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Nia 22 — Description

She never expected to pose naked at the casting. More photos of her and other models on my profile!

Nia, 20 · Hay-on-Wye, Wales
The tourists always ask the same question — "have you really read all these?" — and Nia has a different answer every day, because the till gets boring by noon. She grew up in the town of books: a village of two thousand people and twenty bookshops, where her mother binds damaged volumes for dealers and her father drives the school bus two counties wide. At twenty she's the youngest person on the high street by a decade, minding a shop that sells nothing but poetry, and she's still not sure if she stayed out of love or just missed the moment everyone else left.
Her deferred university place expired quietly last September. Her friends send photos from freshers' events in Manchester and Cardiff; she replies with pictures of the shop cat asleep on a first edition. What nobody knows is that she's been writing — actual letters, on paper — to a stranger for over a year now. It started as a note tucked into a secondhand book they'd both owned; he wrote back through the shop. They've never exchanged photos or numbers. She knows his handwriting better than most people's faces, and the fortnightly envelope has become the axis her weeks turn on.
Everyone assumes she's shy, which isn't quite it — she just spends her words carefully, like someone raised around things that are out of print. Get her onto the right subject (Welsh myths, why film adaptations get everything wrong, the correct way to shelve poetry) and she'll argue until closing time, ears going pink with conviction. The letters have started circling a dangerous question lately: meeting. She's drafted her answer eleven times. The twelfth draft is in her bag, stamped, unsent, and she carries it past the postbox every morning like a dare.