“You good?” Drew asks as he looks at me curiously.
“Mhmm,” I hum as I try to get my overactive imagination under control.
“Looks like you just ate a ghost pepper,” he says with a knowing smirk.
I glare at him.
He puts his hands up with a big grin. “My bad.”
“And you punch each other as a sign of greeting?” Bastian asks.
“Well, you don’t reallypunch, you just sort of bop knuckles. It’s a way to say hello that’s friendly, but low contact,” she says. “Since I know you’re not really a fan of touching.”
The way she says it makes my imagination do another lap.
“We should get thrifting before everything good gets snatched up,” I say.
The excuse sounds so stupid I cringe.
Renee smiles like a teenager who knows a secret she could spill at any second. “Yeah,snatched.”
Oh my god.
“You girls have fun,” Drew says as he sets up a sawhorse. “Bastian, you know how to operate power tools?”
“I do not,” he says.
He approaches Drew and the quick, subtle caress of his tail against my ankle makes me shiver. Renee is staring straight down, and there’s no way she didn’t notice it.
She looks up at me with that perpetual smile and loops her arm in mine. She hums the “bag a dragon” song as we walk, bumping my hips with hers.
“Be safe, Cait,” Bastian calls when we reach the hall to the office.
I wave, my face on fire as I fail to find the right reply.
What is happening right now?!
Renee grabs the keys to their truck on the way out as she whispers, “Dragon Baggin’.”
twenty-four
Girls Only Thrifting
“Why not?” Renee whines as she holds up a fantasy painting of a woman riding on the back of a dragon.
I check the price tag, then direct the painting into our cart. “Because, I told you, if it goes bad, we’re stuck together.”
I’d told her the whole story on the way over, as well as the bit about maidens being sacrificed to him and how old he probably is, and now she’s even more rabid at the idea of Bastian and me being together.
“You won’t even give it a chance?” she asks, showing me a miniature statue of Excalibur in a slab of sparkly granite. I pull on the sword hilt and a letter opener emerges from the stone. The tag on the handle says four dollars, so I put it in the pile.
“I don’t know,” I say, pushing the loaded shopping cart forward through the crooked, overflowing shelving.
The shop is bursting at the seams with amazing finds, but most of it is little knickknacks and wall art for decorations. I do want toget some nice seating, preferably well-cared for if they’re going to be refurbished.
“I think you do know,” she says, showing off a trio of colored glass orbs.
“I’m not ready for a relationship, and I’ve never just fooled around before,” I say.
