Thirty-Two
The end ofOctober in LA was summer hot. April stared out Gertie’s passenger window, her iPad in her lap, stylus dangling loosely in her fingers, and took in the mountains in the distance, a heat haze settling over the city, so wildly different from the East Coast.
For the last three months, she’d actually missed Clover Lake. She hadn’t expected to, but she felt a tenderness toward the quaint downtown in her memory, Clover Moon Café and Owen’s perfect fries. She missed the lake and the watery sunsets, and she even missed Penny’s boundary-crossing inquisitions about her life. She missed her house—though she’d found a renter through the end of the year who more than covered her mortgage—and of course, she missed her cats, who had been staying with Mr.Riley since she’d left. He texted regular pictures, and they’d even video chatted a few times, Bianca with her tail turned up at April, and Bob trying to butt against her face on the phone screen.
She missed Ramona. She knew she always would, but they talked on the phone at least once a week and texted nearly every day. And when a text went unanswered for a day or so, on either of their parts, April was okay.
She felt…good. She felt like herself.
Honestly, the independence of the last three months had been life-changing. Of course, Sasha had been with her, but Sasha was a bit of a lone wolf herself.
“It takes a lot of alone time to keep up this level of charm,” Sasha had said about a week into their trip, sliding noise-canceling headphones over her head in their motel room just outside Chicago, then disappearing for the rest of the night.
And April found she didn’t mind.
She needed the time to process…well, her entire life. And flying down highways with the wind in her hair and the sun spreading colors all over the western sky, sliding her hands over the smooth striped stone at the Wave, or standing inside a cavern lit with phosphorescence was the perfect environment for some good old-fashioned contemplation.
And goddess, did she contemplate.
She thought and dreamed and longed. She let herself cry when she needed to, let the future terrify her if that was what she felt in that moment.
She let herself miss Daphne.
She let herself text Daphne too, but only once a week, and she’d asked Sasha to hold her to it.
She and Daphne had parted on good terms. After their last night together—a night during which neither of them slept very much, too busy soaking each other in, hands roaming, mouths exploring—they’d stood on the front porch of their cabin and kissed goodbye. They’d made no promises, they’d devised no plan. And while April had spent the rest of that day in a gloomy haze, she knew it was the right thing.
But April knew something else too—she loved Daphne Love, and three months exploring the country with Sasha Sinclair hadn’t changed that.
April looked down at her iPad. She’d worked a lot these past three months on her tarot deck, digitizing the twenty-twoFool’s Passagepieces into Procreate so she could make changes easily, then making plans for fifty-six more pieces for the Minor Arcana. The Major Arcana she’d already created needed a few revisions. For one, she didn’t want the person on each card to beher. She wanted a diverse cast, all races and genders and shapes. And the Minor Arcana would take some time, a theme for every suit—wands, cups, swords, and pentacles. She was already about halfway through the cups, her favorite suit, and her head was always working on ideas for the rest, ideas for the guidebook she’d write, ideas for a title for her deck.
Star Journey Tarotwas her favorite name right now, but she hadn’t settled on anything. She planned to run a Kickstarter campaign when the entire project was ready, but she’d also emailed a query letter and samples of her illustrations to several agents in the last month, a process that felt like the fiery depths of hell.
But a thrilling kind of hell.
She wanted to bring her deck to life, she knew that, but she also wanted to work on book covers, illustrate picture books, maybe even work on her own story or graphic novel. She already had a pretty solid Instagram following from her years as a tattooist, and she was excited to start posting different types of art on her page.
She wasexcited.
Period.
And she couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt that way. About anything.
Anything other than Daphne Love.
April tucked her iPad back into her bag at her feet as Sasha turned onto Laurel Canyon Boulevard, also known as Love Street.
“Figures,” April said, propping her leg up on the seat. Sasha said nothing, and April glanced at her. “You okay?”
Sasha blinked, as though she’d been deep in thought, then frowned. “Yeah, fine.”
“Convincing.”
Sasha sighed and shrugged. “I used to live around here.”
April sat up straighter. In the last three months, Sasha had revealed very little about her past or her family. April had gleaned tiny tidbits, like that Sasha was an only child and her mother was Norwegian, but not much beyond that.
“When did your parents leave LA?”
