Thesecondeveryone’s finished, I stand and begin gathering their plates. “As usual, William, keep the lasagna, okay?”
He grumbles the same thing he always does when I leave the man some food. “I’m not a damn charity case.”
“And you also don’t like to waste food, and neither do I.”
I pack up the lasagna and place it in the fridge, and as I begin to load the dishwasher, Adam appears and grabs the cups out of my hand. “I’ll do that.”
I raise my hands in surrender and turn to William. “Same time next week, then.”
“See ya.”
As I reach to open the door, Adam, once again, pulls an object—this time, the doorknob—out of my hand. The way he positions his body around me, it’s like he’s security, making sure I haven’t stolen anything. If he tries to pat me down, looking for William’s wallet or something, I’m going to knee him so hard, he’ll be the one choking this time, only on his own balls.
“I’ll walk you out.” His voice is friendly but very false. One thing about being the Witch of Criaturas is I can almost always tell when people are lying. I may not be able to immediately and intimately connect with them the way I can with animals, but the thing is? We humans are also animals. Our bodies do not lie to each other, even as our words do.
I march up to my vehicle—a cute little blue car that my sister Teal purchased for me as a kind of way to saySorry for daring you to climb on a railing and how it suspended your life for eight years. When I turn around, I catch Adam’s eyes on my ass. He glances up at my face too slow for me to miss it. I remember Grayson’s words:Every single guy gets hard over anything vaguely round. Tits, ass. It doesn’t matter. It means nothing.
“What do you want to know?” I ask. “I’ve got three minutes so make it snappy.”
He closes his eyes briefly, as though I’m the one who followed him to his car, accusing him of trying to scam my grandparent. He glances around, for what reason I don’t know, and when his blue eyes land on mine, I break the contact immediately byfocusing on his Adam’s apple as he swallows. “Why did you first start bringing Gramps food? Why do you keep doing it, huh? What—what’s in it for you?” Now he looks concerned, and I can see that under his hardened exterior, beneath the frown, the crossed arms, the tense jaw, there is a protectiveness. He wants to protect his grandfather. And I get that. I do.
But it doesn’t make up for the last time he and I spoke. In the parking lot of Teal’s ex’s wedding that we all attended last summer.
I don’t do crowds orloud music. They both make me feel like my skin is going to vibrate right off into a pile on the floor, and after about thirty minutes of this sensation, I feel raw, like I need to hide under my comforters, or in the darkest part of the forest, for several days until I feel like myself again.
So I had escaped from the reception to the courtyard, where I found friends—chipmunks, tiny and soft, little white stripes on their bodies so delicate it was like they were painted on. Pigeons were there, too, cooing and chatting. As I held one of each in the crooks of my arms, Adam walked out, saw me, and blinked. It was so similar to the time it appeared like he saw me as a ghost, it took my breath away, so much so that I couldn’t speak.
And then he furrowed his brow and said, “Is that apigeon?”
He spent the next ten minutes scolding me for handling wild animals. He went over diseases and ticks and infections, referencing work trips he had made to jungles in Brazil and Bolivia and the old gods know where else…not noticing once that I was shrinking into my skin, feeling smaller and smaller as he treated me as though I were an especially stupid twelve-year-old who should know better.
That wasn’t the worst part, though.
I was feeling too defeated to return to the reception. So I wandered around the beach instead, wanting to allow the seagulls to land on my arms and shoulders but feeling ridiculous for it, thanks to Adam’s condescending rant. I sat on a bench facing the parking lot, and that was when I heard him again.
“I just saw the fucking craziest thing…Yes, achipmunk. Who does that?” Adam’s voice came in and out, and then I heard a woman laughing in response.
“Oh my God, you didn’t know about the Freak of Cranberry? Literally everyone says she lives in the woods like a dirty old hag and talks to animals. It’s insane. You should do a story on her.”
Adam had laughed uproariously. “There’s no way. My career would be ruined.”
“Oh, shh, shh,” the woman said between giggles. Her hair shone copper red in the sunlight, and she was just as toned and lean as my sister Teal. “There she is. Don’t say anything or she’ll, like, growl at us or something.”
They walked by me briskly, neither one even glancing my way. By the time they got to the woman’s car, they were laughing about something else, and then they hopped in and she drove them away.
To say I was devastated was an understatement. I couldn’t have kept my tears in even if I’d tried. A seagull landed by my hand, pecking very lightly at my fingernails, in the same way a cat might nip at their owner, asking something likeWhat’s up? Why are you so sad?Or, you know, knowing seagulls, it also might’ve beenHey, can you sneak me a big grilled steak from the party?
My sister Teal came out of the reception hall right then. “Teal!” I called, hoping I could bum a ride with her, since the last thing I wanted was to spend another second thinking about howthe man I’d idealized for the last year had justlaughedwhen someone called me a freak.
But she didn’t hear me. She was quickly followed by Carter, her soon-to-be husband, though I certainly didn’t know it at the time. They yelled at each other over his car for about a minute, and thentheygot in and sped away, too.
So I sat there for a while, as the sweet seagull hung out, leaning against my forearm. I realized that this crush I’d been nurturing on Adam for so long was, well, pure delusion. This was a painful truth to acknowledge. I swallowed many times to keep from bubbling tears again.
Adam wasn’t into me, like,atall. And the thing is, it’s fine for someone to not be sexually attracted to someone else. I get it. Adam didn’t owe me interest or flirtation or anything like that. But it was still a hard, hard blow to the ego, considering that up until then, I’m still embarrassed to admit, before I fell asleep at night, I’d imagine the way his face would look when he fell in love with me. I’d think about our first kiss, how he would be so into it, he would make some kind of awkward-yet-hot sound when our tongues touched. I’d fantasize in vivid detail about when he realized that the ghost he saw that one night at his grandfather’s wasn’t a ghost at all, but a real woman with real desires and real powers.
I truly thought the old gods had connected us in some cosmic, world-defining way, because there was no way a man could make eye contact with my lonely, wandering spirit twice in a row and it wouldn’t mean something.
But it really didn’t mean anything at all. He dismissed me like I was nothing.
