Page 151 of Love Spells: And Other Non-Refundable Magic

Rose moves on to socks now. “So,” she says after a while, holding up one of a pair and frowning at it, “are you two girlfriends yet?”

I nearly choke on my wine.

Veronica reaches over and pats my knee once, entirely without sympathy.

“We’re dating.”

“We know you’re dating!” the three women in my living room say at the same time. It’s a little loud for my taste, and I hear a thump coming from somewhere around the house, likely Aurora’s dramatic reaction to the scene unfolding here.

“Then why did you ask?”

“Because dating and being someone’s girlfriend aren’t necessarily the same thing?”

I stare at my sister. She waits, still holding the lone sock.

She’s right, of course, in the pesky way pesky little sisters humble older sisters all the time with their wisdom. Flora and I see each other a lot. We make plans several days ahead instead of pretending everything is spontaneous. I know her schedule. She knows mine. She leaves things here.

There is a sweatshirt folded on my bed because she left it here, and I’ve moved it exactly once in three days because seeing it does something embarrassingly domestic to my brain.

But we’ve never said what this is.

And maybe it, in part, has to do with the fact that I haven’t felt the same urgency I usually do to pin everything down before it can change.

I’ve been enjoying this. Her. Us.

Which is perhaps why Rose’s question doesn’t make me anxious so much as thoughtful.

“No,” I say finally. “We’re not.”

I do want Flora to be my girlfriend, though. And that thought brings another one with it: the message waiting on my Whisp account.

You know what you want. Now do something about it.

I’d thought about the job when I first read it, because that was the obvious thing in front of me, the more tangible thing, even though the spell had nothing to do with it. Well… I stopped treating Phillip’s interest as something mysterious that had happened to me and admitted that I wanted what he was offering.

“I hate that you bitches were right about the spell,” I say.

That gets everyone’s attention.

“I was so convinced it had brought me Phillip because he started showing up right after I ordered it. But Phillip was never about love. He noticed my work, and somehow I turned that into another thing I needed to decode instead of just paying attention to what was actually happening.”

Veronica smiles a little. “In our defense, we did try to tell you.”

“Oh, please,” I reply, but I concede with a small lift of my glass.

“And Flora?”

I look at her, and I feel like the answer to that question is easy.

“I don’t think the spell brought me Flora either.”

I would have hated admitting that a few weeks ago. I wanted the spell to mean something then. I wanted proof that the universe was moving things into place for me, because that meant I couldn’t get it wrong.

Now I think about Flora walking into my life without any guarantees attached to her.

“I think it just made me pay attention.”

The room goes quiet, and the only sounds are those of the rain outside, falling steadily against the glass.