Page 13 of Hopelessly Teavoted
Azrael smiled. He hadn’t drowned in unrequited love for this woman for years without learning when to take a hint. And he most certainly did not love her anymore. He couldn’t. It would be too embarrassing, too pathetic, to hang on after discovering years ago that he’d never been more than an itch for her to scratch. He’d be damned if he stood here awkwardly waiting for her to ask him to leave.
“Happy early birthday,” he said, hoping it came across casual, and like the date wasn’t seared into his brain. “I have to go.” He turned away from her. “Emily Lickinson, you know.”
“It was good to see you.” She gave him a smile that he felt deep in his chest as he held the door open for people filing in, suddenly eager for an evening tea and snack.
He should have been charming, but his tongue felt incapable, so he raised a hand, waving. He walked away toward the corner store for the cat food and then toward home and the giant, fluffy monster that was probably murdering all of his mother’s best upholstery.
The least he could do was stay away from Hopelessly Tea-voted and Victoria for a respectable amount of time.
CHAPTER 4Victoria
She didn’t want him to leave, even if he did have a cat, of all things, to get back to. But like he had after the unfortunate happenstance in college, Az turned away too soon and left her wanting. He was not the accomplice she had counted on in childhood. The friend she had valued so much in high school. He was just the man she’d made a mistake with in college.
Pushing the thought out of her mind, she told herself that it had been years, several flings, and an entire asshole boyfriend since that incident. It certainly did not deserve to occupy this much real estate in her mind, however titillating it was to sometimes turn it over.
No. She would not keep thinking about this.
She closed the shop, ready to give Priscilla a piece of her mind for failing to mention Azrael’s return. The last she’d heard, he was still in California, probably relaxing on sandy beaches with a lover on his arm. Perfect and mundane and totally magicless, the way he’d wanted it when he fled as far as he could get from Hallowcross, Vermont, as fast as possible.
She set her phone on the counter and pressed Priscilla Hart’s number, switching it to speaker.
“Priscilla Hart, reluctant devotee of an electronic device with too much control over my life.”
“It’s just a cell phone, Prissy.”
“Victoria! How’s the leak in the shower ceiling?”
“You fixed it perfectly—thanks for that. You failed to mention, though, that Azrael was back in town.”
“Did I? That’s odd. Must have slipped my mind. He’s here to stay, you know. Has he been by the shop?”
The flat brightness of her tone was not fooling Vickie; her old friend had been scheming.
Priscilla barreled on, “Prickly and suspicious, Azrael. And always so worried. I’m sure it was nice for you two to run into each other again organically.”
Wiping down a counter, Vickie rolled her eyes, glad she had not opted for a video chat.
It was true that Azrael took a while to warm up to people, but once he did, he bloomed like the roses his mother used to grow in her garden in shades of crimson, scarlet, and black. Gorgeous and fragrant with a loyalty worth waiting for.
Azrael had once been witch roses to her, magical and blossoming in colors uncanny to the human world. The angles of his face were obscenely sharp, breathtaking to some and distasteful to others, but she had thought that she could see him, really see him. The way that long ago, in his mother’s gardens, she had seen that the thorn beneath the shiny flesh of the bloodred flower was as delicate and lovely as any mundane thing.
“Victoria? Are you still there?”
“Yes,” she said. “Just cleaning up here, lost in thought. Anything else major you need to tell me? Another sibling I don’t know about? Did you call my disastrous college girlfriend too? Maybe you could dig up an old high school flame to show up next week and embarrass me.”
She picked up the teacups that had been drying in a rack and began to stack them in the cabinet. Priscilla’s mother had such charming and eclectic taste in the servingware here.
“Actually, if you must know, I do have other news. I’m seeing someone delicious and delightful.”
“All right, joking aside, tell me everything,” said Vickie,careful not to drop any of Persephone’s legacy of bat and cat and witch mugs.
“Hold on, let me get comfortable. This is a great story.” The sound of rustling over the phone must have been Prissy settling into one of the plush armchairs at Hart Manor. The memory twisted, just a little bit sharp. It was the cozy furniture she missed so much. Not him. “So,” said Prissy. “Her name is Evelyn Vishwakumar, and she lives in the most gorgeous condo, temporarily of course; she’s here for Witchery Council business. She has the dreamiest Disney princess eyes, and I am just fucking obsessed with her.”
Vickie smiled as she swept the floors.
“Go on.”
“She could be the heroine in a romance novel, Victoria. I went to an honest-to-goddess film festival with her. I wore an outfit that wasn’t black.”
