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“Well,” said Kami, “that’ll get very unfortunate very quickly.”
“I mean it,” said Angela. “We can’t get away from guys now, not really. Not all of them. Jared will always know what we’re doing. I barely know him, and he knows details from the last six years of my life that I thought nobody knew but me and my best friend.”
“Imagine how I feel,” Kami said dryly.
Kami saw Holly exchanging looks with Angela, trying not to be openly horrified about Kami’s life in front of her. She felt her mouth twist.
Someone tried to open the bathroom door and was unable to do so because Angela had her back against it.
“Plumbing got backed up, all the toilets exploded!” Kami yelled. “Go use a different bathroom.”
A voice said suspiciously, “Kami Glass, is this your idea of a joke?”
Angela kicked the door. “Go away or I’ll kick you in the head.”
“We’re so stealth,” Kami said. “It’s what I admire most about us.” She was sitting in one of the sinks, her legs dangling. Her hands were gripping the edge of the sink. “It’s okay,” she added. “He won’t know what you’re saying unless I tell him, and I wouldn’t do that. Jared wouldn’t eavesdrop on you guys either.”
“I don’t care about him,” Angie said fiercely. “I care about you.”
“I have to care about him,” Kami told Angela.
“I can see that,” Holly said slowly. “You would have to love him or hate him.”
The one thing Kami could not feel was indifferent to him. The one thing she could not do was escape him. She saw Holly shiver.
“The idea of it’s kind of romantic,” Holly said. “But it wouldn’t be, would it?”
Kami felt her cheeks burn. “It’s not romantic. We’re not romantic. Why do I have to keep saying that?”
“Because he wants it to be,” Angela said. “Doesn’t he? It’s obvious you’re all he thinks about.”
“Yes,” Kami snapped. “Yes, I matter to him. He wants to keep me to himself, he asked me to go out with him when we’d barely met, and he doesn’t want to touch me.”
Holly blinked. “What?”
“Him being real and me being real,” Kami said. “It’s been hard for us to get used to. Him having a body, it’s been like being thirteen, when you can’t get over how strange guys are, and you can’t look at them when you sit next to them, and when your hands brush you almost have a heart attack.”
“I remember that.” Holly nodded. “Except I was eleven.”
Kami and Angela both looked at her with raised eyebrows. Holly shrugged.
“It’s been like when Holly was eleven, then,” Kami said. “Except worse. Neither of us has known how to handle it, but I’ve wanted to. And he hasn’t. I don’t know what to do about someone who only wants me for my mind.”
Holly slid down the wall to sit on the floor. “I can honestly say it has never happened to me.”
“Yeah,” said Angela. “Guys, always trying to kiss me. I have to beat them off with a stick. Seriously, I keep the stick behind the door at home.”
Kami tried to smile, even as the skin between her brows pinched. “I hate you guys. And I hate talking about this. It’s so humiliating.”
“No,” Holly protested, reaching out a hand to her.
“Yes, it is,” Kami said fiercely. Embarrassment clutched her by the throat, but she swallowed and surged ahead. “Let’s just talk about the investigation. Unless you guys have any leads on who might be the sorcerous murderer, I was thinking of investigating something Ash let drop. He talked about something happening at Monkshood.”
“That old place?” Holly asked.
“Ever go poking around there when you were a kid?” Kami asked.
Holly was silent.
