Page 35 of Truly Madly Magically

“Okay,” I say briskly, cutting off a soliloquy about purchasing unnecessary items, brought to me by her floating out through the window to see the signs of the shops along Main Street—none of them the butcher or farrier or baker she recalls. “I need some privacy. I’m going upstairs, alone. You can stay here. Or you can go downstairs and haunt someone else—just so long as it’s not me.”

She’s quiet for a moment, but then gives me a demure smile that I can see very well is fake. “If you insist on being ill-mannered, Ellowyn, I cannot stop you.”

I actually feel bad—but not bad enough to take back what I said.

I go upstairs and use Georgie’s bathroom to enjoy a very long shower, uninterrupted by spectral asides, thank the elements. I magic myself a selection of different outfits, because that takes even more time, and I’m thinking I’ll have my tea in Georgie’s room—where she is probably communing with her crystals, hopefully quietly—but as I start down the hall, I hear Elizabeth calling me from the stairway.

I look right, then left. Georgie’s rooms are down in the turret end, but across from the bathroom up here is a linen closet.

No one, not even a ghost, is going to find me in the third-floor linen closet. Please Hecate.

I magic myself inside without even blinking—

And slam into a warm body.

“Ouch,” comes Zander’s low voice.

But I already knew it was him.

I would know him anywhere—even the dark depths of a linen closet I don’t think a soul has used in decades. Not even the local spiders.

“What are you doing in here?” I demand in a whisper, trying to back away, but there’s nowhere to go. It’s not the tiniest closet in the world, but then Zander isn’t the tiniest man either.

In fact, he’s big everywhere, like the jock he was in high school—playing every game he could, simply because he could, and, naturally, was good at them at all. I can confirm that that particular athletic body type is not a glamour. Not on him.

Focus, I order myself.

“I’m guessing I’m doing the same thing you are,” Zander whispers back, though even his whisper has that growl in it. “If Zachariah wasn’t already dead, I’d kill him.” I can’t see Zander in the dark of the closet, but I can feel him. Heat and strength and Zander, everywhere. “All he talks about is hunting for crows. Crows, Ellowyn, since four thirty in the damn morning. On a day I foolishly believed I might actually get to sleep in a little, for a change.”

“At least you don’t have Elizabeth asking you questions about how every modern convenience works, like I have any idea, and then telling me how they did it better with less convenience and more good old-fashioned grit back in her day. When she’s not doing that, she’s...”

I trail off, because, belatedly, I realize I’m talking to him like we’re friends.

“Let me guess, bitching about Zachariah the way he’s bitching about her.”

“Constantly.”

“It’s really fucking annoying.”

It is. But. “I guess we should apologize to our friends for the last decade.”

He laughs. “We aren’t that bad.”

He can’t see me in the dark of the closet, so the way I roll my eyes is lost on him.

“We aren’t,” he insists when I say nothing.

“I’ll be sure to take a poll later.”

Because I think we have been that bad, actually, as uncomfortable as that is to accept when I’m watching another Good and Rivers couple act out their feelings and not liking what I see.

This seems like a really bad place to get into all that us stuff. Dark. Close.

Dangerous.

Especially when we agreed to get along with each other only yesterday.

Something we’ve never managed to do. Not even when we were together, if I’m being honest.

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