He looks away and his voice is strained when he finally speaks. “You didn’t misread it. But it’s… complicated. I have a lot of shit I need to figure out and… and you’re one of the best things that’s ever happened to me, but I need time. Time to not fuck this up. Time to not ruin our friendship. You mean the world to me, Junes.”
“Oh.”
It’s not a rejection, not truly, and yet it stings just as sharply.
But if my time at Fairhaven has taught me anything, it’s how to hide my hurt, those broken parts inside myself, with a smile, brittle though it may be.
I look away quickly. “Yeah, um, I get it. Totally. No worries. Let’s get this fort made and the movie started?”
All I have to do is hide, just for a few more hours, until I can fall apart, alone in my nest, reliving his sweet kiss and his even sweeter rejection.
CHAPTER13
Ilet myself mourn Simon for one night and one night only. Things remain strained between us, but I tell myself it’s just that we’re both so busy with finals, even if I can’t bring myself to believe it.
Just like I was at midterms, I’m the first to finish the written part of my Introduction to Casting exam when I place it on Ian’s desk.
“You don’t want to review your answers?” he asks me, just like he did at midterms.
“Do I ever?” I mutter.
He looks up at me with a smirk and an amused shake of his head. “For that cheekiness, you’re going to be the last student I test for the practical exam.” He nods to the hall. “See you in two hours.”
* * *
I’ve spenthours preparing for Ian’s practical exam and cast every single spell with all the precision and control I’ve been developing since claiming my magic at midterms. When I’ve cast the very last spell of the exam, he looks up at me, that smirk dancing on his lips.
“Your performance is satisfactory.”
I shoot him a sour look and his smirk softens into a smile so fond, so sweet, it takes my breath away.
“But your progress is amazing. You should be proud of yourself. I knowI’mproud of what you’ve accomplished.”
And if I said that doesn’t just make me float right out of the classroom and through the rest of my finals, well, I’d be lying.
* * *
The momentwe finish our Restorative Magic final, Alyssa drags me bodily back to the omega lodge, chattering all the while about the Yule baking we’re about to do. In truth, it seems that Alyssa’s already been baking for days. She pulls bundle after bundle of plastic-wrapped spice cookie dough from the refrigerator and sets me to rolling the dough into balls and the balls into cinnamon sugar.
When those are cooling, she directs me in front of the stand mixer and slaps a recipe down in front of me. “Sugar cookies. Not even you could fuck these up, girlie, I promise.”
How wrong she is.
Unlike Alyssa’s cut-out cookies, which bake up into perfectly golden, sweet and chewy little ornaments, Yule trees, and candy canes, my sugar cookies are hard and floury, brittle and crumbly.
“Maybe icing will fix them?”
“Cake pops will fix them!” Alyssa declares, already mixing up another batch of icing to mix into the crumbled mess of my cookies. “Okay, you can ice a few. I made the icing. It’s the perfect consistency for outlining and you can even flood with it in a pinch. It’s just like drawing.”
“Flooding?”
“Oh, sweet saints. All right, come here.”
She patiently shows me how to pipe stripes of icing onto the ornament cookies and drag a toothpick through the still-wet icing to swirl the colors together.
And while Alyssa bakes up a storm around me, I finish icing dozens of definitely passable sugar cookies.
I pull another dozen candy cane-shaped cookies toward me, ice them and then crumble bits of mint chocolate Kit-Kats over top—for Simon, as a sort of olive branch.
