Page 81 of Love Spells: And Other Non-Refundable Magic

“Wear the dress,” she says, scrolling through her phone. She is, again, doing this on purpose.

I narrow my eyes at her, but there’s no bite behind it. I’m too aware of the time glowing on my phone beside her. Six twenty-three.

Not that I’m counting, of course.

I take off my sweater and swap it for the short dress, and I instantly know what she means.

“You really like her.”

There’s no teasing in her voice now. I can hear the faint sound of her moving the wineglass against her knee, the hum of the old ceiling fan above us, Fausto talking somewhere downstairs. Mamá answers him, too muffled through the floor for me to understand any of the words.

I meet her eyes in the mirror. “I barely know her.”

“I didn’t say you knew her.”

That is, annoyingly, a very Maggie answer. I look back at myself in the mirror and reach to my desk to grab the small gold hoop earrings I purchased last week on a whim.

I push the hoop through my ear and fasten it. “I like what I do know.”

“Okay.”

“And I’m attracted to her.”

“Obviously.”

I give her a look in the mirror.

She raises her wineglass. “You kissed her against the side of somebody’s house, Flora. I haven’t witnessed you doing that in the two decades I’ve known you.”

“It was a patio.”

“Oh, Your Fucking Highness, my apologies for the lack of detail.”

“And she kissed me first.”

Maggie’s mouth twitches.

I reach for the other earring.

“And then I kissed her.”

“Hmmm,” she says, and I see her smile hiding behind the glass.

I laugh, and some of the nervous energy that’s been sitting underneath my ribs since Merry texted me on Saturday loosens.

It had been such a simple message.

Would you like to have dinner with me this week? Like an actual date?

Then, less than a minute later, and in what I now recognize is a total Merry move: I realize “actual date” makes it sound like… I don’t even know. I just mean a date. With me, obviously.

I’d been packing an order at the dining room table when it came through, and I’d smiled so quickly that Fausto had looked up from across the room and asked me what was wrong with me.

I hadn’t made Merry wait.

I knew what you meant.

Then: Yes.