“Lupe, I can’t just…he’s a stranger. We talked for like five minutes.”
“So? Sometimes five minutes is all it takes. You felt something, right? A spark?”
I hesitated, then nodded. I had felt something, a literal spark when he had touched my hand. More than I wanted to admit.
Lupe grinned, triumphant. “See? That’s your magic speaking to you. Telling you that you need this.” She waggled her eyebrows. “That you and your magic need some action.”
I groaned. “I talked to a man on a beach for five minutes. We’re not exactly at sex-magic territory.”
But the words snagged in my mind. Sex magic was just as old as ocean magic and, in some ways, even more powerful. The convergence of two energies, the raw creative force of it—my abuela used to say that the ocean was born from the oldest act of love and that every wave was an echo of that first union.
Even my limited powers seemed to spring to life after a good orgasm, like my magic needed a jump-start and apparently the ignition was located in my clit. The one time I’d tried to discuss this with my mother, she’d given me a look that could havefrozen the Gulf Stream and said, “Hay otras formas de acceder al poder, Selena,” which translated tothere are other ways to access powerbut really meantplease never speak of this to me again.
Lupe was giving me a very knowing look. A look that said she was about to make a suggestion I’d pretend to be scandalized by and then think about in the shower for three days.
I changed the subject.
Aggressively.
“So if I went upstairs right now, I wouldn’t hear Antonio snoring like a lawn mower, right?”
Lupe looked away and murmured, “He has his uses.”
La Virgencita, give me strength.
I didn’t like Antonio. That was putting it mildly. He drank too much and smoked too much, and that was coming from a member of the Torres family, where the holiday gatherings could strip a liquor store bare and probably kept the local dispensary in business.
But Antonio’s vices weren’t the festive, communal kind. His were the kind that made him mean at one a.m. and sorry at seven a.m. and absent for the three days in between. And worst of all—worstof all—he had a tendency to neg my cousin.
My beautiful, nurturing cousin who could heal with a bowl of pozole and make you cry with the perfection of her mole. A woman whose magic was so generous, so fundamentallykind, that it literally fed people.
And this pendejo would sit at her table, eat her food, feel her power stitch his hangover back together, and then make a comment about how she “could stand to lay off the tortillas.”
So yeah, he fucking sucked.
But apparently he had a big dick and knew how to use it, so I had to put up with him at breakfast a lot more than I wanted.
“Lupe—”
“Don’t.” She held up a hand, still not looking at me. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“You were going to make that face. The one that looks like you’re eating Lucas candy.”
“Again, that’s just my face.”
“Selena.”
She turned to me, and for a second, beneath the jokes and the flour-dusted apron, I saw the tiredness. It lived in the corners of her eyes, in the slight droop of her shoulders.
She knew.
Of course she knew.
Lupe was one of the smartest people I’d ever met. She knew exactly what Antonio was, and she kept choosing him anyway, and that was the part that made me want to scream—not because I judged her, but because I understood. Choosing something that hurt you because it was familiar and the alternative was being alone with the silence.
I couldn’t judge that. I’d chosen this town for the same reason.
