Page 90 of Love Spells: And Other Non-Refundable Magic

The warmth hits first, carrying the faint smell of whatever candle she’s burned recently and something sweeter underneath it. I take off my coat while Merry flicks on the lamp beside the couch, and the room comes into view slowly around her.

“Aurora, this is Flora,” she says to the cat.

I stop with one arm still caught in my sleeve.

“Are you introducing us?”

Merry freezes halfway though whatever she was doing. “Yes?”

“That’s cute.”

“It’s not cute. She needs to know who you are. She’s heard about you.”

That catches me, and the corner of my mouth lifts.

Merry seems to hear it a second after I do. “I mean—” She turns around. “Not in a weird way.”

I bite the inside of my cheek. “What would the weird way be?”

“Like I come home from the coffee shop and immediately brief my cat on your activities.”

“Do you?”

Merry looks at Aurora, then at me. “Not immediately.”

I laugh, and some small tension I hadn’t realized I’d carried through the front door loosens with it. Merry shakes her head and walks farther into the house.

“Come in before I tell you anything else.”

I follow her into the living room, and immediately understand why I could never have pictured Merry living anywhere else. It’s small and cozy, softened by warm lamps and an overstuffed pink velvet couch with a blanket thrown over one arm, books and framed photographs sharing space on the shelves with half-burned candles and little things that look collected rather than decorated. Nothing is particularly coordinated, but everything feels warm and comfortable and slightly whimsical in the most perfectly Merry way.

Aurora follows me in, winding once around my ankles before wandering to the couch.

“Wow,” Merry says. “Okay. So we’re just trusting strangers now?”

“I’m not a stranger.”

The words are out before I think about them, and Merry looks at me, blinking with what I think is confusion.

“No,” she says after a moment. “You’re not.”

Something shifts.

It’s subtle enough that I might have missed it if I wasn’t already so aware of her.

The quiet of the house settles around us, making the rain against the windows suddenly noticeable. Merry is only a few feet away, her feet bare, her hair damp around her face, most of her lipstick gone because I’ve spent a considerable portion of the last hour removing it with my lips.

“Oh, hello, my sweet child,” she murmurs to the cat once it settles on the couch, bending to scratch beneath Aurora’s chin in a voice so soft and ridiculous that I almost don’t recognize it. “Were you all alone for four whole hours? Did you think I’d abandoned you forever?”

I stare at the image in front of me. Merry kisses the top of Aurora’s head.

Something inside me breaks.

Maybe it’s because she’s still wearing the clothes she wore on our date, looking flushed and beautiful and thoroughly kissed while speaking to a cat like it’s a newborn child. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent the entire evening slowly collecting different versions of Merry—the competent woman talking about work across the table, the nervous one who reached for my hand, the woman who kissed me on the sidewalk like she was expecting me to evaporate off the face of the earth and she was singlehandedly responsible for that not happening—and apparently this is the thing that finished me off.

I want to squeeze her. And bite her. But mostly, I want her mouth back on mine.

Merry straightens and catches me staring.