Romance / Paranormal Romance
Ever Since I Can Remember
Combining Beverly Jenkins + Casey McQuiston | Interview with the Vampire + The Time Traveler's Wife
Synopsis
A D.C. bookstore owner suspects her charming new regular is scouting her building for developers. He's actually three hundred and forty-seven years old, and he's in love with her.
Beverly Jenkins' rich cultural specificity and emotional directness ground a love story between a Black bookstore owner and an immortal man in a gentrifying D.C. neighborhood. Casey McQuiston's banter-driven humor and millennial sensibility shape their flirtation through Morrison arguments and bookstore comedy. The confession-as-interview structure from Interview with the Vampire transforms a Gothic parlor scene into a man in a folding chair telling the truth nobody would believe. The Time Traveler's Wife's logic of asymmetric love and domestic impossibility drives the ending: a woman choosing a man who will never age, in a building that might not survive, on a Tuesday that means everything.
The Formula
- Meticulous cultural detail of a Black-owned bookstore and its neighborhood: the inventory ledger, the poetry shoplifter, the grandmother's church turned condo
- Emotional directness without sentimentality; the body as evidence of a life lived and work done
- Banter-driven romantic tension through literary arguments and humor that masks vulnerability
- Millennial voice and pop-culture fluency grounding the supernatural in the everyday
- Confession-as-interview frame: the immortal's exhausted, intimate disclosure in a folding chair rather than a Gothic parlor
- Centuries of accumulated grief rendered as precision—dates, addresses, names—not melodrama
- Asymmetric aging as a practical reality rather than poetic abstraction; love chosen despite the math
- The supernatural verified through mundane research: checking records, calling phone numbers, finding paint on a door
Reader Reviews
I have read a lot of love stories and very few of them make me believe two people actually like each other. These two like each other. The Morrison argument alone — "There are twelve wrong Morrisons and Tar Baby is number four" — I laughed out loud. But what got me was Naomi checking the paint on the back door. Three days she waited. And then she went to the hardware store, bought a scraping tool for $4.99, and knelt on cardboard in an alley. That's not a woman who believes. That's a woman who needs to know. There's a difference, and this story understands it.
47 found this helpful
I cried when Veronica Washington-Banks cried on the phone. A woman finding out her great-aunt carved a second Sankofa that nobody knew about for sixty-five years — and it's Naomi, this stubborn, broke, meticulous bookstore owner, who uncovers it. That's the love story I didn't expect. The romance between Naomi and Elliot is wonderful, but the real tenderness is in how she treats the building itself, and the people who came before her. The ending with the stuck door and the bell ringing — I had to put my phone down.
41 found this helpful
The gentrification plot does more work here than the paranormal one, and I mean that as praise. The letter from Meridian Development Group sitting between the electric bill and the dentist reminder — that's the real horror of this story. Naomi's ledger as an act of record-keeping against erasure, the grandmother's church turned condo, the inventory of disappearances — this is a story about what it costs to hold space in a neighborhood that's being priced out from under you. The romance is almost secondary to the question of whether the building survives. I wanted more friction around the power asymmetry of an immortal man who has the luxury of patience and a mortal woman who is "six months from not being." That tension gets gestured at but never fully interrogated.
38 found this helpful
As someone who runs a bookshop, the details here wrecked me. The stuck front door she can't afford to plane. Logging inventory in a paper ledger because the software updated itself into something unrecognizable. Leaving the Clifton forward on the shelf for the man who steals poetry. I know that woman. I've been that woman. The romance works because it's built on the same foundation as the bookstore — something stubborn and impractical that keeps opening every morning anyway. My one complaint is that Elliot's immortality reveal feels slightly rushed after all that careful slow-building. But "See you Thursday" might be the best romantic line I've read this year.
33 found this helpful
Structurally interesting — the story uses day-of-the-week headers as a quiet rhythm, Tuesdays and Thursdays accumulating weight until the final scene collapses them into emotional resolution. The prose is controlled and specific; "his laugh sounded like it had been built over time, layered and worn smooth" is economical and right. Where it falters is in the paranormal mechanics. The immortality is both the story's engine and its weakest element — Elliot's confession scene, sitting in a folding chair listing dates and names, is effective as theater but thin as worldbuilding. We're asked to accept a great deal on faith. The gentrification material is stronger than the romance, which suggests the story might have been more honest without the supernatural scaffolding at all.
24 found this helpful
Okay so this is an immortal-falls-for-mortal with a bookstore setting and a gentrification subplot, and honestly the trope execution is a mixed bag. The slow burn is VERY slow — six visits before a real conversation, and the confession doesn't come until two-thirds through. The banter is strong (the Morrison argument is genuinely funny and specific, not just "witty people being witty"), but the romantic arc doesn't have enough beats. They go from antagonism to sitting on a bench with no middle. No moment where they almost touch. No scene where one of them catches themselves wanting something. The emotional contract feels incomplete — I'm told to believe in a love that the story mostly shows as two people arguing about Toni Morrison. Which, fine, that IS love, but give me one more scene.
20 found this helpful
Read this on the night shift and the quiet of it matched the quiet around me. The line about how Elliot said he was three hundred and forty-seven the way people say they're diabetic — practiced, flat, just a fact — really stayed with me. This one's got weight to it.
7 found this helpful
Idk, the banter was good but I kept waiting for something to actually happen? Like he tells her he's immortal and then she scrapes paint off a door and calls an old lady and then they sit on a bench. Where's the rest of the story? It just ends with them walking into a bookstore. I wanted more.
2 found this helpful