Page 20 of Summertime Hexy
It’s somethingworse.
It’swarm.
It’shope.
It’s the idea of her hand in mine, not because we’re bound by magic, but because shechoseto be there.
It’s the thought that maybe, just maybe, I’m not as dead as I thought.
I look away. Force myself back to the stones. Back to silence. Back to the rules I built to survive.
She’s a problem.
She laughs like a storm. Feels like fire. Fights like a spell mid-burn.
And I want her anyway.
CHAPTER 9
HAZEL
I’m not crying.
Again.
That’s the official story and I’m sticking to it.
Because crying implies vulnerability, and vulnerability implies feelings, and feelings implydangerously close to caring, which is how people end up writing dramatic poetry and emotionally haunting love spells on accident.
And we don’t do that anymore.
What wedois trip over a half-buried leather-bound notebook in the dirt behind the Grove and instantly get sucker-punched in the heart by our own twelve-year-old handwriting.
“Oh, gods,” I mutter, brushing dirt off the cover. “Please let this be a book of potion disasters and not an emotional landmine.”
It’s not potion disasters.
It’s worse.
It’s a journal. My journal.
From my second summer here—back when I still believed I’d be a High Enchanter by twenty and could make tulips bloom with a wink and had a crush on literally every counselor with a pulse and a staff.
I flip it open.
Page one: a sketch of a unicorn with stars around it and a title in sparkly pen that saysHazel Blackmoore’s Spellbook of Wonder and Mischief. The ‘o’ in Mischief has a heart in it.
I audibly gag.
But I keep reading.
Because I hate myself, apparently.
“Today I cast a circle and it actually held! Thorn said it felt steady and real and like I knew what I was doing. I didn’t tell him I was making it up as I went, but maybe that’s part of being good at magic. Pretending you’re not scared until the pretending turns real.”
That one gets me.
Because pretending is basically my specialty now. And I don’t know when it stopped turning into something real.
