Softer Than Steel (A Love & Steel Novel) by Jessica Topper Page B

feel like the only loser who hadn’t left the city over Memorial Day weekend? Her classes were empty; the record shop was a ghost town. She should’ve checked in with friends, made plans. She climbed down the ladder and lugged it over to the far wall. Even a barbecue out on a postage stamp of a lawn in Queens would’ve been something. Sighing, she climbed back up.
    Seamus was gearing up for his journey through twelve states. He would leave next month and not return until late August. It had taken Sidra a week to let that sink in, but she accepted it now. If anyone needed to travel out of his head and heart for a while and do some living, it was Seamus.
    She was excited to paint her next quote, one by the famous Yogacharya B.K.S. Iyengar:
    “Yoga is a light, which once lit, will never dim.
    The better your practice, the brighter the flame.”
    She knew it would be a perfect complement for the wall where she demonstrated her poses, under the old exotic hanging lamp.
That lamp must have a good history,
she thought, wondering just what its origins were. She needed to ask her uncle if he knew.
    “Looks good.”
    Sidra twisted on her ladder to face her cousin. “Thanks, Mikey. Figured I’d do it while no one was around to smell the fumes.”
    Her logic received a curt nod. “You know Shay and Char are bailing on me?”
    “Yeah.” She often found herself resorting to monosyllabic Manhattanese tough-girl tone around her older cousin.
    “You’ll put in some hours for me up front, right?”
    Sidra painstakingly stroked the curl of a thick cursive capital
Y
onto the wall freehand. Dexterity inherited from her mother’s side of the family had been perfected through her formative years in Montessori school. Thousands of Downward Facing Dog poses kept her armpits strong as she leaned and stretched her entire arm’s length to finish the word.
    She hated working in the record shop, where hipsters and homeless guys were always trying to pick her up. Revolve Records was a haven for the weirdo and wayward population of the Lower East Side, who would linger for hours, hogging the listening stations and never spending a dime.
    “One night a week, Mikey. And a few weekend hours, but that’s it.”
    “All right.” He grinned. Mikey Sullivan was a huge trash-talking teddy bear of a guy. He didn’t even need a ladder to land his kiss on her cheek. “Thanks. You all set here?”
    “All good,” Sidra replied happily, and resumed her lettering. She loved her space and appreciated all the help her family had lent in making it come to fruition. Mikey and his dad had sanded down and refinished every floorboard, Seamus had expertly installed recessed dimmer lights and wide fans on the ceiling, and Fiona had sewn vibrant pillows in earthy fabrics for the small lounge area. Enduring a few hours behind the cash register in return wouldn’t be a hardship.
    Mikey’s large frame filled the doorway once again. “Hey, did you see the For Sale sign up next door?”
    Sidra lost her grip on the paintbrush, earning a pale green stripe down her leg as it clattered to the floor. “No! Shit. The dry cleaner’s?”
    “Yeah. Fuckin’ A, right?” Mikey said grimly. He swooped his arm down to retrieve the thin brush, like a grizzly bear swiping a fish from the river current. “And with the corner property still vacant, our asses are officially on the line.”
    Every couple of months, Mikey Senior—or Sully, as he was called by everyone who knew him—threatened to dip his toe into the sellers’ market that was skyrocketing around his family’s building. But Sidra had always assumed that, like his son, Uncle Sully was just a big trash-talker. Investors routinely came sniffing around these streets to snap up the last of the genuine New York up-and-coming, next-hot locales, trying to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse, but he had yet to really bite. However, if his building was sitting pretty with two ugly wallflowers on either side, it was