Page 31 of Rewitched

“Oh jeez. Stop, Jinx…” Ari peeled back the door to their home, using a carefully placed ankle to keep the cat from sprinting out. They had skipped the small detail of Jinx from their landlord’s contract several years ago and were skilled in the art of hiding their illegal flatmate.

“Belle! Thank god! Where the hell have you been?” Ari hissed through the crack in the door. “I’ve been trying to reach you literally all day. I thought you’d—Jinx, will you please hold on a second?”

While Ari was temporarily distracted by four nimble paws, Belle seized the opportunity to stuff the point of her hat as far down into her bag as possible before stumbling across the threshold and into their flat.

“Ari, I’m sorry, so sorry. It’s been…a day.”

“Oh, I’m gonna need more than that,” she said crossly. “Monica and Jim said you hadn’t been at the shop, pretty sure they now think I’m crazy, so I know you were lying about that. And your mum chatted my ear off for half an hour about her trip to Isle of Skye, so that was helpful.”

“To be fair, that one is not my fault. That’s what you get for ringing my mum.” Belle sighed. She slumped down immediately, falling face-first into the familiar hug of the sofa.

As she nestled into the lumpy cushions, she already felt a little better. Ari always had the heating on. The candles were lit across the hearth. The fireplace was stuffed with bundles of fairy lights. A repeat of their favourite sitcom played quietly on the television. It felt familiar and right, after the longest day of everything being distinctly, extremely wrong.

“I thought you’d been abducted and shipped off and trafficked and brutally murdered and held prisoner and thrown into a canal, or something. I was ready to fight. I thought I was gonna have to be one of those people on the news holding up some bloody photo of you on the telly, which would make you die of shame anyway, even if you hadn’t already been murdered.”

Belle stretched her arms out wide as Ari stood over her with a maddened look. She rolled her eyes dramatically and reluctantly dove into the hug, flopping on top of her friend with merciless brute force. When Belle surrendered, insisting that she couldn’t breathe, they sat side by side under a blanket instead.

“Thank you for worrying that I was dead, and thank you for preparing to avenge my demise. I had to go and…see someone about…something. I’m fine.”

“Ahh, someone about something.” Ari nodded, giving a sarcastic thumbs-up.

“Honestly, it’s nothing. Well, it is something; otherwise, I wouldn’t have disappeared for the day and missed my birthday plans, but…Ari, I wish I could tell you. You know that I would if I possibly could. And I will, at some point. It’s just that right now, I can’t.”

Belle cringed at her own lack of explanation. Ari was even less impressed, her right eyebrow sitting at such a dramatic, stabbing angle that it could have been used as a weapon.

“Are you embroiled in a deadly drug war?”

“No drugs.”

“Living a double life with a millionaire businessman?”

“No such luck.”

“So, what, then?”

Belle grabbed at easy solutions, like she always did. “It’s…an NDA thing. At work. Contracts and agreements and secret publisher meetings, you know. And I won’t go back to prison again, Ari, they can’t make me!”

She grabbed Ari by her shirt and pretended to shake her. In honesty, the part about contracts and agreements and secret meetings wasn’t not the truth. And the joke worked. Ari snorted a laugh and seemed to have already lost interest in the questioning.

“Fine. Want some birthday toast?”

“My love language. Two pieces, please.” Belle raised her hands in grateful prayer, suddenly realising that her stomach felt like it was eating itself. “When I tell you I am beyond starving…Is there any picnic food left?”

“Over there. Help yourself, but all the booze is gone. The pavlova met a terrible fate in the park involving someone’s Jack Russell. At least he enjoyed your birthday.”

Belle padded over to the kitchen. She began rummaging in the Tupperware from the birthday picnic that had happened without her. A pair of sausage rolls were practically inhaled.

“Belle. I am serious, you know.” Ariadne spun on the spot to face her friend, chewing on a piece of toast. “What is going on with you? You haven’t been yourself for days, but now you’re a no-show at your own birthday plans. You lie to me about needing to work. Whatever it is, it’s only the ‘not telling me’ part which makes you an arse by default. I can read you like a book. Something’s up, I know it. And we do not keep secrets. That’s always been the rule.”

She brandished the toast in Belle’s direction threateningly.

“Besides, you always explode with stress eventually, so we might as well get that out of the way and arrive more quickly to the part where we fix everything together.”

Belle picked at the pastry on a third sausage roll, avoiding eye contact, feeling the temptation to spill everything once and for all.

Ari rolled her eyes and gesticulated with toast dramatically at Belle’s lack of response. A moment later, she spun back around on the spot as an epiphany crossed her mind. “This is about a man, isn’t it?”

“What?” Belle laughed, looking at her friend like she was mad.