"Careful."There was something in the tone that might have been sinister amusement."Love has ruined stronger demons than you."
I looked back toward her house. The porch light was still on, burning steadily in the early morning grey, small and warm and completely ordinary.
"Then they'll have to make room for one more," I said quietly to no one in particular, and walked back inside.
5
LILA
Ihad absolutely not been thinking about Azrael all morning.
I had been thinking about my coffee maker, which had started making a sound like a small animal in distress, and about the fourteen boxes in the second bedroom that weren't going to unpack themselves, and about whether the grocery store in Blackthorn Ridge carried the specific brand of oat milk I liked or whether I was going to have to drive forty minutes every time I ran out.
I had not been thinking about the way he had taken my braid apart like he had been waiting to do it since the first time he saw it. Or the way he had said thirteen days like it was the most natural thing in the world, or the fact that I had looked at him across my own bedroom in the early morning light and felt something shift under my ribs that I was absolutely not ready to examine.
I put on my scrubs, pulled my hair into a braid with perhaps more aggression than necessary, and went to work.
Blackthorn Family Medicalwas a small practice with cream colored walls, a fish tank in the waiting room that one of the doctors had named every fish in individually, and a front desk that functioned as the social hub of the entire building. I had been working there for three weeks, which was long enough to understand that nothing happened in that office without Debbie knowing about it first.
Debbie was fifty-three, married to a man named Gerald who she complained about constantly and adored completely. She had also decided within my first week that I was the daughter she’d never had. She was also completely impossible to hide anything from.
She looked at me when I came through the door, looked again more slowly, and set down her coffee.
"Girl."
"Don't," I said.
"You got laid."
I walked past her to the desk and pulled up the appointment schedule with the focused energy of someone who was absolutely not having this conversation. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"I know that walk."
I gave Debbie a look, “I walk like this every day."
She giggled so loud people in the waiting room peaked away from their phones. “You do not walk like that every day." She leaned across the desk. "Who is he?"
May appeared from the back hallway with a stack of patient files and stopped when she registered the energy at the front desk. May was thirty-two, newly engaged, and had describedherself on my first day as a romance addict without any apparent shame about it. She looked at Debbie and then me. And then she looked even more closely at me.
"Oh my god," she said. "Is that a hickey?"
I put my hand over my neck so quickly I nearly knocked over my water bottle. Debbie made a sound that could only be described as triumphant.
"I hate both of you," I said pleasantly, and answered the phone.
By lunch Debbie had announced, in the tone of someone who was not making a suggestion, that we were going out after work.
I tried to offer several reasonable alternatives such as I was tired. And that I still had unpacking to do.
Debbie pointed at me. "Perfect. You need a drink."
May was already texting someone about parking. I went back to answering phones and accepted my fate.
Cue's on a Friday night was louder and warmer than the Thursday I had been there with Azrael, packed with familiar faces that Debbie seemed to know personally and country music coming from the jukebox at a volume that suggested whoever chose the song had strong feelings about it. Debbie knew approximately everyone in the room and introduced me to all of them within the first ten minutes, and May ordered a round of something that arrived in mason jars with fruit in it, and somewhere around the second drink I stopped thinking about braids and thirteen days and started actually having fun.
I was mid-laugh at something Debbie had said about Gerald and the riding lawnmower when I felt it, that specific awareness of being watched.
I turned around slowly.
