Page 21 of Damiana

“Yeah.”

The card said two things below the name. Carpentry & Finish Work, and underneath that, in a smaller font, Humboldt County Search & Rescue Volunteer. I looked at the second line, then at his face. He was watching me read it.

“Search and rescue?”

“Sometimes.”

“Did you rescue me last night? From yourself?”

The question came out of my mouth without me authorizing a word of it, in a voice I hadn’t used since I was nine years old.

“Something like that,” he said, then pulled a small flat tin from his pocket. “Steep this in hot water and drink it.”

“What now?”

“It’s tea. You need to drink it.”

“Why would I do that?”

“You need to flush out…the cacao,” he said. The way he hesitated on cacao made me wonder what he really meant.

It wasn’t until then that I realized whatever I’d drunk last night had been wearing off in stages, and even in the car I’d been in the fading haze of it. Suddenly, everything around me had slightly sharper edges, including my headache. Except him. Somehow, he’d stayed true the entire time and didn’t look any different now.

“Damian,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“What the fuck? At least tell me why the hell you told me not to sign up for another retreat. What was going on around that fire? What did she do? What was that thing?”

He looked at me for a long second, as handsome and restrained and infuriating as ever. “Not on a sidewalk, Marlowe.”

The morning was very still around the two of us, and somewhere in the distance a car horn went off and a dog barked. Damian waited, letting me decide whether to ask the next question.

I didn’t ask it. I was suddenly and definitively exhausted by him, by Aurora, by nefarious plant medicine. My head was throbbing, the sidewalk was hot, and the night was still coming back in pieces. I needed to sit in the AC with the curtains drawn. I needed to chug ice water and stand under a shower.

“Okay,” I said. “Not on a sidewalk it is, then.”

He nodded.

“I’ll see you,” I said, which was his line, and I didn’t know why I had taken it from him.

“You will.”

He got back into the jeep and drove away.

Chapter Seven

My apartment felt strange when I walked in the door, like I’d been away much longer than a night. The north-facing living room seemed even darker than usual and the mismatched thrifted furniture and salvaged curbside treasures looked less adorable and more like a pitiful collection of hand-me-downs. Doug, my spider plant of three years, hung from his planter in the window, quietly judging me for leaving him. The couch, which I’d bought off Craigslist, looked as sad as ever. It had a small stain that only I knew was there because I’d flipped the cushion over to hide it. I’d left a chipped plate covered in crumbs on the coffee table before running out the door.

I soaked in my pink bathtub. The bathroom hadn’t been remodeled since 1987. I even had a pink toilet to match, and a pink sink, and pink tiles above the tub that I stared at now, counting out of habit, while I thought about the man who was occupying far too much of my brain for someone I’d known for twelve hours. And I wasn’t any less annoyed by him.

He sat like residue on my skin. My body was a map of the places he’d touched, warm and wanting, even when the bathwater cooled.

But my mind was equally preoccupied with what the hell had happened around that fire. At the shore. More specifically, why we’d all allowed it to happen. A few dramatically delivered lines about magical fires, and somehow four grown women had made the journey from luxury wellness retreat to goat sacrifice without anybody demanding a ride home. We’d all kept tabs on each other from across the table, like friends around the same bad men at a house party, and we’d drunk the cacao anyway.

But what chilled me more than the water was what I didn’t know. Specifically, what had hung in the air behind us like some enormous creature breathing ripples into the dark.

I started to shiver in the tepid water. It still felt like some strange current was pulsing through me. Or maybe it was just my self-respect leaving my body. I climbed out of the tub and toweled off, then dressed in my oldest, comfiest clothes and picked up my phone. The group chat was filled with new messages.