“Well, you won’t have to worry about that soon. Because we’re going to solve it. We’re going to solve everything. Now let’s go,” she said, and when he went to protest she held up a finger. “We can pick up a nice bottle of wine on the way.”
And they did. She even let him choose it, from the cheese placeat the end of Main Street. Though it took him a while. He paced. He sweated through the nice jacket she’d helped him pick out, then yanked it off and scrunched it into a ball. “I don’t understand why one squeezed grape saysthank you for ploughing my driveway, and another saysI am glad we are having dinner together,” he said, before finally settling on a rosé that she didn’t have the heart to tell him meant he was a kid trying to apologize to his mom.
As far as she was concerned, he was doing great.
He even got a smile out of the Bentley kids and their father at the tills. And that bolstered him enough to get him over to Cassie’s. He managed to park the truck, and cross the grass, and get up the porch steps.
It was only when they got to the door that he hesitated.
Bottle going round and round in his hands. Left leg jigging. One eye on the window in the door, where he could just about see his own dark reflection. “My hair looks nuts,” he groaned, but she didn’t have time to correct him.
The door swung open.
And it was showtime.
Or at least, she could tell Jackthoughtit was going to be some kind of showtime. He smiled too wide, offered the wine immediately, tried to seem in every way like a very normal human man. Only to encounter a man with a raccoon on his face. And even wilder: the raccoon abandoned said face the moment it saw Popcorn, dancing in between her legs.
It practically launched itself at Popcorn.
They spent the first ten minutes there chasing a raccoon riding on the back of a pug around Cassie’s home. She couldn’t even say Popcorn seemed unhappy about it. Jack seemed more distressed, truth be told. He had to find around twelve different ways to express terror over his new best friend being ridden, while also appearing like a model dinner party guest.
She had never seen anyone try to disguise using their tie as a lasso with an insistence that it needed straightening. Though to be fair, it did work. And nobody seemed to mind. “See,” she whispered to him as Cassie ushered them to the kitchen table. “Sometimes you don’t have to be a model anything. You just need to be amongst people who understand you and are the same way you are.”
And it calmed him, somewhat.
He sat beside her, only sort of surreptitiously watching everything she did. She scooped some peas from a big tureen onto her plate, he did the same. She thanked Cassie for the pork chops she offered, he did the same. Then after a while she noticed it wasn’t just her he was doing that with.
It was Seth.
Seth who tucked his napkin into his sweater. Seth who chose the right utensils. Seth who didn’t werewolf out at any point.
She shouldn’t have been surprised when Cassie winked at her, and then offered her cheek to Seth for a kiss. Because of course the moment Seth obliged happily, Jack clearly thought he should do the same thing. Even though doing the same thing was just a little bit agonizing for him.
He was practically vibrating as he leaned down.
She was sure she saw a ripple of red over his throat, deeper than any blush should be. And then he made the most delicate contact, and it seemed to make him bunch the tablecloth into his fist. Plates skidded across the table. Things rattled.
She met Cassie’s gaze over the food.
Though Cassie didn’t say anything until dinner was over. Jack was on the porch, talking to Seth about how he’d won Cassie’s heart. She heard the wordsI have no idea, I’m the luckiest guy in the world, just as Cassie dumped a pile of books in her arms. “You’ll need these, my little starter witch. Though, to be fair, yourparticular problem here is not going to be that hard to fix,” she said, her bright gaze on Jack, framed in the doorway, trying to glance back to see her while pretending that wasn’t what he was doing.
“So you have a potion, then. You have something I can use,” Nancy said.
But Cassie shook her head. “You don’t need it. Your own magic will do fine. Your own magic will work better, in fact, because your understanding and care for him will be in it. Just let yourself feel that, and then—do you know what your knack is?”
“Writing words, I think.”
“Good. It’ll be easy, then.”
“What will be?”
“Covering him in your magic, of course. Just, like, getting it all over him. In a purely platonic sense, naturally, because I can see you and him? Totally just friends. Nothing going on. He’s definitely not making you go all heart eyes whenever you even vaguely refer to him,” Cassie said while definitely trying not to smile. Then, just as Nancy started out the door, she called after her, “And his heart eyes? Oh, I’m sure they’re for anything but you.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was easy to put Cassie’s last words out of her head the second they were in the car. Mostly because Jack seemed so pleased with how much she was glowing, and how excited she was about magic, that he couldn’t seem to contain it. It bloomed out of him, despite his best attempts at seeming unconvinced about his chances of being as ideal a man as Seth appeared to be.
“Did you notice he didn’toncetry to eat a pork chop with his hands,” he said, in between sparks of gleeful amusement at her incredibly witchy state. But it wasn’t hard to be gleefully amused at him back.
