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My twenty-first birthday was in a few days, and I wasn’t just getting presents. I’d also been planning to give away one. A big one in my eyes. I was going to give Devon my virginity.
Today, plans changed. Because I found out he’s been cheating on me.
Six months, I wasted with him. Six months of my life. Not only did he cheat, he cheated with Tawny, who is supposed to be my friend. He’s been sleeping with her for over a month. Over a month while lying to my face with his forked tongue – that snake.
And looking back, I figured it probably wasn’t the first time. Because not only did he cheat, but he was overheard telling his friend he was only hanging in there to get my cherry and then he’d be done with me and my “quirky ass”.
And it turned out I was the laughingstock of my friend group. Because I’m ridiculous. Ridiculous, quirky Rikki Young, holding onto her virginity for the perfect man.
I’m now convinced that the perfect man doesn’t exist.
I drove here to escape the nonsense of my regular life. The nonsensical “regular” life I constructed for myself.
Along with spending a lot of time on my craft the past three years, I’d been trying to live a double life, the second one being more of a “regular” life.
I moved out and got a roommate. I also got a regular job about eight months ago, wanting to make sure I lived as an adult in the regular world, thinking it’d make me better at the craft because I wasn’t only living in the world of the Young coven. Being in the community instead of spending all my time with witches would make me a better person, a better witch, wouldn’t it?
Turned out, it just made me miserable. The competition out there was stiff. For jobs. For genuine friendships. In dating. I surrounded myself with people my age and that was a mistake. Because almost all of them turned out to be back-biting, plastic, two-faced jerks. There was only competition, no camaraderie. Except for my roommate Priya, who told me the truth about Devon.
I confided in her this morning that I was going to give it up for my birthday and she cracked, sitting me down and showing me evidence of everything that’s been going on. The texts where I’m the butt of jokes. Video of Devon with Tawny at the nightclub with their drunk, glassy eyes and their hands on one another in a way you knew they were getting up to no good behind my back. A text from Tawny to Priya admitting she’d gotten drunk and slept with him once and initially felt bad, but couldn’t seem to stop since then and wanted advice on what to do about it.
As kind as Priya was to tell me the truth, Priya held onto the information for a while, too, worried about sharing it. Maybe even taking Tawny’s side. And she’d shown me signs of the same personality defects as what was in the rest of our friend group, probably because she spent so much time trying to fit in.
I knew I was done. It was time to move on. I’d go back home to Aunt Mimi’s. Back to work at the shop. I’d give up my job at the call center and go back to basics. Back to people who gave a damn about me. Back to dancing to the beat of my own quirky drum. I was done trying to fit where I didn’t belong.
I’d spend a couple days here with Aunt Lyrica, reconnecting with who I am, do a cleansing ritual to rid myself of any lingering bad vibes, spend some time in the forest, give Aunt Lyrica’s apartment a deep cleaning for her, then reboot my life back to the previous settings, back to a life that felt genuine.
Shuck the shoes, the business suits, and the fake life. Get back in touch with and in synch with my environment, my family, myself.
I dashed tears off my face as I pulled down the main strip of Drowsy Hollow, approaching the little diner down the street from the dry cleaners. It was a sweltering hot summer day and as much as I loved my van, I thought it might be nice to have something with air conditioning.
As the thought occurred to me that it might be nice to go pick up some pies and have them for dinner (something me and Aunt Lyrica often did – skip dinner and go straight for dessert, especially at this diner, which was known for their pies), the door to the diner opened and a beaming, sparkled beam of light shone down, spotlighting the delicious man coming out of the diner with a smile on his face.
Riley the wolf shifter.
