Page 40 of Which Witch is Willing?
It was her. Her proximity.
Because she hurt. Because what Nick said had hurt her. Because what Nick saidcouldhurt her. He had that power over her now, and she’d be damned if that didn’t just chap her ass good and proper.
Two days ago she had jacked him in the junk, and he’d been missing ever since.
No word.
No call.
Big fat nothing.
“Can you believe the nerve of that shit weasel?” It was a hypothetical question in that all the questions she asked to Cheeto were hypothetical. It wasn’t like he could answer, though he looked like he’d dearly like to. His curly little nub of a tail wagged happily the way it did whenever she was insulting Nick.
“I mean, saying those things about where we come from. There ain’t a nicer place to live in the whole entire world.”
Here, Cheeto’s tail stopped wagging all together as his small, dark eyes slid to the side.
“All right, okay. So there were mosquitos big enough to rape a turkey and some cousins did a lot more than kiss, but that don’t mean they weren’t good people.”
Cheeto sat down on his plump hindquarters, his velvety ears rotating backward.
“And yes, I do remember how I rescued you from Jo Buck Jones, who was using you to clear his acreage like a flame thrower, but I still think most the people there were essentially good.”
Cheeto grunted.
“Everyone but Charlie Ray. But mostly people have forgotten about what happened with him and the goat.”
“My point is, there are a lot of good memories there.” Moira drew Cheeto to her lap, stroking the spot behind his ears that made his body go slack and loose in her hands. “Like, remember how Uncle Sal used to wake up first thing in the morning, pee out the window and say—”
“Hey, baby. What time do y’all eat around here?”
For a moment, Moira thought she might have heard a ghost. Some scrap of her Uncle the wind had carried all the way from Stump to torment her.
Then, she saw it.
A smallish yacht, sleek and powerful as it knifed through the waves toward her pier. A tall, dark-haired man stood at the prow, gripping the railing and waving his arms in opposing circles like airplane propellers.
Moira scrambled to her feet, upending Cheeto, who squealed in alarm. She had to catch him by the tail to keep him from going in the drink. “Uncle Sal?” she shouted into the wind. “Is that really you?”
The man on the deck stripped off his trucker hat and saluted her with it.
“It’s really me, Moira Jo!”
Moira Jo.
The name opened up a familiar ache in her chest.
She’d been Moira Jo once. A simple southern girl who waited tables at the HooDoo shack. A girl who’d driven an old Barracuda she’d nicknamed the Badger down back roads paved with ground oyster shells. A girl who’d fallen asleep to cricket orchestras and woken up to rooster choirs.
A girl who had laughed easy and often.
Where had that girl gone?
She waited for minutes that felt like eternities as the boat pulled up alongside the pier at a rate far faster than seemed safe.
She saw the alarm darkening Sal’s eyes as he motioned her away from the dock. “Watch y’self, Moira Jo! We’s comin’ in hot!”
Moira reached down the scooped neck of her shirt and drew out her wand from its appointed place in the bra she now wore to hold it snug between her breasts.
