“So . . .” Alma leans in. “It’s tradition to kiss someone at the stroke of midnight.”
“It is, huh?” Slate asks, distracted by something behind me.
I turn to find Adrien chatting with Papa.
When I spin back around, Slate’s attention is back on Alma.
“For good luck,” she says.
A nerve ticks in his jaw, beneath the black stubble, and then his eyes bow with a smile that matches the one on his lips. “I’m starting to like this town and its fanciful traditions.”
Slick. Slick. Slick.
Alma snakes her arm around my waist. “Cadence, here, has no one to kiss.”
My heart skitters to a stop. “What?” She did not just toss me under the cauldron!
“It’ll get Adrien’s attention,” she murmurs inside my ear. “Trust me. I know what I’m doing.”
As though the air isn’t thick enough with my embarrassment, the music stops, and the countdown begins.
Alma lets me go so suddenly I almost topple over. “I promised to show Romain how a real woman kisses.”
She winks at me as everyone begins to shout: “Seventeen, sixteen.” I’m going to kill her.
Fifteen.
Maybe put a real spider on her puny hat.
Fourteen.
She hates spiders.
Thirteen.
Or soap on her toothbrush.
Twelve.
“So, who’s this Adrien?”
I murder my best friend in my thoughts. “No one.”
Eleven.
All of his face is smiley. “Ex-boyfriend?”
Ten.
I look over my shoulder and see Charlotte skipping to Adrien’s side, and then I spot our town’s good doctor in her purple tutu-like frock prancing toward Papa in spite of her bad hip.
Nine.
Oh my God. Please tell me she’s not going to kiss him. Papa’s gone a bit pale. He probably doesn’t want Sylvie, who’s two decades his senior, anywhere near his mouth.
Eight.
I turn back around, and my gaze bangs into Slate, who’s staring at me like he’s a cat and I’m a new ball of yarn.
