Page 55 of Vengefully Matched

CHAPTER 17 Agatha

She showed up at Free Spirits at seven thirty, to make sure she had time to grab a corner table in the back and have a glass of wine and a quick refresher in the bathroom. She’d been going over the documents about the Hildebrand von Auden estate and the Fountain of Youth, trying to decide how a tiny vial of something that had been kept under lock and key, in the heaviest security vault of the lowest level of the Council building, could possibly have been stolen and be related to the chainsaw incident.

The chainsaws had behaved exactly according to the warnings she had read about immortality.

The saws had continued to buzz, even when taken apart. Their pieces had to be kept in separate containers. Was there an elixir of immortality for inanimate objects? And if so, how the devil would such a thing even work? Would the elixir work on animate and inanimate objects, organic and inorganic? She had a horrible feeling that the chainsaws were the work of someone sampling the elixir without wanting to take it themselves first. No wonder the original had been destroyed, and the magic forbidden. Immortality really was a pain in the ass.

Agatha resolved to leave the mystery at work, but arriving to the restaurant a full thirty minutes ahead of schedule had not helped with that initiative.

And to make matters worse, when she tried scrolling Dreaddit to check up on Connie and her fortune-telling business—which seemed to be going well; there were already several rave reviews recommending her to creatures posting in subDreadds—she stumbled upon an AITA post that reminded her of Jonathan so much that she thought perhaps it was him.

Until she remembered that he had the emotional range of a lump of coal, and that it would be a hot day in Heaven before he even suspected himself of being an asshole.

The biggest assholes were always the least suspicious of their own buffoonery.

She set the phone down and browsed through the menu, which offered an assortment of tapas, and a culinary tour of Spain at the table. It was perfect, the small plate approach, for nights like this, when she wasn’t sure if it was fully a date, or fully a fake date even. If it wasn’t going well, they could always treat it as a drink and an appetizer and call it quits; if it was, well, they could fill the table with delicious little snacks until they were both satisfied.

Agatha shifted in her seat, trying not to think of the other sorts of satisfaction she might find at the hands of Priscilla Hart.

And, as though the power of her explicit thoughts had summoned the woman herself, there she stood, clad in a black bodycon dress that left very little to the imagination, a slit up the slide so high that it made Agatha nervous that one wrong move would be enough to disrobe her entirely from the waist down.

Her hair was swept up, slightly wavy, Agatha noted. It was usually down or braided to the side, but this way, goddess, her face was epic.

It was the face of her deepest desires, her darkest, most unapproachable dreams. Her fantasies.

Priscilla’s red lipstick was a shade darker than usual, past the bloodred and into something more decadent, something Agatha longed to swipe her thumb against, to see if it would smudge, if she could make a gorgeous, sloppy mess of the other woman’s mouth. Her naturally long lashes stood out against a cat eye, which was drawn sharp enough to kill a man.

Or a woman, in this instance, for Agatha had never been more certain that she was sexually attracted to other women than she was right at this moment, when it felt like her heart was seizing and the entire world slowed down, like the only two people in the universe were her and Priscilla. It had never been like this, not with the college roommate she used to kiss sloppily on the counters, both of them claiming it was something everyone did with their friends. Not the times they watched porn together and both of them got off from separate twin beds, somehow also pretending that was platonic.

She hadn’t admitted to herself for years that those sexually charged moments were not indicative of simple friendship, and they’d loomed large in her memory, hot and ragged around the edges when she ran her mind around them.

And yet those moments were nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to just looking at Priscilla approach her, dressed all in black, that deadly deep red in her lips and her nails.

“You changed your lipstick,” she said weakly. She had meant to tell Priscilla that she was the sun and everyone else the moon, to quote Shakespeare, to throw herself at her feet and beg for the honor of even so much as being stepped on. Run over with her hearse, even. Or, at the very least, to tell her that she looked lovely tonight. But no, all Agatha managed was a comment on her lipstick.

Hart, she thought, think of her as Hart, but her mind rebelled.

Priscilla slid into the chair across from her, and the scent of her, lemony and tinged with mint, nearly gave Agatha a heart attack. She should really check in with a cardiologist; past mid-thirties could be late enough to worry that there was something wrong with her body to necessitate the way her heart was pounding, thudding, and the extra pulse between her legs that seemed to have developed a life of its own.

She clenched, shifting to try to relieve the pressure of being so swollen, so slick with want, and she caught Priscilla’s carefully lined eyes tracking her, smugly, as though she knew exactly what this attire did to Agatha.

“It’s called Monster,” she said.

“Beg pardon?”

“The lipstick. The color is called Monster.” She smiled, teeth white against the deep red of it. “Because maybe I am a Monster.” Priscilla examined her nails, and Agatha thought something flickered on her face, like this was a mask and the real Prissy—well, did the real Prissy fear that maybe, just maybe, she really was too much of a monster?

That struck a chord in her, that familiar fear of being at once too much and not enough.

“That’s okay, chérie,” Agatha breathed, her voice coming out wrong. Too heavy, too laced with desire. “I happen to like monsters.” She caught Priscilla’s eyes and something stretched between them, entirely new and yet surprisingly familiar after all.

“Can I get you something to drink?” A short woman with reddish-blond hair and a name tag that read Alison stood next to the table.

Agatha welcomed the server’s interruption, and took the moment when Priscilla put in a wine order to scan the menu and remind herself to breathe.

She ordered a second glass of white wine. Prissy asked for a glass of red, and Agatha pointed to a few of the menu items that she had painstakingly selected and thought they might share. Prissy smiled, dazzling once again, and added one, though Agatha was becoming so obsessed with the movement of her mouth that she couldn’t have recounted what it was that Priscilla ordered, let alone what she herself had ordered, to save her life.

The server returned with drinks, and Agatha took a deep breath. She had wanted to even the playing field, ever since Prissy had offered that vulnerable admission of the problems in her broken engagement.