An Imperfect Witch (30 page)

“Sounds like you’ve got my life all figured out.”  Said with a really excellent sneer factor.

Lizard rolled her eyes.  “Cut the crap—I don’t even have mine figured out.”  Yet.  “Get a job, don’t.  Go to school, don’t.  All I’m saying is that you’ve got options.”

A half-smile snuck onto her sister’s face.  “You moving in with Josh?”

Gods.  “I don’t know yet.”  Lizard looked around the four walls that had been her incubator, bandaid, and launch pad.  “But I’m done with here.  It’s a good place to figure out the grown-up thing.”

Raven snorted.  “I’m sixteen.”

“So figure it out slowly.”

The teenager looked around the living room.  “What about all your stuff?”

“Same deal as before.  Clothes, books, boots, and the good frying pan are mine.  Rest stays.”  She shrugged, already missing the four walls that had held her tight for more than two years.  “The other frying pan’s got a big dent in it, but it still works fine.”  People threw out way too much shit. 

Raven flopped down on the couch.  “You have a body in here?  This thing has more lumps than that crap they call oatmeal at the shelter downtown.”

Lizard grinned, because it was easier than bleeding about her sister ever tasting that oatmeal.  “I love that couch.”

“Dork.”

“Whatever.”  She tossed Raven the keys.  “Don’t get paint on the carpet.  And don’t be late with your rent, because the crazy old lady who runs this place will come talk to you for five hundred hours.”  Or she would if Lizard asked her nicely.  “It’s worse than community service.”

“Awesome.”  Raven looked terminally bored—but she was already burrowing into the couch.  “Anything else?”

“Yeah.  Get some popcorn.  The triplets are coming for a sleepover tonight.”  With enough food for a week, because they could get away with it.  Lizard headed for the door.  No way either of them was keeping their shit together for much longer.  “See you around.”

She pretended not to hear the squeal when she closed the door.

But it made her smile all the way to the corner.

-o0o-

All Josh found in front of his doorway was a scrap of paper under a still-warm biscuit.

Moving day.  Could use your help.  114 McKinley Ave.

He picked up the message, staring at the address, perplexed.  And when realization hit, hurled the biscuit past the head of a very startled pigeon.

He’d helped paint that house.  Raven must be moving.

And Lizard was still pretending the future didn’t exist.

-o0o-

He was so sad.

Lizard opened the door and looked at Josh’s eyes and nearly broke.  Something had gone very wrong.

He brushed past her, into the living room where she’d sat all night.  Making poetry collages.  Paper and glue and bits of a heart learning to imagine.

Josh swung around, taking in the stacks of magazines and drunken lines of random words.

Lizard winced.  “Sorry, it looks like I murdered a recycling truck in here.”

He looked her way, radiating confusion.  “Where’s Raven?”

“Huh?”  This moment was so not about her sister.

His eyes were trailing through the mess on the floor again.  “I thought we were helping Raven move.”

Oh, God.  Oh, frack.  The message.  “No.”  The single word rang in the air, bright and sharp and desperate.  Begging him to understand.  “She’s not moving.  Well, she is, but she already did.  She’s in my old apartment. 
I’m
moving.”

There were statues who breathed more often than Joshua Hennessey.

Cracking, she reached into her pocket and pulled out his note.  “You said that you needed to know.  About the future.  And if I’d be there.”  She grabbed his hand, dragging him to her paper-and-glue dreams.  “This is what the kitchen could look like, see?  These are granite countertops, but not the stupid smooth ones.  Ones for people who actually cook.”  And a totally dorky snippet of poetry about kitchen memories built on solid rock.

His eyes glazed, lost in the helter-skelter of her babble.

Her heart seized.  Still not getting it right.  She was a poet, not a granite infomercial.

And then he got it.  His eyes floated up from her collage, clarity dawning.  “You bought this house?”  He looked as gobsmacked as she’d ever seen him.

So close.  Just two more words.  “For us.  I bought this house for us.”

She’d known he loved her.  But in that moment, watching his face contort in a thousand terrible, wonderful ways, she finally understood how much.

And now she knew what to say.  “Fifty years from now, I can imagine us in this house.  In this home.”  She touched the nearest of her paper-and-glue art atrocities, not bothering to look.  “With a kitchen that has seen the wreckage of a thousand dinners.  And a table that has ding marks and scratches and crayon marks on the edges and a dark spot from when you left your coffee sitting there too long.  A hallway with tire marks on the wall from when someone little rode her new tricycle too fast.”  That last one had taken until 3 a.m. to dare to dream—but it had come.

His hands collected up her pathetic collages like they belonged in the Louvre.  And simply cuddled them to his chest.

Her heart lurched.  “You can’t keep those.  They suck.”

He only shook his head, mind leaking besotted, crazy love.

She flailed, looking for something to say.  “Sorry there are no people in the pictures.  The ones in the magazines all look like zombies.”  She pointed to a pile of rejects on the cutting-room floor.  “I tried.”

Josh gazed at the mess of heads and dismembered body parts and began to laugh.  “You know, if the real-estate thing doesn’t work out, you probably have a future in serial-killer letters.”

Words were deserting her again.

He reached out and touched the freshly painted wall.  “It already has some of us here.”

Family history, chapter one.  “I hate taupe.”

His lips quirked.  “I know a painter.  She’s kind of feisty, but she does good work.”

They probably needed to address minor things like the plumbing and wiring first.  She took a deep breath.  “It’s going to take a really long time to fix this place up.  I guess I need to do this the slow, hard way.”  They’d touch every inch of this house before they were done.

He looked around, smile way past his ears.  “Yeah.  I’m getting that.”

“It’ll take forever.  And shitbuckets of money.”

“Yeah.”

She could have told him zebras were mating in the kitchen.  Josh Hennessey, lost in space.  She laid her hands on salmon ugliness, so able to see what it would become.

He looked at her across the expanse of imaginary black-pearl granite, eyes back in focus.  “Does this mean you’re going to marry me?”

Lizard leaned hard on the counter, a poet at total loss for words.  She dug for some—he deserved an ocean of them.  “Can’t we just shack up?”

He didn’t give away anything, inside or out.  “We could.”

She looked down at her white fingers, clutching salmon dreadfulness.  And knew.  They could—and part of him would still be waiting.  “We’re awfully young.”  Or one ex-delinquent was, at least.  Josh had been born grown up.

He somehow managed to look amused and gobble her with his eyes at the same time.  “I’m probably supposed to say something intelligent about waiting until we have forehead wrinkles and a snazzy toilet-paper holder.”

Even the imaginary granite seemed to snicker at that one. 

She met his eyes.  “You don’t think we’re too young.”

He shrugged, suddenly looking insecure.  “What I want isn’t going to change.”

What he couldn’t quite work up the courage to say lay on the beat-up counter between them.  Josh Hennessey was sure—of everything except whether she was ready.

Lizard looked around at the kitchen of her dreams, in the house she never thought she’d deserve.  Thought of the deep, glistening fear of life that lived in Raven’s eyes.  Felt the quiet, beating universe of love three feet away.

And when she met Josh’s gaze again, Lizard Monroe finally had an answer.

“Okay.  But I’m not wearing a floofy dress.”

“I’m so not in charge of that.”  His face flashed amusement.  Love.   Buoyant, sexy happiness. 

And if that was all, she might have held her shit together.  It was his mind, sitting on the precipice of joy and asking her to fall in with him, that did her in.

Tears she no longer cared about streaming down her face, Lizard made it around the counter and into the arms of the man who had tattooed himself on her heart.

Home.  Found.

-o0o-

It was like a parade of Sullivan lemmings.

Lauren moved along somewhere near the back of the line and grinned.  They’d all been sitting in her cottage living room when the bat signal had gone off.  Fifteen phones, all with the same message.

Housewarming party.

Even her crystal ball, holding court on its new velvet throne, had seemed excited.

Devin looked down at the emergency potted plant in her arms.  “I can’t believe you talked my dad out of his favorite houseplant.”

She grinned.  There hadn’t exactly been enough notice for new countertops.  “He said it’s impossible to kill.”

And if Lizard thought this was a nifty way of bypassing an overload of gifts, she was so very wrong.  The line of lemmings carried a year’s supply of Jamie’s tomato sauce, two of Hannah’s hand-woven pillows, a music system that apparently made grown men drool, the footstool for an armchair that would arrive as soon as they had porting coordinates, and a very large purple knit blanket that Moira had pulled out of her bag when the bat signal had arrived.

Lauren was still laughing about the last one.  There was no fooling an old Irish witch.

-o0o-

Lizard took a deep breath, her fingers clutching Josh’s in a death grip.  He only chuckled and squeezed back.

Her show.

The words that were so much a part of her DNA had entirely deserted her.

She looked around at the gathered crowd.  The easy love and patience and raucousness on temporary pause that was Witch Central.  Felt the ghosts of Trinity and her crew, even though they’d only come as far as the back door. 

And knew this cobbled-together thing she was building was meant to be her life.

The words rose up from that place, full of trees and tumbleweeds and everything else that mattered.  “Welcome to our home.”  She looked around at the still beat-up walls paint couldn’t fully fix, the missing trim, the dented and stained floors, and the pièce de résistance, the salmon countertops.  “Every ugly inch of it.”

Delight and laughter—and more than a few minds picking up on the most important word she’d said. 

Our.

She held up Josh’s hand, feeling the crimson flood the rest of the way up her cheeks.  “He’s going to marry me.  You’re all invited.”

The guy in question looked down at her with a dumb grin on his face.

And then he did what most guys do when they’re crazy in love with a delinquent poet who’d finally found her dream.

He sat her up on the countertop and kissed her silly.

-o0o-

Oh, such a blooming.

Moira felt her heart riding the river of joy in the home that had just found its family.

Witch Central had gotten very little warning—and it hadn’t dampened their celebration in the slightest. 

Food had poured in, and music, and excited small feet.  All the requirements for a celebration.

Ginia, Mia, and Shay had commandeered a collection of magazines and some glitter, and were busy making decorations.

Jennie, their most excellent photographer, walked around with her camera.  Documenting the beginnings.  Moira smiled—one day, Josh and Lizard would treasure those pictures.

Frankie, eyes twinkling, had arrived with a bevy of tenants from Lizard’s old building, Raven already well swallowed in their midst.  And was busy telling lightly bawdy stories of his and Bertha’s first year of marriage.  Tilling the soil.  Giving the house stories to tell to those who would live in its walls.

Stories had always been the finest of blessings.

Aervyn sat quietly on the floor, his hands shaping a little spell.  Moira peered closer, trying to make out what he was doing.

“He’s fixing dents in the floor,” said Lauren, sliding into the old witch’s quiet corner.

“Fitting.”  A fair number of them had likely been created by small boys over the years.  This house knew the heartbeat and thudding feet of a family.  In due time, it would again.

Lauren’s lips twitched.  “Does that mean you’re not giving them an Irish blessing as a wedding present?”

“I most certainly am.”  Moira felt the rightness of it moving in her veins.  “Not every Irish blessing calls for an early and fertile joining.”  Although finding one that didn’t would no doubt occupy her for a while.

This garden wasn’t one to be pushed.  And the two beautiful blooms in its center seemed to know that.  It was lovely seeing Josh shade Lizard when she needed it.  But Moira’s heart danced happiest watching their gorgeous young poet tilt her head up toward the sun.

They stood in silence for a while, younger witch and old, glad to have shared some small part in nurturing the seedlings. 

When Lauren finally spoke again, her words were soaked in the sweetness of the moment.  “They’re very good for each other.  I think they’ll be happy here.” 

Aye.  And no one sounded more pleased than the woman who had cleared the path enough for a certain young traveler to find her way.  Moira smiled—her grapevine had been quite informative on that subject.  “I hear she got rather a fine deal.  On both properties.”  The kind that meant a highly skilled realtor had sharpened her knives and done yeoman’s work.

The Irish appreciated a good haggling better than anyone.

“Had to happen.”  Lauren moved out of Aervyn’s way, ruffling his head.  “Her need to buy the castle was…  I’ve never felt anything quite like it.”

Ah, it was a lovely thing, and not all that complicated to understand.  “She has an enormous need to give.  Our Lizard understands all too well how easily she might have fallen into those cracks.”  Cracks Moira was quite sure were going to see some patching over the next few months.  Lizard might think she could hide a house full of sad, lost children on the periphery of Witch Central and have them ignored, but one old Irish witch knew better.