The radio crackled and launched into Barry Manilow.
"Mandy."
I stared at it. In fifteen years, this radio had never played anything but jazz. It had opinions. Strong ones. It had once refused to play for three days after I made a disparaging comment about bebop.
And now it was playing Barry Manilow.
"This is a betrayal," I told it.
The radio ignored me and continued crooning about sending a woman away.
I texted the number on the app—her number, apparently, because this nightmare had no boundaries.Why is your face on my laptop. I don't date. I don't WANT to date. What is happening.
The song ended. Started again. From the beginning.
Forty-five minutes. I timed it. Forty-five minutes of "Mandy" while I paced my shop, questioned my life choices, and wondered if it was possible to exorcise a radio.
By the time she showed up at my door with the assembled chaos of her magical entourage, I was a broken man. A broken man who had Barry Manilow stuck in his head and would never forgive the universe for this indignity.
"The radio has opinions about jazz," I told Liam later, while the witches strategized in the other room. "It's never playedanything but jazz. And now suddenly it's Barry Manilow and I don't know who I am anymore."
He nodded sympathetically. "Cassie's magic set my curtains on fire once."
"That sounds preferable."
"It wasn't."
We stared at our tea in companionable silence. Two men who had been perfectly content in their isolation, now dragged into magical chaos by women who apparently couldn't leave well enough alone.
"It's not going to stop, is it?" I asked.
"No," he said. "It's really not."
THE ALMOST-KISS
I wasn't going to touch her.
I was COMMITTED to not touching her. She was a woman who came to my shop for the quiet. A woman with her own mess to sort through. A woman who had forty-seven first dates under her belt and clearly wasn't looking for number forty-eight.
Also, the radio had started playing what I can only describe as "romantic jazz," and I refused to give it the satisfaction.
But then she said: "When I'm with you, I don't want to run. And that's never happened before."
And I recognized myself in her. The same fear, different shape. The same walls, different architecture.
When I touched her face, it wasn't a decision. It was gravity.
She was leaning closer. I was leaning closer. The radio had shifted to something slow and deliberate—it approved, apparently, which should have been my first warning sign.
I could kiss her. I wanted to kiss her. For the first time in two years, I wanted something other than silence.
Her phone screamed.
Not buzzed—SCREAMED. A digital shriek that shattered the moment like glass. We jerked apart, and I watched the chaos flood back into her eyes—the notifications cascading, the matches multiplying, some man in a leisure suit pounding on my door yelling about cosmic vibrations.
"GROOVY LADY!" Greg shouted through the glass. "THE COSMIC VIBRATIONS ARE VERY INSISTENT!"
Of course they were. Of course the universe had sent a man in polyester to interrupt the first genuine emotion I'd felt in two years. Of course.
