“So it is.”
He hasn’t said anything overtly sensual, and yet the brief wordsfeelit. My body tightens, blood stirring. “Why aren’t you sleeping?” I ask.
“How could I possibly? It’s as if you’re in my bedroom. What did I tell you about those curtains?”
My throat is packed with sand. “You told me that when I keep them open at night, you can see me.”
A short silence falls, in which he says everything by saying nothing at all.
This is more blatant than he’s dared so far; for the past few days, Morgan has begun to look at me with a new…suggestiveness…in his eyes.
“You could close your own curtains,” I point out.
“Not even if I wanted to.” His voice is rough. “My hands wouldn’t allow it. When you dangle temptation, Zelda Tempest, I won’t say no.”
He’s seated at a desk in front of his window just like I am. Morgan lives on the second floor of a pale green Victorian house, the first floor of which is a bakery, Wafting Crescent, run by Bushra and her brother, Zaid. They probably have to listen to a lot of eighties synth pop pumping through their ceiling.
My breath catches. “Bold.”
“Bold is efficient,” he replies. “And you look like you could use some company.”
I’m at a loss for words. This isn’t new territory, as I often don’t know what to say to Morgan. He has a keen interest in the paranormal and likes to ask me questions about my books (as they are focused on the paranormal). Because of this, I tend to avoid him. My writing—and what I plan to write next—is a sore topic at the moment. But I have noticed Morgan, certainly. From afar.
And I can hardly process the words that are coming out of his mouth, like a daydream glimmering to life.
You look like you could use some company.
He is so intensely good-looking that I don’t know how to converse sensibly with him, and that is why I flounder with the weak response: “I’m busy. Reading.”
“Reading what?”
“A volume on the Habsburg Empire.”
He tilts his head, fixing on his ceiling. “Are you into history?”
“Oh yes,” I reply in a rush. “And science. Geology, geography, ancient weapons and torture devices. Bog bodies. Cairns. The lost colony of Roanoke.” I am giving too much information, but I can’t stop—I have a million special interests. My present studies are Baltic Sea trade in the Viking Age, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and listening to unsolved mysteries on audiobook. Traveling used to be a great love of mine, but I’ve tired of it (and also can’t afford it these days). “What about you?” I ask with barely contained eagerness, pulling my waist-length braid over one shoulder and nosing a pen out of it. Iusually keep one somewhere on my person for easy access. “What do you enjoy learning about?”
His chair swivels so that he faces me fully, one hand running through the night-shining strands of his hair. “You.”
My heart takes flight.
He grins as though he knows what that word, inthattone, has accomplished. A man like Morgan must know how he affects people. I am not infatuated, precisely, but with a little more encouragement on his part, I could see myself getting there.
“And ghosts,” he goes on as thunder shakes the walls. “Witchcraft, magic. You already know.”
I bite my lip. Yes, I do.
I also know that none of it is real.
Not the ghost stories that have made our town famous. Not witches, which my sisters claim to be, as did my grandmother. For decades, Grandma Dottie sold candles in our shop. They were supposedly imbued with spells that helped divine a customer’s One True Love, or could speed up the romance-finding process, weeding out the duds so that you knew not to invest too much into the relationship. She passed this particular strain of magic down to Luna, who’s taken up the mantle and has filled the shop top to bottom with “bespelled” candles.
My younger sister, Romina, calls herself aflora fortunist. The magic she claims to wield is similar to Luna’s, in that it aids customers’ romantic notions. But rather than candle magic, she uses floriography, which is the language of flowers. The way that I understand it, magic tells her which flowers to give to a person in order to bring their romantic wishes to fruition(if magic agrees with the customer’s wishes, that is). If you ask Romina and Luna how they can be so sure they’re witches, that what they’re doing is truly charmed, they’ll respond irritatingly vaguely about “intuition” and “connection to nature.” When they practice witchcraft, there are no sparks, no sudden gusts of wind, no sign that anything otherworldly is happening at all. It can’t be proven. I’ll be the first to admit that I love a good witchy aesthetic. But I’ll also admit—and this is where I diverge drastically from my sisters—that it’s only a style. Nothing more.
Rats. I’ve accidentally defiled a library book again.
If it were real, I appear to have written in the corner of Appendix I,it could be proven.
“There’s something about you,” Morgan tells me lowly. “I would like to find out what it is.”
