Page 43 of Jinxes and Drumsticks

“No shit?” I ask. “Is this the equivalent of a girl asking for your birth time?”

She snorts a laugh. “No. But what is your birth time?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Don’t you think you’re moving a little fast there? You won’t go get ice cream with me but you want to see where my wounded healer is on my chart?”

“What do you know about Chiron?” she teases. “Wait. Are you a closet astrologer?”

“Oren was obnoxiously obsessed with it when we were in high school. He was convinced he could make anyone sleep with him if he learned how to read a birth chart.”

“Did it work?” Lillith asks.

I laugh. “Hard to say if it was the birthcharts or the fact that he hit his full height in his junior year, but yeah. He started drowning in ass around that time.”

“You know what?” she says. “Good for him, honestly.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Now that guy is a slut. You should definitely slut-shame him.”

She laughs. “Noted,” she says. “So, he practiced astrology on you?” she asks as she spoons the sautéed veggies into the pressure cooker.

“Mmm, not really. We don’t know my exact birth time so he kept getting frustrated by the parts it left out.”

“You don’t have your birth certificate?”

“We have it,” I say. “But I was a safe surrender baby, so no one actually knows exactly when I was born.”

She pauses in the middle of slicing open some dry guajillo chiles and balks at me. “Wait, really?”

I nod. “Yep, foster kid since birth,” I say.

“I thought...” Her face turns pink like it always does before she reveals that she has some random fact about me logged in her mind like a stalker. “I mean... You talk about your mom sometimes in interviews...”

“Oh, yeah. I mean, I was with her from ages seven to eighteen, until I aged out and got my own place. We’re really close still; I go to her place for Christmas and Thanksgiving every year,” I say. “For most intents and purposes, she is my mom. But she never actually adopted me officially. When I first came to live with her, she needed the subsidy offered by the system to pay her bills, and when I aged out, it just felt like a vanity we didn’t need to worry about.”

Her expression goes stricken but she forces herself to focus on her task, emptying out the seeds from the dried chiles into small jar and plopping them into the cooker. “I’m so sorry,” she says.

“Don’t be. Aside from some rough group homes I barely remember, it honestly wasn’t a horrific experience for me. I think I got off really lucky. And it’s not like staying with your birth family keeps you from being alone, you know?”

Lillith looks at me knowingly and nods. “Yeah,” she says. “You’re so right about that.”

She throws more chili pods into the pressure cooker along with an entire bulb of peeled garlic. Then she takes a few bay leaves out of a repurposed jar and hands one of them to me.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a bay leaf,” she says with a smile. “Make a wish on it before we use it in the food.”

“Wait, really?”

“Yeah,” she says, holding hers under her nose and smelling it. “It’s a tradition. Nan always had me do it whenever a recipe calls for bay leaf. It’s a good way to put a little magic in your cooking.”

I smile down at the dry leaf, completely endeared to her. “You sure you don’t want to keep all the wishes for yourself?” I ask.

“There’s more than enough magic in the world to spare a little for you,” she says, sidling up to me and leaning against my chest.

I smooth my free hand into her hair, tilting her head back so I can kiss her, holding the bay leaf up and over her like it’s some kind of culinary mistletoe. When I part from her, her eyes are still closed, her dark lashes curling the tips of raven wings.

I don’t need to think very hard about what I wish for. It’s the same thing I’ve wished since meeting this woman. All I want is for her to fall as hopelessly for me as I have for her.

She opens her eyes and kisses her bay leaf, then holds her hand open for mine. “All done?” she asks me.