A vein in his forehead pops. “You can see them tomorrow. Right now, we’re leaving.”
Heh. He’s so cute when he’s delusional. “I’m staying. And, wow, I don’t have a key! How sad. Maybe you should’ve given me that promotion I asked for last year, then I would’ve been able to close up for you. As it is…” I trail off, shrugging helplessly. Oh no, so sad, I can’t close up. Guess he has to stay until I’m ready to go.
“You’re promoted,” he says, fishing in his pocket. “Here’s a key.” He pulls out a key ring and starts removing his extra copy of the bar key from it.
“No, thank you,” I respond, taking a hefty step away from the proffered key. “Seems like a lot of responsibility. Yuck.”
His jaw clenches. “You’d seriously turn down a promotion, which comes with a raise, just to see me get scolded?”
“I seriously would.” Would the raise be nice? Sure, of course. But I don’t trust him not to demote me the minute he gets what he wants, especially when I don’t see a fancy—and legally-binding—contract around to assure job security should I accept his offer.
I’m blonde, not stupid.
“You’re infuriating,” he bites out, turning to pick up the wrench and close the sink cabinet.
I am, also, that. “I know.” I beam. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Yeah,” he mutters. “Justwonderful.”
Chapter Two
?
Sonnet and Muse are also perfectly regular names. Obviously.
(Shut up.) (They’re pretty.) (Leave me alone.)
Poem
I met Fox’s parents about five years ago, back when Gilbert and Belinda Blackwood still owned the bar. It had been two days since my younger sister’s eighteenth birthday, which meant it had been two days since she and I packed up everything we could fit into the trunk of my used, mildly beat up twenty-year-old Honda Accord and blasted as far away from our parents’ house as we could get. Goodbye, abuse and terror; hello, freedom.
We, like our older sister before us, ended up in October, Tennessee, about two full tanks of gas away from where our parents live in Indiana.
Unlike our older sister, we didn’t have a plan. Muse has always been the most responsible of us all, and when she left home, she’d had this place pinned on a map for ages. She had a job lined up. She had a studio apartment waiting for her. She had connections and acquaintances. She was settled into the town within a week. Sonnet and me? Not so much.
We thought we could come down here and count on Muse, like we had so many times before. Of course we didn’t need a silly plan.Musewas our plan.
And then we got here, and we saw Muse’s tiny studio. Saw that she was in no way set up to take on two grown adults whohad no money, no foresight, and no idea what they were doing next.
So we lied.
We told her we had jobs set up and that we were staying at the local bed-and-breakfast until we found a place to rent. We told her we had plenty of money, plenty of food, and plenty of anything else we could possibly need. Her shoulders had dropped, losing the tension they’d held since she opened her door to us, and I’d known we were doing the right thing.
Muse got out of a terrible situation, found a cute little town, and set up a life for herself. We couldn’t slam into it and ruin everything she’d worked so hard for, not when we hadn’t done any work at all. It wasn’t fair.
So we watched a movie with her that night, then we bid her a happy farewell, went out to my car, and drove it to the Blackwood Brew parking lot. It was the only one in the area with security lights at the time, which made us feel safer, even with the amount of moderately drunk people around.
I covered our windows with blankets, quadruple checked that the doors were locked, and spent the night pretending to sleep so that Sonnet wouldn’t know how freaked out I was. This failed spectacularly when, at around 3:00 AM, a loud knock on our window had both of us screaming, having neither been asleep at all. I guess we’d both been freaked out and on edge, faking sleep so the other wouldn’t worry.
Ridiculous, looking back, for us to think we’d be sleeping soundly. Of course we were freaked out. We were sleeping in my car in a strange new town in the parking lot of a bar we knew nothing about. And—what we didn’t know then—in a town this small, a stranger’s car is something people notice. We basically drove to the most crowded place in town and screamed,We’re not from here!
Belinda, once we stopped screaming, had kindly and patiently cajoled us into peeking out of our blanket curtains to see that she was only a sweet local woman, not a serial killer bent on making us their next victims. Twenty minutes of conversation through the window later, we somehow wound up inside the building sitting at the bar while Gilbert made us hot chocolates and Belinda reopened the kitchen, refusing to believe that we’d already eaten and insisting that a couple of cheeseburgers wouldn’t be amiss. We learned pretty quickly that nobody argues with Belinda.
We also learned pretty quickly that Gilbert could get a story out of a rock.
“So we had to sleep in our car because we couldn’t bother Muse like that, you know? We’re real sorry for trespassing. We just didn’t have anywhere else to go,” Sonnet concluded our sad tale after approximately thirty minutes in the man’s presence. I’d watched on, mystified. He’d barely said three words to either of us. How had he wrangled all of that out of her?
Magic. Clearly. The only answer.
