Page 23 of Witch You Weren't Here

Kay bit her lip. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘I don’t know. It’s not like I wanted to think about you having a crush on Harry, y’know, but I’m not blind.’

Kay’s cheeks flushed. Had she been so obvious?

Joe shook his head. ‘Look, why don’t you come to Dad’s with me later? Get away from the house?’

She took a deep breath, attempting to exchange one pain for another. ‘Did he ask you to convince me to come?’

‘No.’

‘Then no. I don’t want to see him, anyway.’

‘Urgh, you’re so stubborn, Kay. Suit yourself. I’ll be back Monday.’ And with that, he disappeared back inside the pub.

She looked down at the napkin. It had her name printed on it in beautiful black script, complete with curlicues. A twinge went through her chest – she could see the pen within Harry’s agile fingers, the concentration on his face. He’d told her how his father had made him practise for hours every day in the lead-up to his GCSEs to improve his handwriting. It had paid off, she supposed.

She ran the rest of the way home. Went straight up the stairs of their small cottage, into her bedroom and threw herself down on the bed. Tears were already swimming in her eyes when she opened the napkin and read it:

Kay

I’m sorry I agreed to meet up with you when I knew I couldn’t go through with it. I hope you make things up with Joe. He’s being an idiot but he’s hurting too. Good luck with your exam results. Sure you’ll ace them.

Harry

??

The rush of pain she felt was so fast it burned up and blazed into anger instead. He’d drawn a smiley face underneath his name.

A. Smiley. Face.

On a napkin.

What the actual hell?

He hadn’t even put any effort into it. She knew what a talented artist he was and yet he’d signed off with the kind of quick scribble a five-year-old could manage.

As she stared at it, mouth open, eyes blurry with tears, her breathing came faster. A bubble of hatred and pain grew and grew, like a balloon stretched thin, ready to burst. He was an awful person. Selfish and arrogant and stupid—

She gasped and dropped the napkin.

Harry had infused that smiley face with magic. That tiny image. Brimming with power to … make her hate him? She never would have thought he was stupid. Even if he didn’t want to go out with her. Why would he do this to her? Influencing her – against the tenets – crossing a line even witches who were strangers didn’t cross with each other. He might not want them to date, but she’d thought they were at least friends. You didn’t treat friends like this, it was so … violating.

Why? Why would he do this?

Was it just so she would leave him alone? Had she been pestering him? It had been obvious to her friends, obvious to Joe, that she was infatuated with him. Had she been making things up in her head about how much they got along when really he was just wishing she’d stop trailing after him with goo-goo eyes?

Acid rose at the back of her throat.

And he must have known she would be able to tell he was trying to influence her. Even if that horrible little smiley face didn’t work for longer than a couple of minutes, the point was made. He didn’t want her to like him. He didn’t want her anywhere near him.

She picked up the napkin again, a tear dropping on the bottom. It was such crude magic, clearly he hadn’t had time to finesse it as he’d scribbled her a note in the pub, but it was still clever enough to tug at her natural response to feel hurt and pissed off at him.

She shoved it in the back of her diary and dumped it in the drawer of her bedside cabinet. Then she flopped onto the bed again, burying her head in her arms, forgetting about her new glasses and succeeding in bashing the bridge of her nose with them. Which was just too fitting really.

Why? Why had her affinity only shown itself just after Beltane? Having the ability to see the genuine feelings between people was no use to anyone – especially when it came after Harry had stopped visiting because he needed to concentrate on his exams. If it had happened just a week earlier, at least she would have known never to bother asking him out. The one thing it could have been useful for. She would have been disappointed, yes. But not embarrassed and rejected. Instead, she’d ended up with divorcing parents and utter humiliation.

There was a knock on her door and her mother’s soft footsteps came towards her. Tallulah rarely came out of her own room since Kay’s dad moved out. The intensity of Kay and Joe’s anger at each other was too much for her on top of her broken heart.

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