Ramona stared at the bar top and let the ambient noise of other people’s problems wash over her.
She was on her second whatever-it-was when the stool beside her filled up. She didn’t look. Then it filled up on the other side. Then a third time, the scrape of a chair pulled up behind her.
She looked.
Felix. Posey. Kashvi, already unwinding her scarf. Gerald, on Felix’s shoulder, watching her with the solemn attention he brought to most situations.
“Hi,” Ramona said.
“Thought you might be here,” Posey said simply, settling her coat over the back of her chair. She had soil on her left sleeve.
Kashvi’s fingers sparked once, briefly, gold. “Your spiritual energy was very loud.”
“My energy?—”
“Veryloud,” Kashvi repeated and flagged down Odette.
Ramona looked at them. All of them, here, on a Tuesday, because apparently her emotional state had broadcast itselfacross three city blocks. She opened her mouth to say she was fine, she was just having a drink, she didn’t need?—
“Marcus is opening a second Mystic Moon location,” she said instead. “And giving it to his brother, Dylan.”
“Dylan? The frat guy?” Felix said.
“That’s the one.”
“What a dick,” Kashvi said. A particularly aggressive sparkler shot sideways and narrowly missed the person on the next stool, who didn’t flinch, because this was The Grimalkin and people minded their own business.
Odette replaced Ramona’s drink without being asked. Ramona took it as the gift it was.
Cammie arrived twenty minutes later, pulling her café apron over her head as she walked in the door. She took one look at the situation, sat down, and said “okay” in the tone of someone who had assessed the damage and was prepared to stay until it was dealt with. She’d been their roommate for eight months.
Ramona still wasn’t entirely sure how Cammie had answered the Croneslist ad — Felix and Kashvi had been living together when Posey and Ramona had joined, and none of them had thought to question how a thoroughly non-magical woman had found a listing on a thoroughly magical classifieds board. Cammie had never explained and they had never asked, because Cammie had a quality of existing exactly where she was supposed to be that made questions feel unnecessary.
She sat down, pushed her red hair back from her ear — the one with the dozen piercings, each one slightly different, a collection with no apparent system — and looked at Ramona expectantly.
Somewhere around the third drink, Ramona found herself giving a speech.
“Assistant Professor,” Ramona said. The words came out slurred at the edges. She gestured with her glass, nearly sloshingit. “Published researcher. Office with a window. And a wife.” She paused. The word sat there. “I had a fucking wife.”
The table went quiet. Even Gerald went still.
Cammie tilted her head. Her red hair slid over her shoulder. “I didn’t know you were married.”
Right. Because Ramona didn’t talk about that. Didn’t talk about much, actually. Kept to her room, paid her rent when she could, shared the kitchen in shifts. When she moved to a new city to start a new life, she focused on not bringing too much of the old one with her. That was the arrangement.
“Simone.” Ramona took another sip. The drink had given up tasting like anything. “So fucking pretty. Everyone loved her. Everyone.” She paused. “Especially Kate Stone.”
The group got quieter. Even the jukebox seemed to hold.
“Six months they were sleeping together. Six months.” Her voice cracked on it. “And everyone in the coven knew. Everyone in my department. Every single person.” She pressed her thumb against the base of her glass. “And no one told me.”
“Fuck,” Posey said quietly.
Kashvi’s sparklers had gone completely dark. She reached over and put her hand over Ramona’s on the bar. Didn’t say anything.
“It’s not forever,” Cammie said finally. She sounded like she was trying to mean it and wasn’t quite sure she did.
“Isn’t it, though?” Ramona’s vision blurred. The candlelight smeared at the edges. “Two years and I’m going backwards. Marcus’s frat brother is going to run a store and I’m going to keep pretending Mercury retrograde is real and—” She pressed her palms against her eyes. Everyone was giving her that look. That careful, pitying look she’d been getting for two years. “I should go home.”
