An Imperfect Witch (17 page)

One corner of his mouth turned up.  “I finally got some sleep last night.  Crashed as soon as my head hit the pillow.”

She shrank inside, pretty sure she’d been the cause of his not sleeping.  “That’s good.”  A prize for inane conversation.  Lizard turned in the direction of his hole-in-the-wall caffeine dealer.  Her pillow hadn’t been quite so comfy.

“I’ve missed you,” he said quietly.

“Yeah.”  So stupidly much.  “I’m trying to take a page from your book.”

He’d fallen into step beside her.  “What page is that?”

“Persistence.  I figure if I keep coming to find you, eventually I’m going to say the right thing.”

“Can you hold off on the talking part for just a minute?”  His hand slid into hers.  “I kind of just need to soak this in first.”

She held his hand.  Gave him his minute.  And when he gave her fingers a squeeze, took a deep breath and tried to tell her truth.  “You soak in so many things.  That’s a big part of why I wanted to keep you out of this stuff with Raven.”

The sound of him trying to keep an open mind was deafening.

She winced.  “I know that I put my life in compartments sometimes, and that hurts you.  But it’s not about you not being good enough.”  Those words had scorched her soul.  “It’s about the other things not being good enough.  I don’t want them touching you, with all the hard edges and grit and stuff that’s really hard to wash off.”

He sighed.  “I thought we put that crap to rest two years ago.”

A version of it.  Some creatures had a lot of heads.  “That was about my past.  This has shown up in my present.  It’s different.”  More real, and way more infectious.

“It doesn’t feel a lot different from my shoes.”  He shrugged, hands back in his pockets.  “Just you, shutting me out of part of your life again.  Do you really think I’m so fragile that I can’t handle a little dirt?”

It wasn’t little.  You could die under that kind of dirt, and he just didn’t understand.  Lizard waved at the coffee-shop alleyway around them helplessly.  “Even the alleys you hang out in are clean.”

Josh raised an eyebrow and looked around. 

To him, it just looked like your average alley.  Words—she needed to find them.  She tugged him over to the side, out of the way of the coffee-starved masses, and reached out a finger to touch a concrete wall.  “See this?”

He eyed the graffiti warily.  “Yeah.”

“It’s pretty.  Derivative. Matchy-matchy.”  She shrugged.  “Done by some white kids with money and no imagination.”  Gentrified rebellion.

“Ouch.”  His tone was wry, but his mind hurt.

Damn.  He’d been one of those kids once.  Or knew them.  “That’s not a judgment of the kids, okay?  They’re really lucky.  It’s about this alleyway.  The wall’s clean enough to lean on without catching some contagious disease, the graffiti’s upscale, and the last time someone flopped here under a cardboard box, a concerned citizen probably gave them a ride to a shelter.”

Josh’s cheeks flushed deep red.

Crap—it had been a random shot in the dark.  She was drawing blood every time she moved right now.

Plan B.  Take a quick lesson from someone who was really good at this stuff.

She reached her hands up for his red cheeks, ignoring the curious mental vibes from the coffee crowd, and channeled Moira and Lauren and Nat for everything she was worth.  “You’re a really good man, Josh Hennessey.  And I’m insulting who you are without even trying, and for that, I’m really sorry.  It’s not what I came here to do.”

His hands covered hers.  And they were shaking.  “So why are you here?”

God, he was hurting.  “To try to fix things.”  His hands weren’t the only ones shaking now.  “To say I love you and that I’m sorry, and that I’ll do anything I have to do to make it right.  You matter so damn much.”

Something she’d desperately needed to see finally flared to life in his eyes.  He turned his head, burying it in her palm.  Leaned into her small fingers and simply breathed.

And for the first time in her life, Lizard Monroe understood that she was someone’s rock. 

She stood, frozen in space and time and the blinding light of epiphany.

She’d had it all wrong.  “That’s not why I did this.”  The barest whisper of the clarity burning into her brain.

His eyes turned slowly back to hers.  “Did what?”

“Tromped all over you with my heaviest boots.”  She shook her head.  “It’s not…  I’m not worried about infecting you.  That’s the me of two years ago talking.”

He managed some hint of a smile.  “The me of now is really confused.”

The him of now was so many kinds of awesome.  “You’re like this huge tree.  So rooted in who you are and what you want and where you’re going.”  She had words now, whole lava flows of them.  “And I’ve always felt like tumbleweed.  Like a little wind could come along and blow me off of wherever I’m hanging out.”

She pushed open her mind so he could feel.  See.  “I’ve somehow managed to land myself in this beautiful, magical garden, where life is really good and I even get to hang out with the huge trees for a while.”  And God, she loved it there.  “But I’m still tumbleweed, and the winds—”

“Could still blow you away.”  His hands held hers now.  A promise.  An offer.

“Two years ago, I believed a puff of wind could chase me out and I’d never get to come back.”  It was so blazingly clear now.  “I’m not so afraid of that anymore.  Two years of hanging out in this magic garden and I’m almost convinced I could find my way back.”

His eyes scrunched together.  “Then what still scares you so much?”

She laid her hands on his chest.  “That the garden will be gone.  That the tree loves the tumbleweed enough to have pulled up roots and followed her into the wasteland.”  She leaned the weight of who she was into his chest.  “You’d still be a huge and awesome tree.  But the garden—”  She gulped.  “I need you to stay there so I have some place to come back to.”

A slow, radiant light grew in his eyes.  And then the big tree that was Joshua Hennessey began to laugh.  He picked her up and swung them both around, still laughing.

Crazy tree.  She smiled, totally lost, but unable to dodge whatever was streaming out of him, mind, body, and soul.  “What?”

He put her down and grinned.  “Well, you have it halfway right.”

She grinned back—he was freaking contagious.  “That’s halfway better than I’ve been all week.”

He planted a monster kiss right where all the coffee slurpers could see it.  “Here’s the part that’s right.  I’d follow you anywhere.”

“I think,” she said softly, hands back on his face, “that I finally get that.”

His big hands covered hers, and his eyes were suddenly eight kinds of fierce.  “Well get this, too.  The garden isn’t a place.  It isn’t some acre of dirt with a few flowers and a swing set and a fence around the edges that you can just hop over and leave.”  He stopped, mind wry.  “How the hell did this end up about gardens?”

She had no earthly clue.  “Too much time in the kitchen of an old Irish witch?”

His eyes lit again.  “Right.  So tell me this.  If you took Moira out of her flowers and her cozy little cottage by the sea and dumped her in the middle of this alley, what would happen?”

Choking laughter came straight from Lizard’s toes, breaking through concrete and doubt and the horrible mess of her insides.  She knew exactly what would happen.  “She’d talk the coffee shop into putting a kettle on their stove and stick her nose in everyone’s business and teach all the cute guys how to knit.”  She glued her eyes to Josh’s now, following the insane smell of hope in the words he’d found.  “And the whole world would make a path to her alley.”

“Yeah.”  He smiled.  “We’re not quite as cool as she is, but I think the deal is the same.  The garden goes where we go.”

We.
  Lizard felt the solitary word rewriting some deeply buried code in her soul.

She leaned into his chest, letting the transformation take root.

We.

-o0o-

Uh, oh.  Nell looked at her niece’s wobbly lower lip and closed the book.  “Not reading it right, huh?”

The Dr. Seuss book was Kenna’s favorite.  And the one and only person in the world who could execute the embarrassed, adorable rap version that the opinionated toddler loved best had managed to bung up her own life fairly thoroughly in the last couple of days, and was currently AWOL.

Kenna leaned into her aunt’s side.  “’Izard.”

“I know, sweetheart.  Lizard does it the very best of all.  Can I read you a different book?”  Grasping at straws, Nell pulled a trickle of fire power onto her palm.  “Or maybe we can make pretty lights.”  A quick wiggle of her finger and the small glow hovering over her hand started flickering, sending a prism of light the little girl’s direction.

The lip pouted a moment longer, contemplating the obvious bribery.  And then Kenna smiled, willing, at least for the moment, to be distracted.  She held out her own palm, a light bigger than a pumpkin rapidly forming.  “Me try.”

“No way, munchkin.”  Nell erected a hasty training circle and snuffed out Kenna’s light.  “This time we’re trying to make really teeny lights.  Just like the firebugs.”  The fireflies at Ocean’s Reach in June had captivated her niece for hours.

“Fie-bugs.”  Kenna grinned and held up her palm again.  This time, the light was small and well behaved.

“That’s perfect.”  Nell wiggled her fingers again, building the flickering spell slowly so the toddler could see.  It had a tricky bit in the middle.

Kenna stopped paying attention halfway through, far more interested in zooming her light around like a firefly.

Nell rolled her eyes and put her hand down.  They could practice air-current spells instead—with toddler attention spans, magic lessons had to be flexible.  And at least they’d shifted gears from Dr. Seuss and his infernal colored fish.

Quickly, she shaped a tiny magical slingshot, and snagging her niece’s firefly, zoomed it toward the toddler.

Kenna squealed and tried to clap it in her hands, laughing as it flew right through.

Nell grinned—the kiddo needed catching lessons.  The regular kind.  She showed the toddler her magic slingshot and quickly added a small magnetic field for munchkins who were still waiting for their hand-eye coordination to grow up.

This time, Kenna shaped the spell exactly right, including the twist for the magnetic catcher’s mitt.  And then she held it out toward her firefly.  “Me hold.”

Nell gave the small glow a little push the right direction.

Kenna sat, enthralled, as the floating bug landed on her spell.  “Me catch!”

“You sure did, cutie.”  Nell grinned and took her life into her own hands.  “Now see if you can throw it back to me.”

The little girl giggled and lifted her arm over her head.

Nell, who had played endless versions of this game with a certain small boy, was already ducking when the slingshot let loose.  She fielded the wild throw and fired it back, with a little more speed this time.  The ball of light slapped right into place on Kenna’s catching spell.

Oh, nuts.  Lizard better get her act together fast—they were running out of distractions.

-o0o-

Lauren watched the tableau under the tree in the park and tried, very unsuccessfully, not to sniffle.

Young lovers, dressed in puffy jackets and wool hats, defying the brisk winds blowing off the bay, pretending this was still summer.  She sat leaning back against a big sycamore tree, and he lay with his head in her lap, looking up at the sky.

A picture that could be found in a thousand city parks at the right time of year—but it was the details of this one burrowing deep into Lauren’s gut.  Their fingers, clasped, held against the young woman’s heart.  The shape of her body, curved around the treasure in her lap.

Love, both strong and fragile.  And two who knew it.

She’d seen Josh cuddle Lizard like that before.  But in the tableau under the tree, it was Lizard’s mind that streamed healing, honoring, protecting.  And his that soaked it up.

It didn’t surprise Lauren that Josh knew how to be that vulnerable.

But it was gorgeous to see Lizard able to meet it.

Chapter 15

Her relationship repairs were still fragile, there was not nearly enough bacon in the fridge, and she had a sixteen-year-old paintbrush-wielding menace to deal with after breakfast.

And Lizard was fighting the insane urge to sing as she sifted flour and baking soda into a bowl.

Hormones.  Or something.

“Morning, sexy.”  Josh walked into the kitchen, wearing a smile that matched her dopey hormones.

Terrific.  She tried to find a scowl before they started singing a damn duet.  And then gave up and leaned over and kissed him.  “Hey.  You hungry?”

“I’m twenty-four, male, and awake.”  He hopped up on a bar stool, sniffing appreciatively at the coffee she had waiting.  “What do you think?”

The weird, happy shit in her belly fought its way to the surface.  “I think I really like making breakfast for you in the morning.”  Lizard wanted to yank the words back as soon as she said them.  And then they landed in Josh’s head.  Slunk in behind the simple happiness and the hunger pangs and lit up something deeper.