Page 39 of Tempting Fate

“Amazing.”

“And what about your other guy?”

“Jamie. I—” I swallow. “I live with him.”

“Em!” Cate groans. “You know that’s a bad idea.”

“Hence the call.”

“That’s why you called?”

“Well, no, obviously also to—”

“I’m fucking with you, okay? Get with the details.”

I pick up the knife again and fill her in on everything that’s happened over the past couple of weeks—meeting Jamie, meeting Patch at the pub, searching for the werewolf, which she seems far less interested in than the rest of it, though I get her point, and then finally get to the kiss with Jamie today.

“You kissed him back?”

“I couldn’t help it!”

“Emerson.”

“Okay, fine. I didn’t want to help it. And I’m sure there’s something going on with him and Patch anyway, you know? I just don’t—I don’t know how it all fits together.”

“It’s not about how. It’s whether they even want it to.”

I sigh and set a pan on the stove. “Yeah, you’re right.”

“You might all have to sit down and actually talk about this, you know.”

“I know.”

“You wanna do that?”

“Not in the slightest.”

Cate laughs again. “Fair enough. But you’re going to have to come to some solution because it sounds like otherwise, you’re all going to be miserable.”

“Where are you getting that?”

“Between the lines, Em,” Cate says patiently. “Making soup?”

“Y-yeah. How’d you know?”

“You always make soup when you’re trying to figure stuff out.”

“Soup, specifically?”

“Yeah, I never got it either. You never noticed?”

I lift the chopping board and pause as a thought occurs to me. “Mum always used to make it. When we were sick. Sad. Whatever. I guess I picked it up without noticing.”

Cate’s quiet for a minute. She knew my mum too, though only for a few years before Mum got too sick for us to have visitors and then…

Well. Then she died. I was ten.

“They’ll love it, Em,” Cate says, and I set the chopping board down again.