Never Judge a Book..(A/T)(Teen) Complete

[majiklmoon]

Never Judge a Book by its Cover

Rating: Teen
Disclaimer: I don't own anything - except for Spike the Minivan. Roswell and it's characters belong to Melinda Metz and Jason Katims. She created them, he killed them. I'm just trying to bring them back to life.

This drabble is for Annipoo98 who won me at the Support Stacie Author Auction. She wanted an incrowder drabble with the prompt of romance novel.

Alex Whitman looked nervously around Barnes and Noble, making sure he was unobserved. He felt incredibly stupid, but he tamped the feeling down. He was on a fact finding mission, and nothing was going to stand in his way. He slipped into the periodicals section and grabbed the magazines that were on his list. He crossed the store, pausing for a second to salivate over the newest PERL manual.

“Focus, Whitman, focus,” he muttered under his breath. “You’re a man on a mission, and don’t you forget it.”

Giving the PERL manual one last look filled with longing, he moved toward the back of the store toward the self-help books. He glanced at his list and quickly pulled several titles from the shelves and added them to his pile.

He turned to head toward the register, and then quickly turned back. “Do You Sometimes Feel as if You Love an Alien?” the book jacket screamed at him. Not even bothering to read the blurb on the back, he grabbed the book off the shelf and continued his trek through the store.

Still in stealth mode, he saw a flash of familiar blond hair and he quickly ducked around a display to hide. Much to his chagrin and dismay, the display went crashing to the ground. He quickly reassembled the display in a haphazard fashion and ducked out of sight.

Trying to act nonchalant, he grabbed a without looking at it, collapsed into one of the chairs that dotted the store and began to read.

“Alex, I thought that was you,” a familiar voice said.

“Oh, uh, hey, Tess,” Alex said, lowering the book. “I didn’t see you there. I was really caught up in this book, it’s great.”

“I bet it is,” said Tess reaching out to take it from him. “The Pirate’s Lusty Vixen,” she read. “Hmm, you didn’t strike me as a romance novel kind of a guy.”

“Oh, uh, yeah, well you know,” Alex stammered. “I have layers. Many, many layers.”

“You’re a deep one all right,” Tess said. “What else do you have here?” She reached down and grabbed the pile of books and magazines next to Alex and began to flip through them. “Cosmo, Elle, Vogue,” she read. “You are Who you Love,” “The Love She Desires,” and the oh so damning “Do You Sometimes Feel as if You Love an Alien.”

Alex turned several shades of crimson and stared at his feet wishing that this would be the one time it really would open up and swallow him whole.

“Alex,” Tess said. “Why are you reading this trash?”

“I, uh, I,” was all he could manage.

“Did you seriously think that by reading this – this garbage you could figure out the working of a female mind? Human or alien?”

“Yeah, I, uh, well, kind of,” Alex said. “It’s just when you care for someone, you want to do your best to make sure everything is just right. And well, I don’t have a lot of experience when it comes to girls, uh, I mean women.”

“Alex, any girl in their right mind would go crazy to be with you,” said Tess. “You are funny, smart, intelligent, considerate and compassionate. “I can’t believe there isn’t a line of girls a mile long all waiting to go out with you. But I suppose it’s a good thing there isn’t.”

She dropped the pile of books on the floor at his feet and sat down in his lap and kissed him. “Because if there were, I’d have to kill them all, and Max always gets so cranky when we use our powers.”