Page 73 of Halloween Town

“Thom, I’m fine. I’m over him, I’m over what he did. I just want to move on,” Poppy said, placing her hand on his arm.

He looked down at her small hand and noticed crimson-colored paint under the fingernail of her index finger. There was a spot of yellow on another finger. He wanted to shout, to rant, to expel all his frustration and irritation, but that never got him anywhere. Not with Benji, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to help him with Poppy either. So he stepped back, forcing her hand to drop.

“I’m going to go back to the house, I have work to do,” he said, wincing at his cool tone. But right now, he was pissed and confused, scared—something he couldn’t easily admit—and he didn’t know how to pretend to be okay. “I saw Dane and Wren go into the Night Owl, go join them for coffee,” he suggested. “Are you going to keep Fel, or do you want me to take him back to the inn?”

Felony pushed his body into Poppy’s thigh and turned his back on Thom. Guess that answered his question.

“Thom…” Poppy pleaded. “Let’s talk this out, I don’t want to fight with you.”

“The thing is, you’re not talking, Poppy, and that’s the heart of this problem. I’ll see you at home.”

And actually, a fight would be an improvement from her hedging. If he knew what she was thinking and feeling he could understand it, deal with it, but if she refused to let him—or anyone in—then he was fighting demons he knew were there but couldn’t see.

But he thought, as he turned away from her, he could not, for her or anyone, carry the weight of her emotional baggage while she pretended it didn’t exist.

Poppy

Poppy, still irritated by Wren’s and Thom’s insistence that ghosts didn’t exist—he and Wren didn’t need to be so patronizing!—and caught off-guard by Thom challenging her about Benji’s infidelity, took a slow walk back to the inn, Felony ambling beside her. It was a stunning fall morning, and the trees on the opposite side of the lake had turned from yellow to a deep red, and the lake was a deep, lovely blue not seen outside of books depicting fairy tales.

It was nice, actually, to have some time to herself, to think and to breathe, to take stock of her life, to walk in the sunlight.

Apart from trying to duck Thom’s questions and his curiosity about Benji cheating—she still hadn’t worked how to tell him or Wren why she’d run—life was okay. Good even.

Her work was fulfilling—she was making progress on Melody’s map and character arc, and she had received other queries from her author friends. Some of those queries, she was sure, would turn into commissions. She’d started to embroider an F-You cushion for Wren’s dancer friend, and she’d spent yesterday afternoon hanging out with Hadley. So, yeah, good.

Or mostly good. But given what just happened, maybe it was time to admit that something was a little off with Thom.

She couldn’t put her finger on it, and it was just a feeling—a flicker that started after Wren told her about Benji cheating. And yes, maybe it was making her, subconsciously, a little—just a very little—anxious.

It was so intangible, so vague, that she couldn’t find the words to explain it to Thom. What would she even say? Sometimes I think that you aren’t completely happy—with me, with us, with what we are doing?

Saying it out loud would make her sound like an insecure idiot.

No, she was overreacting; he was simply busy these days. The news had spread about him going on his own, so instead of renovating the inn, he spent the bulk of his working day at his computer, those sexy wire-framed glasses on, diving back into his consulting strategy work. No, there wasn’t a problem with Thom…

She hoped there wasn’t a problem with Thom.

As for her mother and her siblings, well, they hadn’t contacted her for a while, and she was very okay with that. Life was a great deal simpler without having to deal with her mom’s micromanaging, petty aggressions, and barbed comments.

Luna, and by Luna she meant Luna and her cronies, was looking for a cottage for her to rent—and repeatedly assured her that something would become available after Halloween when the town emptied. She’d yet to tell Thom she wanted to move out of Solstice Deep, and thought it better to wait until she had a place lined up.

Coming up the inn’s drive, she looked up at the faded, navy house and wondered if she imagined seeing the biker chick standing in the window of her loft bedroom. Poppy didn’t mind her hanging out there, but she’d lose it if she messed with her art supplies. After letting Fel off his leash and slipping into the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee—she could hear Thom’s voice coming from the library and presumed he was on a call—she went back to the front porch and sat down on the top step. She placed her phone on the step next to her and wrapped her hands around her coffee cup. She sipped, ignoring the sound of a growly engine coming up the drive. With Thom now so busy with his consulting work, he’d outsourced the renovations to contractors, and for the last week, there had been trucks coming and going. She simply wanted to tune them out. Her eyes on the screen, she patted the pockets of her jeans, looking for her buds, wanting to watch her favorite band’s latest video.

“Poppy.”

A halo appeared around the back of his head, and it took Poppy a moment of squinting to bring Benji into focus. Her mouth dropped open as she took him in, looking blond and perfect and so damn stylish that it made her want to scrunch up his pale, mint-green linen jacket to give it some much-needed creases. To put some dust on his white trainers, a hint of wear in the leather belt holding up his tailored, loose-fitting white pants.

God, Benji was here. How boring. “What are you doing here?” she said flatly.

Benji pushed his designer glasses into his hair and slid his hands, tanned and so smooth, into the pockets of his pants. Yeah, GQ perfect, but so polished, so unreal. He was a good-looking guy, but there was no emotion in his eyes, no authenticity in his practiced smile. Why hadn’t she seen that before? Ah, that was because she hadn’t wanted to, because her parents’ and family’s acceptance trumped looking closer at the man she’d decided to marry.

Ugh. The wave of disgust, aimed at herself, hit hard. It was why she couldn’t tell Wren and Thom why she’d bolted. If she felt this yuck about it, they’d feel even worse. Luckily, she snapped out of it… “What are you doing here, Benji?” she asked again, meeting his pale blue, cold-as-hell eyes.

He gave her a long, tip-to-toe look, his lip curling at her old jeans, hole-in-her-toe Vans, her slouchy, loose sweater. “I’m definitely not here to ask you to come back,” he stated. “That ship has sailed.”

“I cannot begin to tell you how glad I am to hear that,” Poppy told him. “And I know the ship’s sailed because I torpedoed it, remember?”

He glared at her. “You caused me a ton of embarrassment. And you also need to refund me for the booze I bought and the honeymoon trip I wasted.”