Page 115 of The Witch They Fear

All three of the girls have leaned in. If there was popcorn, they’d be eating popcorn.

"He looked at me like a man considering a sandwich, Nell. I’m food to him."

"It's a kind of intent."

I shake my head. "It's the kind of intent I've already declined three times."

"I love that you've kept count."

Jesus Christ, Nellie is going to kill me.

"Three," Tess says, loudly, from the rug.

"Tess," the room says, in chorus.

She buries her face back in her phone, snickering. Margo's shoulders are shaking. Shandy's grey eyes are glittering at me from over the top of her book; she's still not reading.

The laugh in my chest is the kind that comes out as breath, not sound. I close my eyes for a second. The room is loud and warm and full and for as ridiculous as this all was, it feels good to have opened up. To have put all these feelings into words at least once.

Even if it’s all a fairy tale.

When I open them, Nellie has stopped grinning. She's looking at me with a face I can't quite read.

"You're allowed to feel things, Cal."

I look at my hands. "I'm not, though."

She waits.

"I'm here to dominate my magic, Nell. That's all I'm here for. Like I said, I have a year. The council put me on a track and the track says: pass the evaluations, earn your freedom back, walk out of here as the kind of witch nobody has to sedate. That's the deal. I can't afford to be distracted. I can't afford to be opened up. I can't afford to want—I can't want anything that lives outside of getting through this year. Relationships are for people who have futures. I don't know if I'm a person with a future yet."

Margo crosses to the couch, and sits down on the arm by my feet.

"Your magic responds to who you are, Cal. Suppression hurts witches. We learn this in healing in our first year. A witch who closes herself off from feeling—from joy, from grief, from desire, from anger—closes off the channel her power runs through. Witches who try to live small to make their magic safer end up making their magic more dangerous. The control you're looking for is on the other side of letting yourself feel things, not on the other side of refusing to."

I don't know what to say to that.

"I'm not saying date all three," Margo says, mildly.

“Or four if you include Leopold!” Nellie adds.

Margo laughs. "I'm saying—be careful with the thesis that not feeling is going to make you safer. It worked for twelve years isn't the argument you think it is. You were sedated for twelve years. That's not the same thing."

I look at my left hand.

I can't argue with her. I don't have the will.

"Okay," I say.

"Good," Margo says. She bumps my foot with her knuckle. "End of unsolicited healing lecture. Returning to my anatomy text."

She goes back to the armchair and opens the book again like she didn't just dismantle a sentence of mine I've been telling myself for weeks.

Shandy, from the rug as if she read my mind–or my cards: "She does that. You will get used to it."

I laugh. It's wetter than I want it to be. I wipe my left eye with the back of my hand and Nellie shoulder-bumps me again without looking, and the room settles back into its weather.

After a while—fifteen minutes, twenty—Nellie says, in her ordinary voice: