Page 4 of Truly Madly Magically

We tend to start off angry with each other ever since our epic Beltane prom (the witch version of that very human high school dance) breakup ten years ago. It’s our default. It’s what works. It’s what keeps our bleeding hearts firmly tucked away behind their little walls.

Healthy walls. Necessary walls.

Boundaries, you might say. Or armor against idiocy.

So the tone of the comment isn’t unexpected, but I don’t really understand what he’s getting at. “What is?”

“I don’t need pity sex, Ellowyn.”

The audacity.

“I am not offering any kind of sex,” I reply, my voice going up an octave in shock.

And if I was, it sure as hell wouldn’t be looking like this. I’d at least have on some sexy underwear. But I feel about as sexy as an overinflated balloon, even with the glamour.

“Then why are you here?” Zander glares the way storms rage, with those thunderstorm-gray eyes of his, and I’ve never been immune. I’m not now either, and not only because I’m currently a hormone factory. “Somehow I doubt you’ve discovered your tender, empathetic side at three in the morning.”

Given the momentary insanity of my sympathetic thoughts toward him earlier, this incenses me. Any notion that I should soften the blow I’m about to deliver deserts me. Hard.

“I’m pregnant, you asshole.”

And there it is. The thing I’ve been striving to keep a secret for the past few months, a secret no more. While Emerson talks of ascension, while we’ve all been trying to figure out what to do about Zander and his grief along with our own, while the creeping dread of the Joywood’s unlikely quiet seeps into our bones like poison.

I am pregnant.

Hecate help me.

2

HE CLEARS HIS THROAT. “What?”

I could repeat it, but that feels like a kindness, and kindness hurts. “You heard me.”

“But we haven’t. Not since...”

“You can count. Congratulations.”

I don’t tell him that I haven’t been with anyone else since then. He doesn’t need to know that. We’ve always been very good at letting each other know all the other people we’ve slept with. It’s possible we’ve even slept around at each other, enjoying witchkind’s disinterest in what I’ve heard called consensus morality.

It’s never had much to do with morality. Not for us.

It’s that there’s nothing out there that’s better than what we do to each other. The sex isn’t good. It isn’t even great. It’s world-altering.

I spent many years dedicated to the sole mission of proving that wrong, and failed.

Repeatedly.

All that aside—and I like to keep it as far aside as I can get it—it doesn’t matter how old we are or how mature we try to become. It doesn’t matter how many old wounds we’ve healed or how many worlds we saved right here in St. Cyprian in the last year.

We are bad for each other. Even when it feels way too good.

Maybe especially then.

I used to lay all the blame for that on him. But as the mature adult, successful local businesswoman, and grown-ass woman that I am, I can say now that some of it was, indeed, my fault.

Though I am less to blame than him.

His dark gray gaze moves over my body, a late-summer storm, and I could drop my glamour to prove myself. But I don’t. I want him to believe me without evidence.

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