Thank the Blessed Virgin! Feeling relieved, Luci left the doorway and looked around the little shop. Since its sign had said “Scent Shop” she would have thought it would be filled with perfume bottles—like Perfumania in the mall back home. But strangely, there were no bottles or even shelves to hold them. The front of the shop was just a small, plain, bare room with white walls and a single metal counter in the back.
Well this is weird…
Luci looked around the empty shop, wondering if maybe it was closed down. But if so, why was the door open? Another idea occurred to her—maybe the shop had just opened and the owner hadn’t moved his or her stock in yet.
She hoped she wasn’t trespassing but she really didn’t want to go back out into the Unmated Males section and have to deal with all the horny Kindred looking for mates! Not that they were nasty about it, but a girl could only take so many big muscular men looking her over that way!
She was just debating on whether she ought to leave and try calling Raze somehow—though she didn’t have his number—when a most peculiar looking person came out of the back room area of the shop and stood behind the counter.
It was a man—(Luci was pretty sure he was a man anyway, because of his beard) wearing a long, flowing purple and yellow robe with a pattern of bright pink flowers printed on it. But it wasn’t his clothes that made her stare. The man had two noses—one right on top of the other.
The first nose looked normal enough—if rather large and with long, curly hairs coming out of the nostrils. But where the bridge of a normal person’s nose would be, there was a second, more petite nose instead. Both sets of nostrils quivered as the strange man inhaled deeply.
“Well, hello there, my dear,” he said, smiling at her. “And how may I help you today? Are you here looking for a gift or are you wanting to make some extra money?”
“Make some extra money?” Luci’s ears perked up at once. “What do you mean? Are you looking for a saleslady to sell your perfume?”
“Sell perfume?” The man with two noses looked confused. “My dear, we have no perfume here. Well, unless you count perfume of the intimate variety, that is.”
“The intimate variety?” It was Luci’s turn to be confused. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Ah, I see. It’s your first time in a scent shop, isn’t it?” the man with two noses asked.
“Well…I mean, I’ve been to Perfumania down on Earth lots of times,” Luci said. “But I’m not sure if you’re selling the same kind of, uh, scent that they are.”
“As to that, we most certainly are not,” the man said emphatically. “What we sell here are the intimate scents of women for Unmated Kindred males to smell.”
“Really?” Luci was intrigued. “But…why?”
“Well because males love the scent of a beautiful female, of course,” the man with two noses said heartily. “Would you like to smell some of our wares? We don’t keep them out in the front of the shop for obvious reasons,” he added and winked.
It didn’t seem obvious to Luci at all, but just then she saw the two large Kindred who had been talking to her earlier staring with interest into the small glass window of the Scent Shop door.
“I’d love to see, er, smell your wares,” she said quickly. “Can we go right now?”
“Of course, of course. Right this way.”
The man with two noses raised the metal countertop and made a courteous “after you” gesture, indicating that she ought to come into the back of the shop.
Luci hurried to do exactly that. Following the two-nosed man through a small doorway, she found herself in a much larger area than the small, bare front of the store.
There were still no perfume bottles but what she did see were rows and rows of bookshelves. And every one of them was crammed with books. Some were fat, old-fashioned leather tomes that reminded her of the old encyclopedia set her grandparents used to have. Others were paperbacks and still others were as thin as pamphlets. All of them seemed to be shelved in random order and Luci didn’t see any titles or author names on the spines.
“Oh,” she said. “Is this some kind of library? Who wrote all these books?”
“The books are not for reading my dear—they are for smelling,” the man with two noses emphasized. “These are scent books. Here—allow me to demonstrate.”
Walking to the nearest bookshelf, he selected a book seemingly at random, and opened it up. Luci came to look at the book and saw that it had many little clear pockets in it, with a single scrap of white fabric in each pocket. It looked a little like an old-fashioned photo album except all the “pictures” were the same boring thing—the little white swatches of fabric.
“Oh,” she said, feeling disappointed. “That’s, uh, nice.”
“How can you know if the book is ‘nice’ or not unless you smell its contents?” the two-nosed salesman asked, frowning. “Here—try this one.”
He tapped one of the pockets with one fingertip and it opened at once, the clear plastic cover unfolding like a flower to display the patch of cloth it had covered.
“Now, just breathe that in,” he told Luci and took his own advice, inhaling deeply. “Ahhh! Such a heavenly aroma!” he moaned as all four of his nostrils quivered in apparent delight.
“Uh…all right.” Leaning over, Luci took a deep sniff and smelled…not really much of anything. The white cloth might have a faintly tangy odor but that was it.
“Do you see?” the man asked her. “Or maybe I should say, do you smell?”
“To be honest, not really,” Luci admitted. “It doesn’t smell like much of anything to me. I’m sorry,” she added, feeling bad for disappointing him.
“Ah, my dear—it’s all right. You cannot help that your olfactory capacity is so limited. After all, you only have one nose,” the salesman said sympathetically. “I weep for you, truly I do, not to be able to smell this exquisite scent!”
“Well, what is it, anyway?” Luci asked, her interest thoroughly piqued by now. “I mean, is it some kind of flower or plant or what?”
“No, no, my dear!” He looked shocked. “I told you, we sell the intimate scents of women here.”
“So this little cloth—you rubbed it on some woman’s body and then put it in a pocket for people to smell?” Luci asked hesitantly. This weird business model completely eluded her, but she supposed that maybe Kindred had a much better sense of smell than humans. Raze had commented several times about how much he liked her scent—she’d always thought he was smelling her shampoo or body wash. But maybe not.
“Actually, a young lady—such as yourself—actually wore this little scent receptor close to her body for a period of time. Then we treated it with scent preserver and put it into a scent book, dedicated just to her.” The salesman closed the book carefully and tapped its cover. “And she made quite a nice piece of change for it, too.”
“She did?” Luci’s ears pricked up and she remembered that he had asked her if she wanted to make some extra money. “That, uh, sounds like a really easy way to earn money,” she remarked.