Squinting my eyes, I frowned at how she said it with such surprise. “Yes?”
“Last time it took you three times as long and you came back”—she tilted her head back and forth—“crispy.”
Oh.I guess I’d made a lot of improvement since she’d last visited. I no longer got attacked by chickens or outsmarted by a raccoon. I hadn’t lost any more of the creatures and wasn’t seen running down the streets yelling for Laken’s help. Hell, I’d even befriended a bear. My cheeks pulled back into a grin with a subtle laugh. “I told you you had a lot to catch up on.” I sprang off the couch, meeting her in her mess of jars and petals. “But give me instructions first.”
Reluctantly, as she wanted details, Maggie instructed me on the flower ceiling we were building. Maeve would enchant it to float upside down over the dance floor, a heaven of lilies and roses, with lanterns all around. The other bouquets for the tables were already made and prepped because Maggie finished them on the way here (somehow, in a carriage?). So we fiddled with stems, stabbing and gluing them into Styrofoam bottoms in the glass jars.
It only took minutes for my friend to take a deep breath and demand, “Spill it.”
And there was much to spill. The jobs Laken and I’d worked, our time together, the market sales, the Augustus anniversary party, finding out he’d be leaving… and oh, Rebecca.
Maggie stared at me with wonder. “So you almost had sex with him?”
Grimly, I nodded.
“Why?”
My utter shock formed a wrinkle in my nose as my mouth opened to defend myself. “I don’t know! Because I wanted to, I guess?”
“Because you wanted to?”
“Well… either I wanted to, orshedid!” I suggested with a little nod to the girl downstairs.
Maggie’s eyes almost popped from her head. “You’re blaming your almost-sex on your vagina?”
“I don’t know?” Instinctively, I shrugged, hoping to bury myself farther into my bones. “Can I do that?”
“No!”
“Well…” Words did not come to mind. “Fuck me, then!”
My flower stem snapped.
“Why are you all that mad at Laken leaving in the first place?”
By the way I glared at her, one would think she’d fatally wounded me. It took a brief moment of staring into her honey-pot eyes for me to realize. And once I did, I sank into my crisscross sitting position.
“Need I remind you of the last three years?” At a glimpse: I panicked anytime I saw a dark-blond man. I checked our mail hysterically. I tried and I tried and I tried to move on, even for one night, and time after time, I failed.
Because the only lips I wanted to tolerate on mine were Laken Augustus’s.
“No,” Maggie mumbled, “no, I remember.”
“I don’t want to sit and watch and wait for him to walk through our door again…”
“So you’d rather not see him walk through it at all?”
Silence.
“Reece…” Maggie paused. “Do you want advice or do you want to complain?”
Throwing myself backward onto the ground, I moaned with agony. “I want to toss myself into an abyss of my own tears where I can wallow in self-pity and not have to worry about it.”
The world could cave in, the land could shift and quake, the oceans could dry, and I would still be trapped inside of my own head.
“I don’t think you need advice,” Maggie started softly. “I think you know what you want. You don’t want to believe it and won’t allow yourself to have it.”
On my back, I side-eyed her, and she raised her brows. I didn’t love that look.
