Kieran blinked.“Seriously?”
Sylvia nodded.“Sometimes it’s just a five-minute call to checkin, but yeah.If they didn’t talk to me for a month, I’d assume they were dead or…”
Kieran asked the question before the growing anxiety tightened his throat too much: “Or what?”
“Or they were breaking up with me.”
Kieran recoiled as if he’d been slapped.He quickly righted himself, clearing his throat.“Well—that’s just your relationship, right?It’s not like that for everyone.Plus, for the record, Ash called me yesterdayandwe’re getting dinner tonight, so maybe you’re overthinking it.”
“I’moverthinking it?”Sylvia repeated, trying not to laugh.She crossed her arms over her chest.“Kieran, come on.You gotta be realistic about this.A relationship where you don’t communicate isn’t much of a relationship at all.You deserve to feel like a priority in your partner’s life.”
Kieran’s eyes went to the floor.“He’s just…busy, okay?I can’t blame him for that.”
“We’re all busy, Kieran.What matters is who we make time for.”
Sylvia took the finished mocha from Kieran as he stood in silence, staring out at the door again.While she called the customer’s name and set the mug on the bar, Kieran exhaled through his nose.
She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
She doesn’t knowus.
That afternoon, Kieran returned home to the shoddy little apartment he shared with Briar and Delilah.He was tired enough thathe passed out face-first on the couch and slept for nearly an hour before the sound of Delilah rifling through the kitchen cabinets stirred him from his post-work nap haze.He moaned, just faintly, and Delilah stifled a chuckle.
“Sorry to wake you,” she said as she pulled down a mixing bowl from one of the higher cabinets.Now that his eyes were open, Kieran spotted tins of flour and sugar lined up neatly on the counter.Delilah continued: “I’m meeting some potential clients this evening, and I wanted to make them some enchanted biscuits as a sort of…preview of my magic.Might help sell them when it comes to hiring me to break their curse.”
Kieran sat up, rubbing his bleary eyes with the inside of his forearm.“Oh, it’s okay.I should have gone to my room.”
“But it’s too cold in there?”Delilah guessed, shooting him a wry smile over her shoulder as she pulled her brown curls into a ponytail.
In response to her repeating his frequent grievance, Kieran muttered, “Maybe.”
Delilah laughed, then turned back to her baking.Ever since they’d moved in together, near the end of summer, she’d made an effort to fill the run-down apartment with things that made it feel more like a home and less like a refuge for wayward mice (which they had seemingly evicted, though Kieran wasn’t holding his breath).Whether it was covering up the scuff marks on the hardwood floors with mismatched rugs, hanging thrifted art over cracks in the walls, buying curtains for the windows that frosted over on the inside on cold nights, or tending to the menagerie of plants she’d tucked into nearly every nook and cranny, she alwayshad some kind of project going.In the beginning, Kieran had tried to help, but whenever he’d found decorations or furniture he liked, they were far out of his budget.
When it came down to it, he was pretty much broke.Which, for someone who grew up in one of Celdwyn’s richest families, was somewhat of a jarring experience.
Just then, the front door flew open, making Kieran jump.Carrying two massive grocery bags was his twin.Briar shook red hair out of her eyes as she came in—in the last few months, she’d let it grow from a buzz cut into a choppy mop that hung around her ears.She sidestepped into the shared living room and kitchen area, dropping the grocery bags on the counter beside her girlfriend.
“They didn’t have the berries you wanted, so I got chocolate chips instead,” Briar explained, shrugging off her oversize black coat.Kieran noticed a dusting of snow on the sleeves, flakes sticking to the fabric and to Briar’s hair and eyelashes.
“Of course your replacement for fruit is chocolate,” Delilah said with a laugh.She bent down and kissed Briar on the mouth, all tenderness.The tension that had been in Briar’s shoulders melted away, and she made a faint, contented sound as she wrapped her arms around Delilah.Delilah lifted Briar off the ground, setting her on the counter and deepening their kiss.
This continued for a long, painful second before Kieran interrupted: “So, did you need me to put those groceries away, or…?”
The girls broke apart, Briar blushing while Delilah giggled and tucked a loose curl that had escaped her ponytail behind her ear.
“Sorry, Kier,” Delilah said.
“Consider it payback for the last time I caught you and Ash onthe couch.”Briar snickered.She hopped off the counter and went back to the groceries, pulling things out of the brown paper bag and passing them to Delilah.“How is he, anyway?Haven’t seen him around in a few weeks.”
If there had been anything left of Kieran’s good mood, it vanished.The last thing he wanted to talk about after Sylvia’s confrontation this morning was Ash.Sure, he knew their relationship wasn’t exactly…perfect, per se, but what relationship was?
Theirs,muttered a deeply unhelpful voice in Kieran’s head as his eyes went from his sister to Delilah.
Kieran sighed through his nose.It wasn’t that he wasn’t happy for them—of all the people he knew, Briar and Delilah may well be the most deserving of an easy, loving partnership after what they’d been through.Both had seen themselves as doomed by their respective family curses—Briar cursed to siphon Kieran’s magic away until it killed him and turned her into a monster, Delilah to never find true love.The fact that they’d found each other and broken each other’s curses was something of a miracle.Plus, seeing his sister and his best friend so happy together was genuinely wonderful.It was the kind of love people wrote poetry about and used to decorate the pages of storybooks.Warm, patient, and understanding.
And despite himself, for all that he loved the two of them, it made Kieran wildly, painfully jealous.
Not that he’d ever admit it out loud.Those feelings were reserved for the poetry he penned late at night in his poorly insulated, too-cold bedroom, wrapped in layers upon layers of blankets like a fabric cocoon.He’d found it was a good way to distract himselffrom the sound of the girls’ giggling make-out sessions, which the paper-thin walls did little to dampen.
