“Basically.”
“I guess I’d better get believing more then. I think I’m a fan.”
“You do whatever you want.” I was exhausted already from talking with him. How had we ever had a normal conversation before? “Now that that’s all settled, we’ll figure this out in the morning. We’ll get un-hexed or whatever.”
“Easy as that?”
“Then, you can leave again. It will be like this never happened. Okay? Just like you want. You can go back to your life, where you must have so many people concerned about you, using your extreme amount of saved paid time off.”
“Oh, yes, another little vacation in Barnett I didn’t ask for.”
I put up a hand. “I’m going to fix this, but we aren’t talking about what happened last summer anymore,” I said, “I can’t … I can’t do this right if that is all you are going to talk about because I can barely stand to think of it. Got it?”
Dom slowly nodded. “Okay.”
“Good.” I turned around to go back to my bed, though I doubted I would be getting any real sleep for the rest of the night.
“But one more thing.” Dom spoke up, stopping me in my tracks.
Of course there was.
“For a minute there, when it dawned on me what might be going on, I almost thought you had done this on purpose. That you had done this to bring me back.” His tone wavered between confusing and something else. Though it was probably just me thinking that he could almost sound… hopeful?
Or maybe he had just realized exactly in that moment what he had walked away from. It was called breakup remorse, and if that would continue to haunt him for the rest of his life, well, that was something I could look forward to.
Because I, sure as the stars, wasn’t going to be plagued by it.
I snorted. “In your dreams, lover boy.”
He huffed a short laugh as well, only he hunched over his knees where he sat and stared down toward his hands.
6
“Hey, I know I said this before, but I would appreciate it if you could come over to the apothecary. See the space again. I feel like you’re the only one who gets the style I’m going for. Even though, you know, I do still have to think of a name for the place,” Lu rambled on, and I couldn’t bring myself to stop her.
I pressed the phone tighter to the side of my head as I flicked my eyes back toward Dom. His eyes were squeezed closed. Fingers massaged his temples at our last-ditch effort at any sort of hex reversal spell today.
The first few I’d pieced together myself didn’t work. They barely made a dent in whatever was passing between the two of us. If anything, the push to make this entire mess go away had made the hex even worse.
Every day, when I left for work, something was predestined to go wrong. I dropped a perfectly mixed color on the floor after tripping over my own feet. The hair vacuum got clogged almost every time I used it. The water was too hot in the shampoo station. I cut the pickiest of hair client’s hair a half inch too short, which might as well have been as if I’d shaved their entire head.
It was a small mercy that my sweetest boss of all time—and I told her so—Kim, managed to put up with me at this point.
But it still meant that Dom was here, sitting and usually moaning and groaning about something or another while taking up the sofa and thus the entire living room space. For the past week, I had been forced to spend all my time trying not to snap at him and his negativity for the rest of the hours of my days.
Because I couldn’t do anything. Not until I figured this curse out and everything went back to normal, as if the very painful mistake had never happened at all. If that was even possible. Doubt seeped in with every passing day and hour.
I’d pulled out nearly every excuse in the book to miss the past two coven meetings along with seeing the girls one-on-one. I hadn’t realized how close we had all become and how often I did see them throughout the week until now.
Lu noticed the most now that she was living with Ryan full-time at the house. It was only a short walk away from my apartment to visit, which freaked me out enough that I staged a coughing fit to get off the phone when Lu mentioned that fact, hoping the risk of contagion would warn her away.
Cringing as Lu went on about the apothecary and paint colors, I tried to come up with another reason for me to take a rain check. I waved my hand around as I stared out the back sliding door toward the river, still flowing fast from all the rain we’d been getting. “I …”
I cursed someone. I cursed that guy—you remember, the one you had to pull me off the bathroom floor to get over last summer? Yeah, that one. And for the past week, I’ve been trying to figure out how to fix the hex I put on us both. Yeah, the kind of hex you all warned me not to even consider as a joke. I know. Now, I’m no further along than ever even if I keep lying to Dom about how I can feel we are getting close.
Only we weren’t. I wasn’t.
The only thing I was getting close to was running away forever so that the spell could wear off on its own and I didn’t have to listen to the tall, broody guy on my couch moan and groan about how long it was taking and how I had really messed up his life repeatedly.
