“You motherfucker, you understand just how to get me.”
“Of course I do. I know you. And I’m gonna use that for this, especially.”
“Why this especially? What the hell does it matter if I live forever?”
“Well, it matters because I want you to be around. I mean, I don’t want to just drift for all eternity without you,” he said. Then he snorted, like that was just obvious. Or not a big deal at all. In fact, it was so little of one that he didn’t even wait for her reaction.
He turned his back. Grabbed a saucepan to check on his newly regrown incisor.
And finally he clapped his hands together. “Now, are we going flying, or what?” he asked. As if he wasn’t even thinking about their shared immortality anymore. He was on to the next thing. While she stood there, still stranded in the land ofoh my god, he wants to be with me always.
Worse than that, really, because all she wanted to do was say the same thing to him.
Five minutes too late, and too heartfelt to stand.
So instead, she nodded. “Sure,” she said.
And that was the end of that.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
She didn’t explain what she was planning on doing.
She just grabbed what she needed, and followed Seth out into the now dark garden. Then when he turned at the sound of her footsteps on the front porch, and raised his eyebrows in anticipation, she dragged it out from behind her back.
And got the reaction she’d been expecting.
“You want to do this on aHoover?” he gasped, in a voice that sounded torn between excitement and incredulity. But she could see the excitement winning out, even before she started laying out her carefully considered reasoning.
“Well, you know, a broom is so thin.”
“That is true.”
“And I’m so clumsy.”
“You’re not that bad.”
She gave him alook. “Oh come on, you know I am.”
“I do, but I’m trying to pretend otherwise to be supportive.”
“Okay, well, you can stop. You’re being supportive enough, I promise.”
“Thankgod,because all I can see behind my eyes is you plummeting to the ground from so far up that it somehow tests the lim its of that lemon potion. I’m honestly about thirty seconds away from desperately begging you to ride me instead,” he said, all in a rush. Then he saw her taken aback expression, and seemed to realize what that sounded like, and hurried to explain. “And you know, by ‘ride me’ I mean because I’m large, and I have lots of things you could hold on to while you did it.”
Though it hardly seemed to explain anything at all.
It just made her eyebrows climb higher. And his face get even redder.
“Not that you would want to hold on while you rode me,” he tried again, then almost immediately and visibly cursed himself. And she could understand why, because, oh dear god, what was happening? What was going on? How was he saying something even worse than the original thing?Stop, she wanted to tell him. But he didn’t, somehow hedidn’t. “That’s not what I was trying to say. I just wanted you to use me in whatever way would work best for you.”
And okay then shehadto cut in.
He gave her no choice at all. “Seth, what the fuck are youdoing?”
“I don’t know. It’s just coming out of me.”
“So put it back in again. Like, superfast.”
