I take a bite of the linguine, and it’s everything seafood pasta is meant to be, and then were both silent, eating in a nearly awkward quiet that’s somehow familiar and uncomfortable all at once.
Because it shouldn’t be familiar anymore.
It shouldn’t be comfortable between me and Caleb, should it?
It shouldn’t be awkward and comfortable at once. That much I’m sure of.
“I can clean up, and then I can be out of your hair.” I’m not sure why I say it. I could have just thanked him for the meal and given him the toffee and been on my way. And now I’m volunteering dishwashing, because apparently my grandmother’s rules of etiquette were ground into my very bones.
“I cooked. I invited you here. I’m not about to make you clean.”
“Then I should just go?—”
The lights go out, and whatever else I was about to say sputters to silence on my tongue.
Heavy, heavy silence. No electric hum of the fridge, or the heater. Only the dying embers of the small residual fire in the potbelly stove.
Gunner whines softly, and the hairs on the back of my neck come to full alert. A prickling wrongness travels across my skin, and it has nothing to do with electricity, and everything to do with magic.
“Has this been happening a lot?” I manage.
There’s nothing to be afraid of in the dark. I know that rationally. Logically.
Unfortunately, between the pressing dark and the steady trickle of otherworldly wrongness… rational brain is losing to the fear lizard brain.
I stand quickly, wishing I’d fished my phone from my purse and set it on the table like a bad-mannered freshman just so I’d have a flashlight.
I take a step forward, meaning to retrieve it —and slam directly into Caleb’s bulk.
Which is, in fact, bulky. He’s not the lanky twenty-year-old he was when we were dating, and though I also rationally knew that, it’s very different to feel his mass with my boobs squished up against him in the dark.
“You should sit down so I can get the flashlight and the generator running.” His voice is rough, and the palms that force me back into the chair are, too.
It hits me suddenly that for as well as I think I know Caleb, I don’t know this grown-up version of him at all.
“I’ll go outside and get the generator online,” he says, his voice still strained. No matter how hard I try to make out his face in the dark, it ain’t happening. “You stay put.”
“I can help?—”
“I don’t want you to break an ankle tripping over something because this place is an OSHA violation waiting to happen.”
I mean, when he puts it like that. I roll my eyes, which he can’t see. When the door closes behind him though, I immediately stand up again.
Not only do I not like taking orders, but this isn’t going to be solved by whatever he’s going to do outside with a generator. Nope.
This is magic, and I know it as surely as I know Gunner is already at my side.
“Upstairs?” I ask him.
“I think all the way up,” he answers, his voice thick with meaning.
“The light.”
“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” Gunner tells me.
“You can see, right?” I ask, because I sure as shit can’t. “We need to get up there.”
“I’m a dog, Ivy. A magical dog. I can get you up there. About time I took you for a walk, anyway.”
