Page 116 of Love Spells: And Other Non-Refundable Magic

Dani leans back in her chair. “The witch.”

“Yes.”

“The online witch.”

“Oh my god, please help me.”

“Merry,” Dani says, flattening her hands on the table right next to me. “How do you even have a crush on a person whose name you don’t know and whose face you’ve never seen?”

“Well, when you say it like that, it sounds bad.”

“And might I remind you,” Veronica adds, taking a huge bite of her sandwich and still choosing to speak with her mouth full, “that you have a fucking smokeshow going to your house every few days!”

“I like talking to her,” I say. “The witch, I mean. That’s all.”

Veronica laughs, tilting her head back and almost choking on the food she is still chewing on. I give myself several seconds to reconsider telling them anything else.

“She knows a lot about me at this point. Probably too much, honestly. And usually it’s very one-sided because that’s literally what I paid her for, but lately…” I look down at the bracelet on my wrist and turn it once. “I don’t know. It’s different.”

Veronica reaches across the table and catches my wrist before I can pull it away, looking at the bracelet.

“But I don’t get it,” she says as she drops my wrist and goes back to her food. “Wasn’t the whole goal of the spell to help you find love? Why is this a problem?”

“I don’t know. We were talking the other night, and I asked whether she ever does spells for herself.”

“You asked your witch if she witches herself?”

“Essentially.”

“And what did she say?” Dani takes a sip of her soda, then places the cup very gently on the table, studying my face with a serious expression.

I hesitate. I don’t know why I’m reluctant to tell them anything. Maybe because it felt so personal when The Third Fairy said it. Less like one of our usual conversations about my mess of a life and more like I’d accidentally opened a door I hadn't known was there.

“She said she wanted the courage to let herself be happy about someone without immediately imagining all the ways she could lose them.”

Veronica gasps, and her expression changes.

“Yeah,” I say. “That’s what I did, too. That face.”

She ignores me. “And you liked that?”

“I understood it.”

Which isn’t quite the same thing. Except I keep thinking about it.

About how strange it was to discover that the woman who has spent weeks calmly dissecting every stupid thing happening inside my head maybe has stupid things happening inside hers, too.

I liked knowing that. Perhaps more than I should have.

Dani abandons her salad completely. “So you like Flora.”

“A lot.”

“And you like the witch,” she adds.

“A tiny amount.”

Veronica’s eyes ping-pong between us, following this obnoxious back-and-forth.