“So you say.” I raised my eyebrows, reaching back toward my half-eaten second slice of pizza again. “So, go on now. Tell me more about your online dating escapades. For the paper, of course.”
He barked a short laugh. “Not that you want to get another laugh out of me.”
“Not at all.”
“Not at all,” he repeated with a shake of his head, swiping over his touchpad before his essay lit back up on the screen.
5
Ryan and I maintained a steady stream of conversation over the next few hours as he wrote his examination of regency dating as detailed withinPride and Prejudiceand further explored in their historical sources. I marked each particularly helpful passage I found within the first few chapters with a sticky note before passing it across the table.
He talked more about football and high school in a small town, where his parents still lived in a close-knit development. He talked about wanting to travel for study abroad, but at this rate, he’d never get to. He talked about favorite colors since there couldn’t just be one and foods and how much he hated night classes—almost more thaneight in the morninglectures, but at least you could show up to those in your sweatpants.
I could only agree, mostly because in the late evenings, I much preferred to be exactly where we were then, if not running off to accompany Vadika to her lab or sneak off to see Gertie in town, which Ryan was surprised to realize was so close.
“Who knew that a whole plethora of witches lived in Barnett?”
“Just the ones who need to,” I answered.At the very least. Much like how many of them had found witchcraft and believed in the world and all of its unknowns to begin with.We needed to.
As well as a conversationalist, Ryan was surprisingly well written.
When he was engaged, he fell into a typing frenzy. He had to pause and go back to make sure he had put spaces in the right place between words, as if he could not keep up with his thoughts fast enough.
That, or he just wanted to be done.
He was typing his final few words of the conclusion by the time I put on a movie. I set it up on the edge of the table, where I could still see from the couch next to us, and let it play as my eyes dropped. I shifted to prop my feet up.
I glanced over his essay. It could’ve been better put in the middle sections. In Ryan’s words, it was good enough. I fixed some minor citations and quotation marks before handing it back. If his professor wasn’t impressed, I was.
Not that I’d ever say that.
In fact, I was close to being shocked at how well formed his unique argument was in only a few painstaking hours, however modern. I’d read worse clickbait articles that came through my email daily. Even more so, I was shocked the moment he shut his computer lid and collapsed on the couch next to me.
“Freedom,” Ryan sighed, stretching his arms overhead.
He shut his warm eyes for a moment before he opened them again, getting comfortable in the dark corner we had found ourselves in without the bright screens of computers lighting up our faces.
“Congratulations. One paper down.”
“And about a half dozen more to go before the end of the semester,” he added.
Well, that was one way to think about it. “Now, who’s the pessimist?”
I turned my attention back toward the movie I’d put on. I had seen it more than a few times. Ever since I’d first arrived at Barnett, it had become sort of a tradition when I needed to settle myself.
I didn’t want to come back to campus not long after arriving and hesitantly heading off campus to meet the small coven with a sad, yet somewhat active social media page Faith maintained when she was in the mood to mark meetings. The rest of the ladies stuck to a more ancient, yet easier, phone call when they needed to cancel. An incident which had only happened once two years ago during a rainstorm that flooded the river and Gertie’s cellar.
When I had shown up, I pushed past the white picket fence to the large, slightly sloped backyard of Gertrude’s home. It looked like something out of a fairy tale. Her yard was adorned with raspberry vines and a small, smoldering firepit in the center with women around it. And they acted as if I had always been there.
When I didn’t want to go back to campus, a few of the ladies simply shrugged, taking me inside the sunroom, where they laid blankets on the daybed and watched Audrey Hepburn films until I fell asleep. I woke up to tea and a promise that I was allowed to come back to the meetings whenever I needed.
I’d never felt more at home.
I slouched into the cushions and indirectly into Ryan, mind lost from the sound of nonsensical dancing on-screen.
“You seem sad.”
“Just thinking.”
