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Oh fuck,my brain said.We haven’t kissed anyone in like six or seven years. Do we even remember how to do it right?
I yanked my tongue back into my mouth and shut my mouth so quickly that I caught Moe’s bottom lip in my teeth.
“Ow!” he yelped.
I opened my mouth and leaped back as his hand went to his swollen lip. “Fuck, I’m sorry!”
The heat in my torso turned to a hot roaring tornado of anxiety. Of course, I had fucked this up. I was doing fine until my brain butted in like a parent bursting into your bedroom while you’re grinding on a broom handle.
What? It’s the real reason witches used brooms.
“You like it rough,” Moe said, his words a bit slurred from his lip.
“I didn’t mean to! Ah, fuck, I don’t know any healing magic.” It was often outside the ability of dark witches. I put my hand to my mouth and gnawed on my thumbnail.
Moe touched his lip and then looked at his fingertips to check for blood. I didn’t spot any red on his hand. “Are you a vampire witch?”
“No such thing, I’m sorry!”
Moe chuckled. “We’ll keep practicing kissing.”
With that, the tornado of hot anxiety in my gut died.
“We all make mistakes!” he continued. “Once, I hadn’t eaten in three days because I was a broke student. I was going down on my girlfriend at the time, and it took her a while, which I don’t mind,” he added quickly with a wink. “But my mind wandered to burgers, fries, and nice juicy pickles. Anyway, I lost focus and nipped her.”
My knees squeezed together. “Did she kick you in the nuts? She should have.”
“No, turns out she was into that but didn’t know! Anyway, the lesson is that we all make mistakes, and it’s okay because you learn from it and sometimes what you learn is that you have a new kink. I didn’t learn that today, but that’s okay!”
“I think the lesson is that a pussy isn’t lunch.”
Moe nodded. “A pussy isn’t lunch,” he said like an old wise man on a mount.
“What did you study in school?”
Moe pulled back his shoulders. “I have a Bachelor of Engineering in Binocular Maintenance and Repair.”
He looked so proud of himself that I swallowed the urge to ask if he was kidding. “I didn’t know that was a thing.”
“It is at MIT… Mr. Intelligent’s Teachery.”
I think I understood why the mate spell had decided Moe and I were meant for each other. He needed someone hard and mean to protect him from the world. I wondered if anyone had looked out for him before he had met Jag. In return, he was bringing out a silliness in me that I thought I had lost two decades ago.
“I want to go back to school—somewhere that doesn’t lose their accreditation like MIT did—so I can get a degree in music. Then, maybe I can be a real musician like Elliot wants us to be. I know you don’t need a degree for that, but a degree might convince him that we are good.”
I glanced across the store at Elliot as he flipped through items on a rack. I wanted to hug him and kiss him and tell him he was already a skilled musician. They all were.
“Did you go to college?” Moe said, taking my hand. His touch sent a tremor of pleasure through my skin.
It seemed weird that we were smitten when we didn’t even know basic life facts about each other—and weirder still that I wasn’t scrambling to break the spell.
“No, I was expelled from high school for using dark magic. I floated around New York with Juniper until we joined a gang of thieves.”
I watched him, expecting sweet Moe to be horrified by my criminal past. Instead, he said, “Like heists? I always wanted to do heists! I have so many questions about everything you just said! First, why do people dislike some magic? No, wait! I know what I want to ask first. Did you ever want to go to school?”
It was a strange question because I was in my mid-thirties and hadn’t thought of school in years. “Not after they kicked me out. I figured no school would take me.”
Moe squeezed my hand. “But what did you dream of doing before then?”
