The thing was she smelled like a second-hand bookshop. Or maybe of that smell clinging to second hand books. A musty smell, stale and lost. Poor ventilation perhaps, forcing odours to eddy and pool, seeping into porous pages. It might come from ageing glue, cracking and splitting the binding. The brittle yellowing paper... who knows. She was a primary school art teacher, with all that glue and paper the explanation might fit, but no.
She was used. Second hand was too kind a description. You can look at a book and tell if it has been read by just one person or by many. She had been used. Used by many and thrown back to the pile. Her once straight, shiny blond hair had lost its lustre, yellowing to straw. It was a mess of cowlicks, dog-eared this way and that. She had topped every man’s list for years, a best seller. They all wanted to get their hands on her, eating her up with their eyes, and she let them. Now weathered and wrinkled, she willed someone, someone to look past her faded youth, the smell and the aura of cheapness that clung to her chest like a necklace.
. . . a second-hand book.
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