe, it really was a rarity.

I put the chocolates in the fridge and turned on the coffee machine. I was awake now and while it was tempting to go and crawl back into bed, there were other things I